The Golden Bowl Henry James (spicy books to read txt) š
- Author: Henry James
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He could live over again at almost any quiet moment the long process of his introduction to his present interestsā āan introduction that had depended all on himself, like the ācheekā of the young man who approaches a boss without credentials or picks up an acquaintance, makes even a real friend, by speaking to a passer in the street. His real friend, in all the business, was to have been his own mind, with which nobody had put him in relation. He had knocked at the door of that essentially private house, and his call, in truth, had not been immediately answered; so that when, after waiting and coming back, he had at last got in, it was, twirling his hat, as an embarrassed stranger, or, trying his keys, as a thief at night. He had gained confidence only with time, but when he had taken real possession of the place it had been never again to come away. All of which success represented, it must be allowed, his one principle of pride. Pride in the mere original spring, pride in his money, would have been pride in something that had come, in comparison, so easily. The right ground for elation was difficulty mastered, and his difficultyā āthanks to his modestyā āhad been to believe in his facility. This was the problem he had worked out to its solutionā āthe solution that was now doing more than all else to make his feet settle and his days flush; and when he wished to feel āgood,ā as they said at American City, he had but to retrace his immense development. That was what the whole thing came back toā āthat the development had not been somebodyās else passing falsely, accepted too ignobly, for his. To think how servile he might have been was absolutely to respect himself, was in fact, as much as he liked, to admire himself, as free. The very finest spring that ever responded to his touch was always there to pressā āthe memory of his freedom as dawning upon him, like a sunrise all pink and silver, during a winter divided between Florence, Rome and Naples some three years after his wifeās death. It was the hushed daybreak of the Roman revelation in particular that he could usually best recover, with the way that there, above all, where the princes and Popes had been before him, his divination of his faculty most went to his head. He was a plain American citizen, staying at an hotel where, sometimes, for days together, there were twenty others like him; but no Pope, no prince of them all had read a richer meaning, he believed, into the character of the Patron of Art. He was ashamed of them really, if he wasnāt afraid, and he had on the whole never so climbed to the tip-top as in judging, over a perusal of Hermann Grimm, where Julius II and Leo X were āplacedā by their treatment of Michaelangelo. Far below the plain American citizenā āin the case at least in which this personage happened not to be too plain to be Adam Verver. Going to our friendās head, moreover, some of the results of such comparisons may doubtless be described as having stayed there. His freedom to seeā āof which the comparisons were partā āwhat could it do but steadily grow and grow?
It came perhaps even too much to stand to him for all freedomā āsince, for example, it was as much there as ever at the very time of Mrs. Ranceās conspiring against him, at Fawns, with the billiard-room and the Sunday morning, on the occasion round which we have perhaps drawn our circle too wide. Mrs. Rance at least controlled practically each other license of the present and the near future: the license to pass the hour as he would have found convenient; the license to stop remembering, for a little, that, though if proposed toā āand not only by this aspirant but by any otherā āhe wouldnāt prove foolish, the proof of wisdom was none the less, in such a fashion, rather cruelly conditioned; the license in especial to proceed from his letters to his journals and insulate, orientate, himself afresh by the sound, over his gained interval, of the many-mouthed monster the exercise of whose lungs he so constantly stimulated. Mrs. Rance remained with him till the others came back from church, and it was by that time clearer than ever that his ordeal, when it should arrive, would be really most unpleasant. His impressionā āthis was the pointā ātook somehow the form not so much of her wanting to press home her own advantage as of her building better than she knew; that is of her symbolising, with virtual unconsciousness, his own special deficiency, his unfortunate lack of a wife to whom applications could be referred. The applications, the contingencies with which Mrs. Rance struck him as potentially bristling, were not of a sort, really, to be met by oneās self. And the possibility of them, when his visitor said, or as good as said, āIām restrained, you see, because of Mr. Rance, and also because Iām proud and refined; but if it wasnāt for Mr. Rance and for my refinement and my pride!āā āthe possibility of them, I say, turned to a great murmurous rustle, of a volume to fill the future; a rustle of petticoats, of scented, many-paged letters,
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