The Author of Beltraffio

Henry James

The Author of Beltraffio

I

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 him—conscious 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 occur—for I could scarcely believe it was near at hand—would 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 visit—of any duration—to England for you will not have forgotten the commotion, I may even say the scandal, produced by Mark Ambient’s 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 won’t take upon myself to say—especially 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 lands—was 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 husband’s absence—a good many months—at 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 charming—my 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 wasn’t, after all, though she had lived so near the rose, the author of “Beltraffio,” and I didn’t 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 trunk—they are not, as you know, very numerous, but he had preluded to “Beltraffio” by, some exquisite things—and 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 years—he 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, didn’t prevent me—cet âge est sans pitié—from sending with my friend’s 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 be—a—you, 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 needn’t 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 Englishman’s last and dearest treasure—the 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.

There was genius in his house too I thought when we got there; there was imagination in the carpets and curtains, in the pictures and books, in the garden behind it, where certain old brown walls were muffled in creepers that appeared to me to have been copied from a masterpiece of one of the pre-Raphaelites.   That was the way many things struck me at that time, in England—as reproductions of something that existed primarily in art or literature.   It was not the picture, the poem, the fictive page, that seemed to me a copy; these things were the originals, and the life of happy and distinguished people was fashioned in their image.   Mark Ambient called his house a cottage, and I saw afterwards he was right for if it hadn’t been a cottage it must have been a villa, and a villa, in England at least, was not a place in which one could fancy him at home.   But it was, to my vision, a cottage glorified and translated; it was a palace of art, on a slightly reduced scale—and might besides have been the dearest haunt of the old English genius loci.   It nestled under a cluster of magnificent beeches, it had little creaking lattices that opened out of, or into, pendent mats of ivy, and gables, and old red tiles, as well as a general aspect of being painted in water-colours and inhabited by people whose lives would go on in chapters and volumes.   The lawn seemed to me of extraordinary extent, the garden-walls of incalculable height, the whole air of the place delightfully still, private, proper to itself.   “My wife must be somewhere about,” Mark Ambient said as we went in.   “We shall find her perhaps—we’ve about an hour before dinner.   She may be in the garden.   I’ll show you my little place.”

We passed through the house and into the grounds, as I should have called them, which extended into the rear.   They covered scarce three or four acres, but, like the house, were very old and crooked and full of traces of long habitation, with inequalities of level and little flights of steps—mossy and cracked were these—which connected the different parts with each other.   The limits of the place, cleverly dissimulated, were muffled in the great verdurous screens.   They formed, as I remember, a thick loose curtain at the further end, in one of the folds of which, as it were, we presently made out from afar a little group.   “Ah there she is!” said Mark Ambient; “and she has got the boy.”  He noted that last fact in a slightly different tone from any in which he yet had spoken.   I wasn’t fully aware of this at the time, but it lingered in my ear and I afterwards understood it.

“Is it your son?” I inquired, feeling the question not to be brilliant.

“Yes, my only child.   He’s always in his mother’s pocket.   She coddles him too much.”  It came back to me afterwards too—the sound of these critical words.   They weren’t petulant; they expressed rather a sudden coldness, a mechanical submission.   We went a few steps further, and then he stopped short and called the boy, beckoning to him repeatedly.

“Dolcino, come and see your daddy!”  There was something in the way he stood still and waited that made me think he did it for a purpose.   Mrs. Ambient had her arm round the child’s waist, and he was leaning against her knee; but though he moved at his father’s call she gave no sign of releasing him.   A lady, apparently a neighbour, was seated near her, and before them was a garden-table on which a tea-service had been placed.

Mark Ambient called again, and Dolcino struggled in the maternal embrace; but, too tightly held, he after two or three fruitless efforts jerked about and buried his head deep in his mother’s lap.   There was a certain awkwardness in the scene; I thought it odd Mrs. Ambient should pay so little attention to her husband.   But I wouldn’t for the world have betrayed my thought, and, to conceal it, I began loudly to rejoice in the prospect of our having tea in the garden.   “Ah she won’t let him come!” said my host with a sigh; and we went our way till we reached the two ladies.   He mentioned my name to his wife, and I noticed that he addressed her as “My dear,” very genially, without a trace of resentment at her detention of the child.   The quickness of the transition made me vaguely ask myself if he were perchance henpecked—a shocking surmise which I instantly dismissed.   Mrs. Ambient was quite such a wife as I should have expected him to have; slim and fair, with a long neck and pretty eyes and an air of good breeding.  She shone with a certain coldness and practised in intercourse a certain bland detachment, but she was clothed in gentleness as in one of those vaporous redundant scarves that muffle the heroines of Gainsborough and Romney.  She had also a vague air of race, justified by my afterwards learning that she was “connected with the aristocracy.”  I have seen poets married to women of whom it was difficult to conceive that they should gratify the poetic fancy—women with dull faces and glutinous minds, who were none the less, however, excellent wives.  But there was no obvious disparity in Mark Ambient’s union.  My hostess—so far as she could be called so—delicate and quiet, in a white dress, with her beautiful child at her side, was worthy of the author of a work so distinguished as “Beltraffio.”  Round her neck she wore a black velvet ribbon, of which the long ends, tied behind, hung down her back, and to which, in front, was attached a miniature portrait of her little boy.  Her smooth shining hair was confined in a net.  She gave me an adequate greeting, and Dolcino—I thought this small name of endearment delightful—took advantage of her getting up to slip away from her and go to his father, who seized him in silence and held him high for a long moment, kissing him several times.

I had lost no time in observing that the child, not more than seven years old, was extraordinarily beautiful.  He had the face of an angel—the eyes, the hair, the smile of innocence, the more than mortal bloom.  There was something that deeply touched, that almost alarmed, in his beauty, composed, one would have said, of elements too fine and pure for the breath of this world.  When I spoke to him and he came and held out his hand and smiled at me I felt a sudden strange pity for him—quite as if he had been an orphan or a changeling or stamped with some social stigma.  It was impossible to be in fact more exempt from these misfortunes, and yet, as one kissed him, it was hard to keep from murmuring all tenderly “Poor little devil!” though why one should have applied this epithet to a living cherub is more than I can say.  Afterwards indeed I knew a trifle better; I grasped the truth of his being too fair to live, wondering at the same time that his parents shouldn’t have guessed it and have been in proportionate grief and despair.  For myself I had no doubt of his evanescence, having already more than once caught in the fact the particular infant charm that’s as good as a death-warrant.

The lady who had been sitting with Mrs. Ambient was a jolly ruddy personage in velveteen and limp feathers, whom I guessed to be the vicar’s wife—our hostess didn’t introduce me—and who immediately began to talk to Ambient about chrysanthemums.  This was a safe subject, and yet there was a certain surprise for me in seeing the author of “Beltraffio” even in such superficial communion with the Church of England.  His writings implied so much detachment from that institution, expressed a view of life so profane, as it were, so independent and so little likely in general to be thought edifying, that I should have expected to find him an object of horror to vicars and their ladies—of horror repaid on his own part by any amount of effortless derision.  This proved how little I knew as yet of the English people and their extraordinary talent for keeping up their forms, as well as of some of the mysteries of Mark Ambient’s hearth and home.  I found afterwards that he had, in his study, between nervous laughs and free cigar-puffs, some wonderful comparisons for his clerical neighbours; but meanwhile the chrysanthemums were a source of harmony, he and the vicaress were equally attached to them, and I was surprised at the knowledge they exhibited of this interesting plant.  The lady’s visit, however, had presumably been long, and she presently rose for departure and kissed Mrs. Ambient.  Mark started to walk with her to the gate of the grounds, holding Dolcino by the hand.

“Stay with me, darling,” Mrs. Ambient said to the boy, who had surrendered himself to his father.

Mark paid no attention to the summons but Dolcino turned and looked at her in shy appeal, “Can’t I go with papa?”

“Not when I ask you to stay with me.”

“But please don’t ask me, mamma,” said the child in his small clear new voice.

“I must ask you when I want you.  Come to me, dearest.”  And Mrs. Ambient, who had seated herself again, held out her long slender slightly too osseous hands.

Her husband stopped, his back turned to her, but without releasing the child.  He was still talking to the vicaress, but this good lady, I think, had lost the thread of her attention.  She looked at Mrs. Ambient and at Dolcino, and then looked at me, smiling in a highly amused cheerful manner and almost to a grimace.

“Papa,” said the child, “mamma wants me not to go with you.”

“He’s very tired—he has run about all day.  He ought to be quiet till he goes to bed.  Otherwise he won’t sleep.”  These declarations fell successively and very distinctly from Mrs. Ambient’s lips.

Her husband, still without turning round, bent over the boy and looked at him in silence.  The vicaress gave a genial irrelevant laugh and observed that he was a precious little pet.  “Let him choose,” said Mark Ambient.  “My dear little boy, will you go with me or will you stay with your mother?”

“Oh it’s a shame!” cried the vicar’s lady with increased hilarity.

“Papa, I don’t think I can choose,” the child answered, making his voice very low and confidential.  “But I’ve been a great deal with mamma to-day,” he then added.

“And very little with papa!  My dear fellow, I think you have chosen!”  On which Mark Ambient walked off with his son, accompanied by re-echoing but inarticulate comments from my fellow-visitor.

His wife had seated herself again, and her fixed eyes, bent on the ground, expressed for a few moments so much mute agitation that anything I could think of to say would be but a false note.  Yet she none the less quickly recovered herself, to express the sufficiently civil hope that I didn’t mind having had to walk from the station.  I reassured her on this point, and she went on: “We’ve got a thing that might have gone for you, but my husband wouldn’t order it.”  After which and another longish pause, broken only by my plea that the pleasure of a walk with our friend would have been quite what I would have chosen, she found for reply: “I believe the Americans walk very little.”

“Yes, we always run,” I laughingly allowed.

She looked at me seriously, yet with an absence in her pretty eyes.  “I suppose your distances are so great.”

“Yes, but we break our marches!  I can’t tell you the pleasure to me of finding myself here,” I added.  “I’ve the greatest admiration for Mr. Ambient.”

“He’ll like that.  He likes being admired.”

“He must have a very happy life, then.  He has many worshippers.”

“Oh yes, I’ve seen some of them,” she dropped, looking away, very far from me, rather as if such a vision were before her at the moment.  It seemed to indicate, her tone, that the sight was scarcely edifying, and I guessed her quickly enough to be in no great intellectual sympathy with the author of “Beltraffio.”  I thought the fact strange, but somehow, in the glow of my own enthusiasm, didn’t think it important it only made me wish rather to emphasise that homage.

“For me, you know,” I returned—doubtless with a due suffisance—“he’s quite the greatest of living writers.”

“Of course I can’t judge.  Of course he’s very clever,” she said with a patient cheer.

“He’s nothing less than supreme, Mrs. Ambient!  There are pages in each of his books of a perfection classing them with the greatest things.  Accordingly for me to see him in this familiar way, in his habit as he lives, and apparently to find the man as delightful as the artist—well, I can’t tell you how much too good to be true it seems and how great a privilege I think it.”  I knew I was gushing, but I couldn’t help it, and what I said was a good deal less than what I felt.  I was by no means sure I should dare to say even so much as this to the master himself, and there was a kind of rapture in speaking it out to his wife which was not affected by the fact that, as a wife, she appeared peculiar.  She listened to me with her face grave again and her lips a little compressed, listened as if in no doubt, of course, that her husband was remarkable, but as if at the same time she had heard it frequently enough and couldn’t treat it as stirring news.  There was even in her manner a suggestion that I was so young as to expose myself to being called forward—an imputation and a word I had always loathed; as well as a hinted reminder that people usually got over their early extravagance.  “I assure you that for me this is a red-letter day,” I added.

She didn’t take this up, but after a pause, looking round her, said abruptly and a trifle dryly: “We’re very much afraid about the fruit this year.”

My eyes wandered to the mossy mottled garden-walls, where plum-trees and pears, flattened and fastened upon the rusty bricks, looked like crucified figures with many arms.  “Doesn’t it promise well?”

“No, the trees look very dull.  We had such late frosts.”

Then there was another pause.  She addressed her attention to the opposite end of the grounds, kept it for her husband’s return with the child.  “Is Mr. Ambient fond of gardening?” it occurred to me to ask, irresistibly impelled as I felt myself, moreover, to bring the conversation constantly back to him.

“He’s very fond of plums,” said his wife.

“Ah well, then, I hope your crop will be better than you fear.  It’s a lovely old place,” I continued.  “The whole impression’s that of certain places he has described.  Your house is like one of his pictures.”

She seemed a bit frigidly amused at my glow.  “It’s a pleasant little place.  There are hundreds like it.”

“Oh it has his tone,” I laughed, but sounding my epithet and insisting on my point the more sharply that my companion appeared to see in my appreciation of her simple establishment a mark of mean experience.

It was clear I insisted too much.  “His tone?” she repeated with a harder look at me and a slightly heightened colour.

“Surely he has a tone, Mrs. Ambient.”

“Oh yes, he has indeed!  But I don’t in the least consider that I’m living in one of his books at all.  I shouldn’t care for that in the least,” she went on with a smile that had in some degree the effect of converting her really sharp protest into an insincere joke.  “I’m afraid I’m not very literary.  And I’m not artistic,” she stated.

“I’m very sure you’re not ignorant, not stupid,” I ventured to reply, with the accompaniment of feeling immediately afterwards that I had been both familiar and patronising.  My only consolation was in the sense that she had begun it, had fairly dragged me into it.  She had thrust forward her limitations.

“Well, whatever I am I’m very different from my husband.  If you like him you won’t like me.  You needn’t say anything.  Your liking me isn’t in the least necessary!”

“Don’t defy me!” I could but honourably make answer.

She looked as if she hadn’t heard me, which was the best thing she could do; and we sat some time without further speech.  Mrs. Ambient had evidently the enviable English quality of being able to be mute without unrest.  But at last she spoke—she asked me if there seemed many people in town.  I gave her what satisfaction I could on this point, and we talked a little of London and of some of its characteristics at that time of the year.  At the end of this I came back irrepressibly to Mark.

“Doesn’t he like to be there now?  I suppose he doesn’t find the proper quiet for his work.  I should think his things had been written for the most part in a very still place.  They suggest a great stillness following on a kind of tumult.  Don’t you think so?” I laboured on.  “I suppose London’s a tremendous place to collect impressions, but a refuge like this, in the country, must be better for working them up.  Does he get many of his impressions in London, should you say?”  I proceeded from point to point in this malign inquiry simply because my hostess, who probably thought me an odious chattering person, gave me time; for when I paused—I’ve not represented my pauses—she simply continued to let her eyes wander while her long fair fingers played with the medallion on her neck.  When I stopped altogether, however, she was obliged to say something, and what she said was that she hadn’t the least idea where her husband got his impressions.  This made me think her, for a moment, positively disagreeable; delicate and proper and rather aristocratically fine as she sat there.  But I must either have lost that view a moment later or been goaded by it to further aggression, for I remember asking her if our great man were in a good vein of work and when we might look for the appearance of the book on which he was engaged.  I’ve every reason now to know that she found me insufferable.