“It must have been that I was.” He made it out as she held him. “Yes—I can only have died. You brought me literally to life. Only,” he wondered, his eyes rising to her, “only, in the name of all the benedictions, how?”
It took her but an instant to bend her face and kiss him, and something in the manner of it, and in the way her hands clasped and locked his head while he felt the cool charity and virtue of her lips, something in all this beatitude somehow answered everything. “And now I keep you,” she said.
“Oh keep me, keep me!” he pleaded while her face still hung over him: in response to which it dropped again and stayed close, clingingly close. It was the seal of their situation—of which he tasted the impress for a long blissful moment in silence. But he came back. “Yet how did you know—?”
“I was uneasy. You were to have come, you remember—and you had sent no word.”
“Yes, I remember—I was to have gone to you at one to-day.” It caught on to their “old” life and relation—which were so near and so far. “I was still out there in my strange darkness—where was it, what was it? I must have stayed there so long.” He could but wonder at the depth and the duration of his swoon.
“Since last night?” she asked with a shade of fear for her possible indiscretion.
“Since this morning—it must have been: the cold dim dawn of to-day. Where have I been,” he vaguely wailed, “where have I been?” He felt her hold him close, and it was as if this helped him now to make in all security his mild moan. “What a long dark day!”
All in her tenderness she had waited a moment. “In the cold dim dawn?” she quavered.
But he had already gone on piecing together the parts of the whole prodigy. “As I didn’t turn up you came straight—?”
She barely cast about. “I went first to your hotel—where they told me of your absence. You had dined out last evening and hadn’t been back since. But they appeared to know you had been at your club.”
“So you had the idea of this—?”
“Of what?” she asked in a moment.
“Well—of what has happened.”
“I believed at least you’d have been here. I’ve known, all along,” she said, “that you’ve been coming.”
“‘Known’ it—?”
“Well, I’ve believed it. I said nothing to you after that talk we had a month ago—but I felt sure. I knew you would,” she declared.
“That I’d persist, you mean?”
“That you’d see him.”
“Ah but I didn’t!” cried Brydon with his long wail. “There’s somebody—an awful beast; whom I brought, too horribly, to bay. But it’s not me.”
At this she bent over him again, and her eyes were in his eyes. “No—it’s not you.” And it was as if, while her face hovered, he might have made out in it, hadn’t it been so near, some particular meaning blurred by a smile. “No, thank heaven,” she repeated—“it’s not you! Of course it wasn’t to have been.”
“Ah but it was,” he gently insisted. And he stared before him now as he had been staring for so many weeks. “I was to have known myself.”
“You couldn’t!” she returned consolingly. And then reverting, and as if to account further for what she had herself done, “But it wasn’t only that, that you hadn’t been at home,” she went on. “I waited till the hour at which we had found Mrs. Muldoon that day of my going with you; and she arrived, as I’ve told you, while, failing to bring any one to the door, I lingered in my despair on the steps. After a little, if she hadn’t come, by such a mercy, I should have found means to hunt her up. But it wasn’t,” said Alice Staverton, as if once more with her fine intention—“it wasn’t only that.”
His eyes, as he lay, turned back to her. “What more then?”
She met it, the wonder she had stirred. “In the cold dim dawn, you say? Well, in the cold dim dawn of this morning I too saw you.”
“Saw me—?”
“Saw him,” said Alice Staverton. “It must have been at the same moment.”
He lay an instant taking it in—as if he wished to be quite reasonable. “At the same moment?”
“Yes—in my dream again, the same one I’ve named to you. He came back to me. Then I knew it for a sign. He had come to you.”
At this Brydon raised himself; he had to see her better. She helped him when she understood his movement, and he sat up, steadying himself beside her there on the window-bench and with his right hand grasping her left. “He didn’t come to me.”
“You came to yourself,” she beautifully smiled.
“Ah I’ve come to myself now—thanks to you, dearest. But this brute, with his awful face—this brute’s a black stranger. He’s none of me, even as I might have been,” Brydon sturdily declared.
But she kept the clearness that was like the breath of infallibility. “Isn’t the whole point that you’d have been different?”
He almost scowled for it. “As different as that—?”
Her look again was more beautiful to him than the things of this world. “Haven’t you exactly wanted to know how different? So this morning,” she said, “you appeared to me.”
“Like him?”
“A black stranger!”
“Then how did you know it was I?”
“Because, as I told you weeks ago, my mind, my imagination, had worked so over what you might, what you mightn’t have been—to show you, you see, how I’ve thought of you. In the midst of that you came to me—that my wonder might be answered. So I knew,” she went on; “and believed that, since the question held you too so fast, as you told me that day, you too would see for yourself. And when this morning I again saw I knew it would be because you had—and also then, from the first moment, because you somehow wanted me. He seemed to tell me of that. So why,” she strangely smiled, “shouldn’t I like him?”
It brought Spencer Brydon to his feet. “You ‘like’ that horror—?”
“I could have liked him. And to me,” she said, “he was no horror. I had accepted him.”
“ ‘Accepted’—?” Brydon oddly sounded.
“Before, for the interest of his difference—yes. And as I didn’t disown him, as I knew him—which you at last, confronted with him in his difference, so cruelly didn’t, my dear—well, he must have been, you see, less dreadful to me. And it may have pleased him that I pitied him.”
She was beside him on her feet, but still holding his hand— still with her arm supporting him. But though it all brought for him thus a dim light, “You ‘pitied’ him?” he grudgingly, resentfully asked.
“He has been unhappy, he has been ravaged,” she said.
“And haven’t I been unhappy? Am not I—you’ve only to look at me!—ravaged?”
“Ah I don’t say I like him better,” she granted after a thought. “But he’s grim, he’s worn—and things have happened to him. He doesn’t make shift, for sight, with your charming monocle.”
“No”—it struck Brydon: “I couldn’t have sported mine ‘downtown.’ They’d have guyed me there.”
“His great convex pince-nez—I saw it, I recognised the kind—is for his poor ruined sight. And his poor right hand—!”
“Ah!” Brydon winced—whether for his proved identity or for his lost fingers. Then, “He has a million a year,” he lucidly added. “But he hasn’t you.”
“And he isn’t—no, he isn’t—you!” she murmured as he drew her to his breast.
II
REVISIONS
James’s final New York Edition preface speaks of his passion for revision, that process whereby “The ‘old’ matter is there, re-accepted, re-tasted, exquisitely re-assimilated, and re-enjoyed—believed in, to be brief with the same ‘old’ grateful faith. . . .” Generally his works were published in book form only after first appearance in magazines, and for the secondary publication he always made changes. Then for subsequent editions he made more changes. But the final revisions for the New York Edition of 1907-1909 could be dramatic,
especially when he reconsidered a work written in relative youth.
There remains disagreement as to which texts should be recommended to the general reader. Although the late revised texts tend to be more “difficult,” highly wrought, and often exquisite in vocabulary, they frequently offer fresh power and deepened insight. And as indicated by the final Portrait of a Lady collations that are provided here, in his maturity James was more ready to explore expressions of human passion and sexuality.
But there were indications that James eventually regretted the wholesale task of revision, and the revenues from the New York Edition were sufficiently disappointing to explain some bitterness concerning that effort. In a 1943 reminiscence, Compton Mackenzie recalled that James was appalled when he learned that the young writer was planning to “rewrite” his own successful 1912 novel, Carnival. According to Mackenzie, the Master responded as follows: “ ‘I wasted months of labour upon the thankless, the sterile, the preposterous, the monstrous task of revision. There is not an hour of such labour that I have not regretted since. You have been granted the most precious gift that can be granted a young writer—the ability to toss up a ball against the wall of life and catch it securely at the first rebound . . . I on the contrary, am compelled to toss the ball so that it travels from wall to wall . . .’ here with a gesture he seemed to indicate that he was standing in a titanic fives-court, following with anxious eyes the ball he had just tossed against the wall of life . . . ‘from wall to wall until at last, losing momentum with every new angle from which it rebounds, the ball returns to earth and dribbles slowly at my feet, when I arduously bend over, all my bones creaking, and with infinite difficulty manage to reach it and pick it up.’” In Henry James: A Life in Letters, Philip Horne cites a letter from that same year, where, in reference to a Uniform Edition of some of his tales, James states, “I shall not ask to see the proofs—I hate so reading over my old things!” (545).
The following collation provides a very small sampling of extensive revisions made for the New York Edition.
Daisy Miller
Daisy Miller: A Study, in Cornhill Magazine, 1878; Daisy Miller, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1879; Daisy Miller: A Study, An International Episode, Four Meetings, London: Macmillan, 1879. This collation provides texts from the first English book edition of 1879 and from the New York Edition (volume XVIII) of 1909.
1879 “Oh, blazes, it’s har-r-d!” he exclaimed, pronouncing the adjective in a peculiar manner.
NYE “Oh blazes; it’s har-r-d!” he exclaimed, divesting vowel and consonants, pertinently enough, of any taint of softness.
1879 He had a great relish for feminine beauty; he was addicted to observing and analysing it. . . .
NYE He took a great interest generally in that range of effects and was addicted to noting and, as it were, recording them. . . .
1879 Certainly she was very charming; but how deucedly sociable!
NYE Certainly she was very charming, but how extraordinarily communicative and how tremendously easy.
1879 Winterbourne stood looking after her; and as she moved away, drawing her muslin furbelows over the gravel, said to himself that she had the tournure of a princess.
NYE Winterbourne stood watching her, and as she moved away, drawing her muslin furbelows over the walk, he spoke to himself of her natural elegance.
1879 “They are very common,” Mrs. Costello declared. “They are the sort of Americans that one does one’s duty by not—not accepting.”
NYE “They are horribly common”—it was perfectly simple. “They’re the sort of Americans that one does one’s duty by just ignoring.”
1879 “Of course she’s pretty. But she is very common.”
NYE “Of course she’s very pretty. But she’s of the last crudity.”
1879 “Well, if Daisy feels up to it—,” said Mrs. Miller, in a tone impregnated with a sense of the magnitude of the enterprise.
NYE “Well, if Daisy feels up to it—,” said Mrs. Miller in a tone that seemed to break under the burden of such conceptions.
1879 “Yes, it would be lovely!” said Daisy. But she made no movement to accompany him; she only stood there laughing.
NYE “Yes, it would be lovely!” But she made no movement to accompany him; she only remained an elegant image of free light irony.
1879 But he saw that she cared little for feudal antiquities, and that the dusky traditions of Chillon made but a slight impression on her.
NYE But he saw she cared little for mediaeval history and that the grim ghosts of Chillon loomed but faintly before her.
1879 This announcement, instead of embarrassing Mrs. Miller, seemed to relieve her.
NYE This proclamation, instead of embarrassing Mrs. Miller, seemed to soothe her by reconstituting the environment to which she was most accustomed.
1879 “My dearest young lady,” cried Winterbourne, with eloquence, “have I come all the way to Rome to encounter your reproaches?”
NYE “Dearest young lady,” cried Winterbourne, with generous passion, “have I come all the way to Rome only to be riddled by your silver shafts?”
1879 “She’s very crazy!” cried Walker. . . .
NYE “She’s very reckless,” cried Walker. . . .
1879 “Who is Giovanelli?” “The little Italian.”
NYE “And who is Giovanelli?” “The shiny—but, to do him justice, not greasy—little Roman.”
1879 . . . the riddle had become easy to read. She was a young lady whom a gentleman need no longer be at pains to respect.
NYE . . . the whole riddle of her contradictions had grown easy to read. She was a lady about the shades of whose perversity a foolish puzzled gentleman need no longer trouble his head or his heart. That once questionable quantity had no shades—it was a mere black little blot.
1879 Mr. Giovanelli’s urbanity was apparently imperturbable. He looked on the ground a moment, and then he said, “For myself, I had no fear, and she wanted to go.” “That was no reason!” Winterbourne declared.
NYE Giovanelli raised his neat shoulders and eyebrows to within a suspicion of a shrug. “For myself I had no fear; and she—she did what she liked.” Winterbourne’s eyes attached themselves to the ground. “She did what she liked!”
The Portrait of a Lady
The Portrait of a Lady, published in Macmillan’s Magazine, October 1880-November 1881. This collation provides texts from the first English book edition (London: Macmillan, 1881) and from the New York Edition (volumes III and IV) of 1908.
1881 Deprived of this advantage, however, Isabel’s visitors retained that of an extreme sweetness and shyness of demeanor, and having, as she thought, the kindest eyes in the world.
NYE Deprived of this advantage, however, Isabel’s visitors retained that of an extreme sweetness and shyness of demeanor, and having, as she thought, eyes liked balanced basins, the circles of “ornamental water,” set, in parterres, among the geraniums.
1881 Miss Stackpole directed her gaze to the Constable again, and Ralph bespoke her attention for a small Watteau hanging near it. . . .
NYE Miss Stackpole directed her gaze to the Constable again, and Ralph bespoke her attention for a small Lancret hanging near it. . . .
1881 . . . something told her that she should not be satisfied, . . .
NYE . . . something assured her there was a fallacy somewhere in the glowing logic of the proposition—as he saw it— even though she mightn’t put her very finest finger-point on it; . . .
1881 There was something too forcible, something oppressive and restrictive, in the manner in which he presented himself.
NYE There was a disagreeable strong push, a kind of hardness of presence, in his way of rising before her.
1881 Caspar Goodwood raised his eyes to her own again; they wore an expression of ardent remonstrance.
NYE Caspar Goodwood raised his eyes to her again; they seemed to shine through a vizard of a helmet.
1881 She was an excitable creature, and n
ow she was much excited.
NYE Vibration was easy to her, was in fact too constant with her, and she found herself now humming like a smitten harp. She only asked, however, to put on the cover, to case herself again in brown holland.
1881 “I’m afraid there are moments in life when even Beethoven has nothing to say to us. We must admit, however, that they are our worst moments.”