The Author of Beltraffio - Генри Джеймс

Henry James

The Author of Beltraffio

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Much as I wished to see him I had kept my letter of introduction three weeks in my pocket-book.   I was nervous and timid about meeting himconscious of youth and ignorance, convinced that he was tormented by strangers, and especially by my country-people, and not exempt from the suspicion that he had the irritability as well as the dignity of genius.   Moreover, the pleasure, if it should occurfor I could scarcely believe it was near at handwould be so great that I wished to think of it in advance, to feel it there against my breast, not to mix it with satisfactions more superficial and usual.   In the little game of new sensations that I was playing with my ingenuous mind I wished to keep my visit to the author of Beltraffio as a trump-card.   It was three years after the publication of that fascinating work, which I had read over five times and which now, with my riper judgement, I admire on the whole as much as ever.   This will give you about the date of my first visitof any durationto England for you will not have forgotten the commotion, I may even say the scandal, produced by Mark Ambients masterpiece.   It was the most complete presentation that had yet been made of the gospel of art; it was a kind of æsthetic war-cry.   People had endeavoured to sail nearer to truth in the cut of their sleeves and the shape of their sideboards; but there had not as yet been, among English novels, such an example of beauty of execution and intimate importance of theme.   Nothing had been done in that line from the point of view of art for art.   That served me as a fond formula, I may mention, when I was twenty-five; how much it still serves I wont take upon myself to sayespecially as the discerning reader will be able to judge for himself.   I had been in England, briefly, a twelve-month before the time to which I began by alluding, and had then learned that Mr. Ambient was in distant landswas making a considerable tour in the East; so that there was nothing to do but to keep my letter till I should be in London again.   It was of little use to me to hear that his wife had not left England and was, with her little boy, their only child, spending the period of her husbands absencea good many monthsat a small place they had down in Surrey.   They had a house in London, but actually in the occupation of other persons.   All this I had picked up, and also that Mrs. Ambient was charmingmy friend the American poet, from whom I had my introduction, had never seen her, his relations with the great man confined to the exchange of letters; but she wasnt, after all, though she had lived so near the rose, the author of Beltraffio, and I didnt go down into Surrey to call on her.   I went to the Continent, spent the following winter in Italy, and returned to London in May.   My visit to Italy had opened my eyes to a good many things, but to nothing more than the beauty of certain pages in the works of Mark Ambient.   I carried his productions about in my trunkthey are not, as you know, very numerous, but he had preluded to Beltraffio by, some exquisite thingsand I used to read them over in the evening at the inn.   I used profoundly to reason that the man who drew those characters and wrote that style understood what he saw and knew what he was doing.   This is my sole ground for mentioning my winter in Italy.   He had been there much in former yearshe was saturated with what painters call the feeling of that classic land.   He expressed the charm of the old hill-cities of Tuscany, the look of certain lonely grass-grown places which, in the past, had echoed with life; he understood the great artists, he understood the spirit of the Renaissance; he understood everything.   The scene of one of his earlier novels was laid in Rome, the scene of another in Florence, and I had moved through these cities in company with the figures he set so firmly on their feet.   This is why I was now so much happier even than before in the prospect of making his acquaintance.

At last, when I had dallied with my privilege long enough, I despatched to him the missive of the American poet.   He had already gone out of town; he shrank from the rigour of the London season and it was his habit to migrate on the first of June.   Moreover I had heard he was this year hard at work on a new book, into which some of his impressions of the East were to be wrought, so that he desired nothing so much as quiet days.   That knowledge, however, didnt prevent mecet âge est sans pitiéfrom sending with my friends letter a note of my own, in which I asked his leave to come down and see him for an hour or two on some day to be named by himself.   My proposal was accompanied with a very frank expression of my sentiments, and the effect of the entire appeal was to elicit from the great man the kindest possible invitation.   He would be delighted to see me, especially if I should turn up on the following Saturday and would remain till the Monday morning.   We would take a walk over the Surrey commons, and I could tell him all about the other great man, the one in America.   He indicated to me the best train, and it may be imagined whether on the Saturday afternoon I was punctual at Waterloo.   He carried his benevolence to the point of coming to meet me at the little station at which I was to alight, and my heart beat very fast as I saw his handsome face, surmounted with a soft wide-awake and which I knew by a photograph long since enshrined on my mantel-shelf, scanning the carriage-windows as the train rolled up.   He recognised me as infallibly as I had recognised himself; he appeared to know by instinct how a young American of critical pretensions, rash youth, would look when much divided between eagerness and modesty.   He took me by the hand and smiled at me and said: You must beayou, I think! and asked if I should mind going on foot to his house, which would take but a few minutes.   I remember feeling it a piece of extraordinary affability that he should give directions about the conveyance of my bag; I remember feeling altogether very happy and rosy, in fact quite transported, when he laid his hand on my shoulder as we came out of the station.

I surveyed him, askance, as we walked together; I had already, I had indeed instantly, seen him as all delightful.   His face is so well known that I neednt describe it; he looked to me at once an English gentleman and a man of genius, and I thought that a happy combination.   There was a brush of the Bohemian in his fineness; you would easily have guessed his belonging to the artist guild.   He was addicted to velvet jackets, to cigarettes, to loose shirt-collars, to looking a little dishevelled.   His features, which were firm but not perfectly regular, are fairly enough represented in his portraits; but no portrait I have seen gives any idea of his expression.   There were innumerable things in it, and they chased each other in and out of his face.   I have seen people who were grave and gay in quick alternation; but Mark Ambient was grave and gay at one and the same moment.   There were other strange oppositions and contradictions in his slightly faded and fatigued countenance.   He affected me somehow as at once fresh and stale, at once anxious and indifferent.   He had evidently had an active past, which inspired one with curiosity; yet what was that compared to his obvious future?  He was just enough above middle height to be spoken of as tall, and rather lean and long in the flank.   He had the friendliest frankest manner possible, and yet I could see it cost him something.   It cost him small spasms of the self-consciousness that is an Englishmans last and dearest treasurethe thing he pays his way through life by sacrificing small pieces of even as the gallant but moneyless adventurer in Quentin Durward broke off links of his brave gold chain.   He had been thirty-eight years old at the time Beltraffio was published.   He asked me about his friend in America, about the length of my stay in England, about the last news in London and the people I had seen there; and I remember looking for the signs of genius in the very form of his questions and thinking I found it.   I liked his voice as if I were somehow myself having the use of it.