The Lesson of the Master E-Book

Henry James

• Herausgeber: Hesperus Press Ltd.
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 136

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

On the brink of a promising career, ambitious young author Paul Overt is thrilled when he is introduced to the celebrated novelist Henry St. George, and even more so when the older man — although now considered to be past his prime — takes him under his wing. St. George is full of wise counsel for the young writer, and following his stern warnings to cultivate solitude and independence in order to not squander his talents, Paul leaves for Europe, where he immerses himself in his work. On his return, however, he is greeted with a devastating discovery. With an ending that is both ironic and deeply ambiguous, Henry James's exquisite novella The Lesson of the Master is an extended meditation on marriage, sacrifice, and artistic integrity.

Leseprobe

The Lesson of the Master

Henry James

Foreword byColm Tóibín

Hesperus Classics

Published by Hesperus Press Limited 4 Rickett Street, London sw6 1ru www.hesperuspress.com

First published in Universal Review in 1888

First published by Hesperus Press Limited, 2007

This edition published in 2025

Foreword © Colm Tóibín, 2007

ISBN (paperback): 1-84391-155-8

ISBN13 (paperback): 978-1-84391-155-5

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-84391-332-0

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

Contents

Foreword

Colm Tóibín

The Lesson of the Master

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Notes

Biographical Note

Foreword

Colm Tóibín

Philip Larkin, in his poem ‘Dockery and Son’, which was written in 1963 when Larkin was forty-one, wrote about a question that would also preoccupy Henry James in his forties: the question of being single and childless. In ‘Dockery and Son’, the poet discovers that Dockery, ‘that withdrawn/ High-collared public schoolboy’ who was junior to him at college, must have had a son when aged nineteen or twenty. As the poet travels away, he thinks about his fate: ‘To have no son, no wife,/ No house or land still seemed quite natural.’ Dockery, on the other hand, clearly thought that ‘adding meant increase’ whereas to the poet ‘it was dilution’.

On 5th January 1888, when Henry James was in his mid-forties, he recorded a conversation in his notebook with the journalist Theodore Child,

about the effect of marriage on the artist, the man of letters, etc. He mentioned the cases he had seen in Paris in which this effect had been fatal to the quality of the work etc. – through overproduction, need to meet expenses, make a figure etc. And I mentioned certain cases here.

Child then spoke of the French novelist Alphonse Daudet, whom James also knew, saying of his Trente Ans de Paris, a memoir, that ‘He would never have written it if he hadn’t married.’ James then wrote:

So it occurred to me that a very interesting situation would be that of an elder artist or writer, who had been ruined (in his own sight) by his marriage and its forcing him to produce promiscuously and cheaply – his position in regard to a younger confrere whom he sees on the brink of the same disaster and whom he endeavours to save, to rescue, by some act of bold interference – breaking off the marriage, annihilating the wife, making trouble between the parties.

As a result of this conversation, James was inspired to write his story The Lesson of the Master, published later that year.

Four years earlier, James had had a similar conversation with Edmund Gosse about John Addington Symonds, ‘of his extreme and somewhat hysterical aestheticism’, and of his wife’s disapproving of the tone of her husband’s work, ‘thinking his books immoral, pagan, hyper-aesthetic etc.’ He imagined Symonds’ wife saying: ‘I have never read any of John’s works. I think them most undesirable.’ James immediately saw a drama he could make between ‘the narrow, cold Calvinistic wife, a rigid moralist; and her husband, impregnated – even to morbidness – with the spirit of Italy, the love of beauty, of art.’ From these seeds he grew his story ‘The Author of Beltraffio’, the first of the ten stories he wrote about writers.

In both cases James brought in two other characters besides the writer and his wife; in both stories there was a younger man, an admirer of the older writer’s work; and in both also an innocent younger person over whose future there will be a battle. In the case of ‘The Author of Beltraffio’, this person was the young son of the writer and his puritan wife; in The Lesson of the Master it was a young woman, Marian Fancourt.

All his life as a writer James worried about both the purity of his work and the making of money. It was as though he himself was a married couple. One part of him cared for the fullness of art and the other part for the fullness of the cupboard. James sought both with stubborn steadfast zeal. Sometimes when he realised that he could not achieve one without failing the other, he argued with himself. However, he seldom gave up trying to match them. He struck hard bargains with publishers and editors. His notebooks are full of hopeful jottings of ideas that might not only come to full fruition as works of art but as objects that would take the measure, as he called it, of the great flat foot of the public.

The argument between moral and artistic principles and between commerce and art interested James deeply, and it might have been enough for him to intensify this argument in pure drama, make it as simple as the row between a husband and a wife over the publication of a book, or the direction of a career. In both ‘The Author of Beltraffio’ and The Lesson of the Master, it seems at first that this will be his subject, as observed by the younger man, the admirer. But in The Lesson of the Master James sought not only to allow his master-writer Henry St George to teach two different lessons to the younger man – one about art, and the other about everything – but he sought also to show the reader his own mastery of the ambiguous line, the ironic drama surrounding complex motive and the twist in the plot. He wished to make clear that the Master was not only Henry St George, but Henry James.

James thought highly enough of The Lesson of the Master to include it in the New York edition of his work, published in 1909, from which he excluded the majority of his tales or stories. In his introduction to the volume in which it is included, he set out to justify his use of a character who was eminent, such as the famous writer Henry St George. ‘I’m not ashamed to allow,’ he wrote, ‘it was amusing to make these people “great”, so far as one could do so without making them intrinsically false.’ To the reader who wished to know on whom he had based Henry St George, James insisted that he could not tell. ‘And it wouldn’t indeed do for me to name his exemplar publicly even if were I able. But I none the less maintain his situation to have been in essence an observed reality.’

The truth was, of course, that the story arose from what James heard about Daudet – he loved hearing half a story so that his imagination could work on the rest – and he filled in the detail and worked on the form using what he knew best, which was himself. As Fred Kaplan has pointed out in his Henry James: The Imagination of Genius, James was never to earn as much money as he did in 1888, the year of The Lesson of the Master, publishing and producing an enormous and uneven quantity of work. His name was everywhere, but he remained both the Henry St George of earlier days, ‘a high literary figure’ as Paul Overt sees him, and the figure by whom Overt is disappointed because of ‘the lower range of production to which he had fallen after his first three great successes, the comparative absence of quality of his later work.’

Thus James allowed St George to appear as a metaphor for his own presence in the literary world, just as Overt, by renouncing what he most desired and working with high ambition, believing love to be a dilution of his talent, also represented James in one of his guises. Both men dreamed of love, and it was these dreams that James guarded carefully in London in the 1880s; he gave to his characters all the more intensely what he renounced himself. A decade later these dreams and desires would emerge in his letters to younger men such as Hendrik Andersen and Jocelyn Persse. But for the moment, the Master’s imagination allowed his readers to know that the lesson for anyone seeking fame as a writer could be learned in the indeterminate space between the bossy Mrs St George and the lovely Marian Fancourt, or in the solitary cage of renouncing love for the sake of art and living with the consequences.

The Lesson of the Master

1

He had been told the ladies were at church, but this was corrected by what he saw from the top of the steps – they descended from a great height in two arms, with a circular sweep of the most charming effect – at the threshold of the door which, from the long bright gallery, overlooked the immense lawn. Three gentlemen, on the grass, at a distance, sat under the great trees, while the fourth figure showed a crimson dress that told as a ‘bit of colour’ amid the fresh rich green. The servant had so far accompanied Paul Overt as to introduce him to this view, after asking him if he wished first to go to his room. The young man declined that privilege, conscious of no disrepair from so short and easy a journey and always liking to take at once a general perceptive possession of a new scene. He stood there a little with his eyes on the group and on the admirable picture, the wide grounds of an old country house near London – that only made it better – on a splendid Sunday in June. ‘But that lady, who’s she?’ he said to the servant before the man left him.

‘I think she’s Mrs St George, sir.’

‘Mrs St George, the wife of the distinguished – ’ Then Paul Overt checked himself, doubting if a footman would know.

‘Yes, sir – probably, sir,’ said his guide, who appeared to wish to intimate that a person staying at Summersoft would naturally be, if only by alliance, distinguished. His tone, however, made poor Overt himself feel for the moment scantly so.

‘And the gentlemen?’ Overt went on. ‘Well, sir, one of them’s General Fancourt.’

‘Ah yes, I know; thank you.’ General Fancourt was distinguished, there was no doubt of that, for something he had done, or perhaps even hadn’t done – the young man couldn’t remember which – some years before in India. The servant went away, leaving the glass doors open into the gallery, and Paul Overt remained at the head of the wide double staircase, saying to himself that the place was sweet and promised a pleasant visit, while he leaned on the balustrade of fine old ironwork which, like all the other details, was of the same period as the house. It all went together and spoke in one voice – a rich English voice of the early part of the eighteenth century. It might have been church time on a summer’s day in the reign of Queen Anne; the stillness was too perfect to be modern, the nearness counted so as distance, and there was something so fresh and sound in the originality of the large smooth house, the expanse of beautiful brickwork that showed for pink rather than red and that had been kept clear of messy creepers by the law under which a woman with a rare complexion disdains a veil. When Paul Overt became aware that the people under the trees had noticed him he turned back through the open doors into the great gallery which was the pride of the place. It marched across from end to end and seemed – with its bright colours, its high panelled windows, its faded flowered chintzes, its quickly recognised portraits and pictures, the blue-and-white china of its cabinets and the attenuated festoons and rosettes of its ceiling – a cheerful upholstered avenue into the other century.

Our friend was slightly nervous; that went with his character as a student of fine prose, went with the artist’s general disposition to vibrate; and there was a particular thrill in the idea that Henry St George might be a member of the party. For the young aspirant he had remained a high literary figure, in spite of the lower range of production to which he had fallen after his first three great successes, the comparative absence of quality in his later work. There had been moments when Paul Overt almost shed tears for this; but now that he was near him – he had never met him – he was conscious only of the fine original source and of his own immense debt. After he had taken a turn or two up and down the gallery he came out again and descended the steps. He was but slenderly supplied with a certain social boldness – it was really a weakness in him – so that, conscious of a want of acquaintance with the four persons in the distance, he gave way to motions recommended by their not committing him to a positive approach. There was a fine English awkwardness in this – he felt that too as he sauntered vaguely and obliquely across the lawn, taking an independent line. Fortunately there was an equally fine English directness in the way one of the gentlemen presently rose and made as if to ‘stalk’ him, though with an air of conciliation and reassurance. To this demonstration Paul Overt instantly responded, even if the gentleman were not his host. He was tall, straight and elderly and had, like the great house itself, a pink smiling face, and into the bargain a white moustache. Our young man met him halfway while he laughed and said: ‘Er – Lady Watermouth told us you were coming; she asked me just to look after you.’ Paul Overt thanked him, liking him on the spot, and turned round with him to walk toward the others. ‘They’ve all gone to church – all except us,’ the stranger continued as they went; ‘we’re just sitting here – it’s so jolly.’ Overt pronounced it jolly indeed: it was such a lovely place. He mentioned that he was having the charming impression for the first time.

‘Ah you’ve not been here before?’ said his companion. ‘It’s a nice little place – not much to do, you know.’ Overt wondered what he wanted to ‘do’ – he felt that he himself was doing so much. By the time they came to where the others sat he had recognised his initiator for a military man and – such was the turn of Overt’s imagination – had found him thus still more sympathetic. He would naturally have a need for action, for deeds at variance with the pacific pastoral scene. He was evidently so good-natured, however, that he accepted the inglorious hour for what it was worth. Paul Overt shared it with him and with his companions for the next twenty minutes; the latter looked at him and he looked at them without knowing much who they were, while the talk went on without much telling him even what it meant. It seemed indeed to mean nothing in particular; it wandered, with casual pointless pauses and short terrestrial flights, amid names of persons and places – names which, for our friend, had no great power of evocation. It was all sociable and slow, as was right and natural of a warm Sunday morning.

His first attention was given to the question, privately considered, of whether one of the two younger men would be Henry St George. He knew many of his distinguished contemporaries by their photographs, but had never, as happened, seen a portrait of the great misguided novelist. One of the gentlemen was unimaginable – he was too young; and the other scarcely looked clever enough, with such mild undiscriminating eyes. If those eyes were St George’s the problem, presented by the ill-matched parts of his genius would be still more difficult of solution. Besides, the deportment of their proprietor was not, as regards the lady in the red dress, such as could be natural, toward the wife of his bosom, even to a writer accused by several critics of sacrificing too much to manner. Lastly Paul Overt had a vague sense that if the gentleman with the expressionless eyes bore the name that had set his heart beating faster (he also had contradictory conventional whiskers – the young admirer of the celebrity had never in a mental vision seen his