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Invent Your Own
Computer Games with Python

2nd Edition

Al Sweigart
Copyright © 2008, 2009, 2010 by Albert Sweigart

Some Rights Reserved. "Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python" ("Invent
with Python") is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-
Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

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Book Version 13

ISBN 978-0-9821060-1-3

2nd Edition
A Note to Parents and Fellow
Programmers
Thank your for reading this book. My motivation for writing this book comes from a gap
I saw in today's literature for kids interested in learning to program. I started programming
when I was 9 years old in the BASIC language with a book similar to this one. During the
course of writing this, I've realized how a modern language like Python has made
programming far easier and versatile for a new generation of programmers. Python has a
gentle learning curve while still being a serious language that is used by programmers
professionally.

The current crop of programming books for kids that I've seen fell into two categories.
First, books that did not teach programming so much as "game creation software" or a
dumbed-down languages to make programming "easy" (to the point that it is no longer
programming). Or second, they taught programming like a mathematics textbook: all
principles and concepts with little application given to the reader. This book takes a
different approach: show the source code for games right up front and explain
programming principles from the examples.

I have also made this book available under the Creative Commons license, which allows
you to make copies and distribute this book (or excerpts) with my full permission, as long
as attribution to me is left intact and it is used for noncommercial purposes. (See the
copyright page.) I want to make this book a gift to a world that has given me so much.
Thank you again for reading this book, and feel free to email me any questions or
comments.

Al Sweigart
[email protected]

The full text of this book is available in HTML or PDF format at:
http://inventwithpython.com
 Dinosaur Comics reproduced with permission Thanks Ryan!

Who is this book for?

Programming isn't hard. But it is hard to find learning materials that teach you to do interesting things with
programming. Other computer books go over many topics that most newbie coders don't need. This book will
teach you how to program your own computer games. You will learn a useful skill and have fun games to show for
it!

This book is for:

Complete beginners who wants to teach themselves computer programming, even if they have no previous
experience programming.

Kids and teenagers who want to learn computer programming by creating games. Kids as young as 9 or 10
years old should be able to follow along.

Adults and teachers who wish to teach others programming.

Anyone, young or old, who wants to learn how to program by learning a professional programming
language.
Table of Contents
Source Code Listing
hello.py 21
guess.py 30
jokes.py 51
dragon.py 58
buggy.py 83
coinFlips.py 87
hangman.py 103
tictactoe.py 150
truefalsefizz.py 172
bagels.py 184
sonar.py 213
cipher.py 244
reversi.py 261
aisim1.py 292
aisim2.py 294
aisim3.py 299
pygameHelloWorld.py 309
animation.py 324
collisionDetection.py 338
pygameInput.py 348
spritesAndSounds.py 360
dodger.py 371

1 Installing Python 1
Downloading and Installing Python 2
Starting Python 4
How to Use This Book 4
The Featured Programs 5
Line Numbers and Spaces 5
Summary 7
2 The Interactive Shell 8
Some Simple Math Stuff 8
Evaluating Expressions 11
Storing Values in Variables 12
 Using More Than One Variable 15
Summary 16
3 Strings, and Your First Program 18
Strings 18
String Concatenation 19
Writing Programs in IDLE's File Editor 20
Hello World! 20
How the "Hello World" Program Works 23
Summary 26
4 Guess the Number 28
The "Guess the Number" Game 28
Sample Run of "Guess the Number" 29
Guess the Number's Source Code 29
The import Statement 31
The random.randint() Function 32
Passing Arguments to Functions 34
Blocks 36
The Boolean Data Type 37
Comparison Operators 37
Conditions 38
Experiment with Booleans, Comparison Operators, and Conditions 38
Looping with While Statements 41
The Player Guesses 41
if Statements 44
Leaving Loops Early with the break Statement 45
Check if the Player Won 46
Summary: What Exactly is Programming? 47
A Web Page for Program Tracing 48
5 Jokes 50
Make the Most of print() 50
Sample Run of Jokes 50
Joke's Source Code 51
Escape Characters 52
 Quotes and Double Quotes 53
The end Keyword Argument 54
Summary 55
6 Dragon Realm 56
Introducing Functions 56
Sample Run of Dragon Realm 57
Dragon Realm's Source Code 57
def Statements 60
Boolean Operators 61
Return Values 65
Variable Scope 65
Parameters 68
Where to Put Function Definitions 70
Displaying the Game Results 71
The Colon : 73
Where the Program Really Begins 73
Designing the Program 75
Summary 76
7 Using the Debugger 77
Bugs! 77
Starting the Debugger 78
Stepping 80
The Go and Quit Buttons 81
Stepping Over and Stepping Out 81
Find the Bug 83
Break Points 86
Summary 88
8 Flow Charts 89
How to Play "Hangman" 89
Sample Run of "Hangman" 89
ASCII Art 91
Designing a Program with a Flowchart 92
Creating the Flow Chart 93
 Summary: The Importance of Planning Out the Game 100
9 Hangman 102
Hangman's Source Code 103
Multi-line Strings 107
Constant Variables 108
Lists 108
Changing the Values of List Items with Index Assignment 110
List Concatenation 110
The in Operator 111
Removing Items from Lists with del Statements 112
Lists of Lists 113
Methods 114
The reverse() and append() List Methods 115
The Difference Between Methods and Functions 116
The split() Function 116
The range() and list() Functions 120
for Loops 121
elif ("Else If") Statements 127
Review of the Functions We Defined 131
Making New Changes to the Hangman Program 132
Dictionaries 139
Sets of Words for Hangman 142
The random.choice() Function 143
Multiple Assignment 145
Summary 147
10 Tic Tac Toe 148
Sample Run of Tic Tac Toe 149
Source Code of Tic Tac Toe 150
Designing the Program 154
Game AI 156
List References 162
Short-Circuit Evaluation 170
The None Value 175
 Summary: Creating Game-Playing Artificial Intelligences 182
11 Bagels 183
Sample Run 184
Bagel's Source Code 184
Designing the Program 186
The random.shuffle() Function 188
Augmented Assignment Operators 190
The sort() List Method 192
The join() String Method 192
String Interpolation 194
Summary: Getting Good at Bagels 198
12 Cartesian Coordinates 200
Grids and Cartesian Coordinates 201
Negative Numbers 202
Math Tricks 204
Absolute Values and the abs() Function 206
Coordinate System of a Computer Monitor 207
Summary: Using this Math in Games 208
13 Sonar Treasure Hunt 209
Sample Run 210
Sonar's Source Code 213
Designing the Program 218
The remove() List Method 229
Summary: Review of our Sonar Game 238
14 Caesar Cipher 239
About Cryptography 239
The Caesar Cipher 240
ASCII, and Using Numbers for Letters 241
The chr() and ord() Functions 242
Sample Run of Caesar Cipher 243
Caesar Cipher's Source Code 244
The isalpha() String Method 247
The isupper() and islower() String Methods 248
 Brute Force 251
Summary: Reviewing Our Caesar Cipher Program 253
15 Reversi 256
How to Play Reversi 255
Sample Run 257
Reversi's Source Code 260
The bool() Function 276
Summary: Reviewing the Reversi Game 290
16 AI Simulation 291
"Computer vs. Computer" Games 291
AISim1.py Source Code 292
AISim2.py Source Code 294
Percentages 296
The round() Function 297
Comparing Different AI Algorithms 299
AISim3.py Source Code 299
Learning New Things by Running Simulation Experiments 305
17 Graphics and Animation 306
Installing Pygame 307
Hello World in Pygame 308
Hello World's Source Code 308
Importing the Pygame Module 311
Variables Store References to Objects 313
Colors in Pygame 313
Fonts, and the pygame.font.SysFont() Function 315
Attributes 316
Constructor Functions and the type() function. 317
The pygame.PixelArray Data Type 321
Events and the Game Loop 322
Animation 324
The Animation Program's Source Code 324
Some Small Modifications 335
Summary: Pygame Programming 335
18 Collision Detection and Input 337
The Collision Detection Program's Source Code 337
The Collision Detection Function 341
The pygame.time.Clock Object and tick() Method 344
The Keyboard Input Program's Source Code 348
The colliderect() Method 356
Summary: Collision Detection and Pygame Input 356
19 Sound and Images 358
Image and Sound Files 360
Sprites and Sounds Program 360
The Sprites and Sounds Program's Source Code 360
Setting Up the Window and the Data Structure 364
The pygame.transform.scale() Function 364
Summary: Games with Graphics and Sounds 368
20 Dodger 369
Review of the Basic Pygame Data Types 370
Dodger's Source Code 371
Implementing the Cheat Codes 392
Modifying the Dodger Game 397
Summary: Creating Your Own Games 397
Appendix A
Differences Between Python 2 and 3 399
Appendix B
Statements, Functions, and Methods Reference 403
Appendix C
Running Python Programs without Python Installed 404
Appendix D
Common Error Messages in Python 407
Glossary 411
About the Author 421
 Topics Covered In This Chapter:

Downloading and installing the Python interpreter.

Using IDLE's interactive shell to run instructions.

How to use this book.

The book's website at http://inventwithpython.com

Hello! This is a book that will teach you how to program by showing you how to create
computer games. Once you learn how the games in this book work, you'll be able to create
your own games. All you'll need is a computer, some software called the Python
Interpreter, and this book. The software you'll need is free and you can download it from
the Internet.

When I was a kid, I found a book like this that taught me how to write my first programs
and games. It was fun and easy. Now as an adult, I still have fun programming computers,
and I get paid for it. But even if you don't become a computer programmer when you grow
up, programming is a useful and fun skill to have.

Computers are very useful machines. The good news is that learning to program a
computer is easy. If you can read this book, you can program a computer. A computer
program is just a bunch of instructions run by a computer, just like a storybook is just a
whole bunch of sentences read by the reader.

These instructions are like the turn-by-turn instructions you might get for walking to a
friend's house. (Turn left at the light, walk two blocks, keep walking until you find the first
blue house on the right.) The computer follows each instruction that you give it in the order
that you give it. Video games are themselves nothing but computer programs. (And very
1
 fun computer programs!)

In this book, any words you need to know will look like this. For example, the word
"program" is defined in the previous paragraph.

In order to tell a computer what you want it to do, you write a program in a language that
the computer understands. The programming language this book teaches is named Python.
There are many different programming languages including BASIC, Java, Python, Pascal,
Haskell, and C++ (pronounced, "c plus plus").

When I was a kid most people learned to program in BASIC as their first language. But
new programming languages have been invented since then, including Python. Python is
even easier to learn than BASIC and it's a serious programming language used by
professional computer programmers. Many adults use Python in their work (and when
programming just for fun).

The first few games we'll create together in this book will probably seem simple
compared to the games you've played on the Xbox, Playstation, or Wii. They don't have
fancy graphics or music but that's because they're meant to teach you the basics. They're
purposely simple so that we can focus on learning to program. Games don't have to be
complicated to be fun. Hangman, Tic Tac Toe, and making secret codes are simple to
program but are also fun.

We'll also learn how to make the computer solve some math problems in the Python
shell. (Don't worry if you don't know a lot of mathematics. If you know how to add and
multiply, you know enough math to do programming. Programming is more about problem
solving in general than it is about solving math problems.)

Downloading and Installing Python

Before we can begin programming you'll need to install the Python software; specifically
the Python interpreter. (You may need to ask an adult for help here.) The interpreter is a
program that understands the instructions that you'll write in the Python language. Without
the interpreter, your computer won't understand these instructions and your programs won't
work. (We'll just refer to "the Python interpreter" as "Python" from now on.)

Because we'll be writing our games in the Python language, we need to download Python
first, from the official website of the Python programming language,
http://www.python.org

I'm going to give you instructions for installing Python on Microsoft Windows, not
because that's my favorite operating system but because chances are that's the operating
system that your computer is running. You might want the help of someone else to
download and install the Python software.

When you get to python.org, you should see a list of links on the left (About, News,
Documentation, Download, and so on.) Click on the Download link to go to the download
2
 1 - Installing Python

The Featured Programs

Most chapters begin with a sample run of the featured program. This sample run shows
you what the program's output looks like, with what the user types in shown as bold print.
This will give you an idea of what the complete game will look like when you have entered
the code and run it.

Some chapters also show the complete source code of the game, but remember: you don't
have to enter every line of code right now. Instead, you can read the chapter first to
understand what each line of code does and then try entering it later.

You can also download the source code file from this book's website. Go to the URL
http://inventwithpython.com/source and follow the instructions to download the source
code file.

Line Numbers and Spaces

When entering the source code yourself, do not type the line numbers that appear at the
beginning of each line. For example, if you see this in the book:

9. number = random.randint(1, 20)

You do not need to type the "9." on the left side, or the space that immediately follows it.
Just type it like this:

number = random.randint(1, 20)

Those numbers are only used so that this book can refer to specific lines in the code.
They are not a part of the actual program.

Aside from the line numbers, be sure to enter the code exactly as it appears. Notice that
some of the lines don't begin at the leftmost edge of the page, but are indented by four or
eight spaces. Be sure to put in the correct number of spaces at the start of each line. (Since
each character in IDLE is the same width, you can count the number of spaces by counting
the number of characters above or below the line you're looking at.)

For example, you can see that the second line is indented by four spaces because the four
characters ("whil") on the line above are over the indented space. The third line is
indented by another four spaces (the four characters, "if n" are above the third line's
indented space):

5
 while guesses < 10:
if number == 42:
print('Hello')

Text Wrapping in This Book

Some lines of code are too long to fit on one line on the page, and the text of the code
will wrap around to the next line. When you type these lines into the file editor, enter the
code all on one line without pressing Enter.

You can tell when a new line starts by looking at the line numbers on the left side of the
code. For example, the code below has only two lines of code, even though the first line
wraps around:

1. print('This is the first line! xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

xxxxxxxxxxxx')
2. print('This is the second line! ')

Tracing the Program Online

You can visit http://inventwithpython.com/traces to see a trace through each of the

programs in this book. Tracing a program means to step through the code one line at a time,
in the same way that a computer would execute it. The traces web page has notes and
helpful reminders at each step of the trace to explain what the program is doing, so it can
help you better understand why these programs work the way they do.

Checking Your Code Online

Some of the games in this book are a little long. Although it is very helpful to learn
Python by typing out the source code for these games, you may accidentally make typos
that cause your game programs to crash. It may not be obvious where the typo is.

You can copy and paste the text of your source code to the online diff tool on the book's
website. The diff tool will show any differences between the source code in the book and
the source code you've typed. This is an easy way of finding any typos in your program.

Copying and pasting text is a very useful computer skill, especially for computer
programming. There is a video tutorial on copying and pasting at this book's website at
http://inventwithpython.com/videos/.

The online diff tool is at this web page: http://inventwithpython.com/diff. A video

6
 1 - Installing Python
tutorial of how to use the diff tool is available from this book's website at
http://inventwithpython.com/videos/.

Summary
This chapter has helped you get started with the Python software by showing you the
python.org website where you can download it for free. After installing and starting the
Python IDLE software, we will be ready to learn programming starting in the next chapter.

This book's website at http://inventwithpython.com has more information on each of the

chapters, including an online tracing website that can help you understand what exactly
each line of the programs do.

7
 Topics Covered In This Chapter:

Integers and Floating Point Numbers

Expressions

Values

Operators

Evaluating Expressions

Storing Values in Variables

Before we start writing computer games, we should learn some basic programming
concepts first. These concepts are values, operators, expressions, and variables. We won't
start programming in this chapter, but knowing these concepts and the names of things will
make learning to program much easier. This is because most programming is built on only
a few simple concepts combined together to make advanced programs.

Let's start by learning how to use Python's interactive shell.

Some Simple Math Stuff

To open IDLE on Windows, click on Start > Programs > Python 3.1 > IDLE (Python
GUI). With IDLE open, let's do some simple math with Python. The interactive shell can
work just like a calculator. Type 2+2 into the shell and press the Enter key on your
keyboard. (On some keyboards, this is the RETURN key.) As you can see in Figure 2-1,
the computer should respond with the number 4; the sum of 2+2.

8
 2 - The Interactive Shell
This is like how a cat is a type of pet, but not all pets are cats. Someone could have a pet
dog or a pet lizard. An expression is made up of values (such as integers like 8 and 6)
connected by an operator (such as the * multiplication sign). A single value by itself is also
considered an expression.

In the next chapter, we will learn about working with text in expressions. Python isn't
limited to just numbers. It's more than just a fancy calculator!

Evaluating Expressions
When a computer solves the expression 10 + 5 and gets the value 15, we say it has
evaluated the expression. Evaluating an expression reduces the expression to a single
value, just like solving a math problem reduces the problem to a single number: the answer.

The expressions 10 + 5 and 10 + 3 + 2 have the same value, because they both
evaluate to 15. Even single values are considered expressions: The expression 15 evaluates
to the value 15.

However, if you just type 5 + into the interactive shell, you will get an error message.

>>> 5 +
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

This error happened because 5 + is not an expression. Expressions have values

connected by operators, but the + operator always expects to connect two things in Python.
We have only given it one. This is why the error message appeared. A syntax error means
that the computer does not understand the instruction you gave it because you typed it
incorrectly. Python will always display an error message if you enter an instruction that it
cannot understand.

This may not seem important, but a lot of computer programming is not just telling the
computer what to do, but also knowing exactly how to tell the computer to do it.

Expressions Inside Other Expressions

Expressions can also contain other expressions. For example, in the expression 2 + 5
+ 8, the 2 + 5 part is its own expression. Python evaluates 2 + 5 to 7, so the original
expression becomes 7 + 8. Python then evaluates this expression to 15.

Think of an expression as being a stack of pancakes. If you put two stacks of pancakes
together, you still have a stack of pancakes. And a large stack of pancakes can be made up
of smaller stacks of pancakes that were put together. Expressions can be combined together
to form larger expressions in the same way. But no matter how big an expression is it also
evaluates to a single answer, just like 2 + 5 + 8 evaluates to 15.

11
Other documents randomly have
different content
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Henry James
at Work
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
you are located before using this eBook.

Title: Henry James at Work

Author: Theodora Bosanquet

Release date: October 5, 2020 [eBook #63377]

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Laura Natal Rodrigues at Free Literature

(Images
generously made available by Hathi Trust.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HENRY JAMES AT

WORK ***
 THE HOGARTH ESSAYS

HENRY JAMES AT WORK

BY
 THEODORA BOSANQUET

HENRY JAMES AT WORK

I knew nothing of Henry James beyond the revelation of his novels

and tales before the summer of 1907. Then, as I sat in a top-floor
office near Whitehall one August morning, compiling a very full index
to the Report of the Royal Commission on Coast Erosion, my ears
were struck by the astonishing sound of passages from The
Ambassadors being dictated to a young typist. Neglecting my Blue-
book, I turned round to watch the operator ticking off sentences
which seemed to be at least as much of a surprise to her as they
were to me. When my bewilderment had broken into a question, I
learnt that Henry James was on the point of coming back from Italy,
that he had asked to be provided with an amanuensis, and that the
lady at the typewriter was making acquaintance with his style.
Without any hopeful design of supplanting her, I lodged an
immediate petition that I might be allowed the next opportunity of
filling the post, supposing she should ever abandon it. I was told, to
my amazement, that I need not wait. The established candidate was
not enthusiastic about the prospect before her, was even genuinely
relieved to look in another direction. If I set about practising
typewriting on a Remington machine at once, I could be interviewed
by Henry James as soon as he arrived in London. Within an hour I
had begun work on the typewriter. By the time he was ready to
interview me, I could tap out paragraphs of The Ambassadors at
quite a fair speed.
He asked no questions at that interview about my speed on a
typewriter or about anything else. The friend to whom he had
applied for an amanuensis had told him that I was sufficiently the
right young woman for his purpose and he relied on her word. He
had, at the best, little hope of any young woman beyond docility. We
sat in armchairs on either side of a fireless grate while we observed
each other. I suppose he found me harmless and I know that I found
him overwhelming. He was much more massive than I had
expected, much broader and stouter and stronger. I remembered
that someone had told me he used to be taken for a sea-captain
when he wore a beard, but it was clear that now, with the beard
shaved away, he would hardly have passed for, say, an admiral, in
spite of the keen gray eyes set in a face burned to a colourable sea-
faring brown by the Italian sun. No successful naval officer could
have afforded to keep that sensitive mobile mouth. After the
interview I wondered what kind of impression one might have
gained from a chance encounter in some such observation cell as a
railway carriage. Would it have been possible to fit him confidently
into any single category? He had reacted with so much success
against both the American accent and the English manner that he
seemed only doubtfully Anglo-Saxon. He might perhaps have been
some species of disguised cardinal, or even a Roman nobleman
amusing himself by playing the part of a Sussex squire. The observer
could at least have guessed that any part he chose to assume would
be finely conceived and generously played, for his features were all
cast in the classical mould of greatness. He might very well have
been a merciful Cæsar or a benevolent Napoleon, and a painter who
worked at his portrait a year or two later was excusably reminded of
so many illustrious makers of history that he declared it to be a hard
task to isolate the individual character of the model.
If the interview was overwhelming, it had none of the usual
awkwardness of such curious conversations. Instead of critical
angles and disconcerting silences, there were only benign curves
and ample reassurances. There was encouraging gaiety in an
expanse of bright check waistcoat. He invited me to ask any
questions I liked, but I had none to ask. I wanted nothing but to be
allowed to go to Rye and work his typewriter. He was prepared,
however, with his statements and, once I was seated opposite to
him, the strong, slow stream of his deliberate speech played over me
without ceasing. He had it on his mind to tell me the conditions of
life and labour at Rye, and he unburdened himself fully, with
numberless amplifications and qualifications but without any real
break. It would be a dull business, he warned me, and I should
probably find Rye a dull place. He told me of rooms in Mermaid
Street, "very simple, rustic and antique—but that is the case for
everything near my house, and this particular little old house is very
near mine, and I know the good woman for kind and worthy and a
convenient cook and in short——." It was settled at once that I
should take the rooms, that I should begin my duties in October.

II

Since winter was approaching, Henry James had begun to use a

panelled, green-painted room on the upper floor of Lamb House for
his work. It was known simply as the green room. It had many
advantages as a winter workroom, for it was small enough to be
easily warmed and a wide south window caught all the morning
sunshine. The window overhung the smooth, green lawn, shaded in
summer by a mulberry tree, surrounded by roses and enclosed
behind a tall, bride wall. It never failed to give the owner pleasure to
look out of this window at his charming English garden where he
could watch his English gardener digging the flower-beds or mowing
the lawn or sweeping up fallen leaves. There was another window
for the afternoon sun, looking towards Winchelsea and doubly
glazed against the force of the westerly gales. Three high
bookcases, two big writing-desks and an easy chair filled most of the
space in the green room, but left enough dear floor for a restricted
amount of the pacing exercise that was indispensable to literary
composition. On summer days Henry James liked better to work in
the large "garden room" which gave him a longer stretch for
perambulation and a window overlooking the cobbled street that
curved up the hill past his door. He liked to be able to relieve the
tension of a difficult sentence by a glance down the street; he
enjoyed hailing a passing friend or watching a motor-car pant up the
sharp little slope. The sight of one of these vehicles could be
counted on to draw from him a vigorous outburst of amazement,
admiration, or horror for the complications of an age that produced
such efficient monsters for gobbling protective distance.
The business of acting as a medium between the spoken and the
typewritten word was at first as alarming as it was fascinating. The
most handsome and expensive typewriters exercise as vicious an
influence as any others over the spelling of the operator, and the
new pattern of a Remington machine which I found installed offered
a few additional problems. But Henry James's patience during my
struggles with that baffling mechanism was unfailing—he watched
me helplessly, for he was one of the few men without the smallest
pretension to the understanding of a machine—and he was as easy
to spell from as an open dictionary. The experience of years had
evidently taught him that it was not safe to leave any word of more
than one syllable to luck. He took pains to pronounce every
pronounceable letter, he always spelt out words which the ear might
confuse with others, and he never left a single, punctuation mark
unuttered, except sometimes that necessary point, the full stop.
Occasionally, in a low "aside" he would interject a few words for the
enlightenment of the amanuensis, adding, for instance, after spelling
out "The Newcomes," that the words were the title of a novel by one
Thackeray.
The practice of dictation was begun in the nineties. By 1907 it was a
confirmed habit, its effects being easily recognizable in his style,
which became more and more like free, involved, unanswered talk.
"I know," he once said to me, "that I'm too diffuse when I'm
dictating." But he found dictation not only an easier but a more
inspiring method of composing than writing with his own hand, and
he considered that the gain in expression more than compensated
for any loss of concision. The spelling out of the words, the
indication of commas, were scarcely felt as a drag on the movement
of his thought. "It all seems," he once explained, "to be so much
more effectively and unceasingly pulled out of me in speech than in
writing." Indeed, at the time when I began to work for him, he had
reached a stage at which the click of a Remington machine acted as
a positive spur. He found it more difficult to compose to the music of
any other make. During a fortnight when the Remington was out of
order he dictated to an Oliver typewriter with evident discomfort,
and he found it almost impossibly disconcerting to speak to
something that made no responsive sound at all. Once or twice
when he was ill and in bed I took down a note or two by hand, but
as a rule he liked to have the typewriter moved into his bedroom for
even the shortest letters. Yet there were to the end certain kinds of
work which he was obliged to do with a pen. Plays, if they were to
be kept within the limits of possible performance, and short stories,
if they were to remain within the bounds of publication in a monthly
magazine, must be written by hand. He was well aware that the
manual labour of writing was his best aid to a desired brevity. The
plays—such a play as The Outcry, for instance—were copied straight
from his manuscript, since he was too much afraid of "the
murderous limits of the English theatre" to risk the temptation of
dictation and embroidery. With the short stories he allowed himself a
little more freedom, dictating them from his written draft and
expanding them as he went to an extent which inevitably defeated
his original purpose. It is almost literally true to say of the sheaf of
tales collected in The Finer Grain that they were all written in
response to a single request for a short story for Harper's Monthly
Magazine. The length was to be about 5,000 words and each
promising idea was cultivated in the optimistic belief that it would
produce a flower too frail and small to demand any exhaustive
treatment. But even under pressure of being written by hand, with
dictated interpolations rigidly restricted, each in turn pushed out to
lengths that no chopping could reduce to the word limit. The tale
eventually printed was Crapy Cornelia, but, although it was the
shortest of the batch, it was thought too long to be published in one
number and appeared in two sections, to the great annoyance of the
author.

III

The method adopted for full-length novels was very different. With a
clear run of 100,000 words or more before him, Henry James always
cherished the delusive expectation of being able to fit his theme
quite easily between the covers of a volume. It was not until he was
more than half way through that the problem of space began to be
embarrassing. At the beginning he had no questions of compression
to attend to, and he "broke ground," as he said, by talking to himself
day by day about the characters and construction until the persons
and their actions were vividly present to his inward eye. This
soliloquy was of course recorded on the typewriter. He had from far
back tended to dramatize all the material that life gave him, and he
more and more prefigured his novels as staged performances,
arranged in acts and scenes, with the characters making their
observed entrances and exits. These scenes he worked out until he
felt himself so thoroughly possessed of the action that he could
begin on the dictation of the book itself—a process which has been
incorrectly described by one critic as re-dictation from a rough draft.
It was nothing of the kind. Owners of the volumes containing The
Ivory Tower or The Sense of the Past have only to turn to the Notes
printed at the end to see that the scenario dictated in advance
contains practically none of the phrases used in the final work. The
two sets of Notes are a different and a much more interesting
literary record than a mere draft. They are the framework set up for
imagination to clothe with the spun web of life. But they are not
bare framework. They are elaborate and abundant. They are the
kind of exercise described in The Death of the Lion as "a great
gossiping eloquent letter—the overflow into talk of an artist's
amorous design." But the design was thus mapped out with the
clear understanding that at a later stage and at closer quarters the
subject might grow away from the plan. "In the intimacy of
composition pre-noted proportions and arrangements do most
uncommonly insist on making themselves different by shifts and
variations, always improving, which impose themselves as one goes
and keep the door open always to something more right and more
related. It is subject to that constant possibility, all the while, that
one does pre-note and tentatively sketch."[1]
The preliminary sketch was seldom consulted after the novel began
to take permanent shape, but the same method of "talking out" was
resorted to at difficult points of the narrative as it progressed, always
for the sake of testing in advance the values of the persons involved
in a given situation, so that their creator should ensure their right
action both for the development of the drama and the truth of their
relations to each other. The knowledge of all the conscious motives
and concealments of his creatures, gained by unwearied observation
of their attitudes behind the scenes, enabled Henry James to exhibit
them with a final confidence that dispensed with explanations.
Among certain stumbling blocks in the path of the perfect
comprehension of his readers is their uneasy doubt of the sincerity
of the conversational encounters recorded. Most novelists provide
some clue to help their readers to distinguish truth from falsehood,
and in the theatre, although husbands and wives may be deceived
by lies, the audience is usually privy to the plot. But a study of the
Notes to The Ivory Tower will make it clear that between the people
created by Henry James lying is as frequent as among mortals and
not any easier to detect.
For the volumes of memories, A Small Boy and Others, Notes of a
Son and Brother, and the uncompleted Middle Years, no preliminary
work was needed. A straight dive into the past brought to the
surface treasure after treasure, a wealth of material which became
embarrassing. The earlier book was begun in 1911, after Henry
James had returned from a year in the United States, where he had
been called by his brother's fatal illness. He had come back, after
many seasons of country solitude, to his former love of the friendly
London winter, and for the first few months after his return from
America he lodged near the Reform Club and came to the old house
in Chelsea where I was living and where he had taken a room for his
work. It was a quiet room, long and narrow and rather dark—he
used to speak of it as "my Chelsea cellar." There he settled down to
write what, as he outlined it to me, was to be a set of notes to his
brother William's early letters, prefaced by a brief account of the
family into which they were both born. But an entire volume of
memories was finished before bringing William to an age for writing
letters, and A Small Boy came to a rather abrupt end as a result of
the writer's sudden decision that a break must be made at once if
the flood of remembrance was not to drown his pious intention.
It was extraordinarily easy for him to recover the past; he had
always been sensitive to impressions and his mind was stored with
records of exposure. All he had to do was to render his sense of
those records as adequately as he could. Each morning, after
reading over the pages written the day before, he would settle down
in a chair for an hour or so of conscious effort. Then, lifted on a
rising tide of inspiration, he would get up and pace up and down the
room, sounding out the periods in tones of resonant assurance. At
such times he was beyond reach of irrelevant sounds or sights.
Hosts of cats—a tribe he usually routed with shouts of execration—
might wail outside the window, phalanxes of motor-cars bearing
dreaded visitors might hoot at the door. He heard nothing of them.
The only thing that could arrest his progress was the escape of the
word he wanted to use. When that had vanished he broke off the
rhythmic pacing and made his way to a chimney-piece or book-case
tall enough to support his elbows while he rested his head in his
hands and audibly pursued the fugitive.
 [1]The Ivory Tower (Collini, 1917), p. 341.

IV

In the autumn of 1907, when I began to tap the Remington

typewriter at Henry James's dictation, he was engaged on the
arduous task of preparing his Novels and Tales for the definitive New
York edition, published in 1909. Since it was only between breakfast
and luncheon that he undertook what he called "inventive" work, he
gave the hours from half-past ten to half-past one to the
composition of the prefaces which are so interesting a feature of the
edition. In the evenings he read over again the work of former
years, treating the printed pages like so many proof-sheets of
extremely corrupt text. The revision was a task he had seen in
advance as formidable. He had cultivated the habit of forgetting past
achievements almost to the pitch of a sincere conviction that nothing
he had written before about 1890 could come with any shred of
credit through the ordeal of a critical inspection. On a morning when
he was obliged to give time to the selection of a set of tales for a
forthcoming volume, he confessed that the difficulty of selection was
mainly the difficulty of reading them at all. "They seem," he said, "so
bad until I have read them that I can't force myself to go through
them except with a pen in my hand, altering as I go the crudities
and ineptitudes that to my sense deform each page." Unfamiliarity
and adverse prejudice are rare advantages for a writer to bring to
the task of choosing among his works. For Henry James the
prejudice might give way to half reluctant appreciation as the
unfamiliarity passed into recognition, but it must be clear to every
reader of the prefaces that he never lost the sense of being
paternally responsible for two distinct families. For the earlier brood,
acknowledged fruit of his alliance with Romance, he claimed
indulgence on the ground of their youthful spontaneity, their
confident assurance, their rather touching good faith. One catches
echoes of a plea that these elderly youngsters may not be too
closely compared, to their inevitable disadvantage, with the richly
endowed, the carefully bred, the highly civilized and sensitized
children of his second marriage, contracted with that wealthy bride,
Experience. Attentive readers of the novels may perhaps find the
distinction between the two groups less remarkable than it seemed
to their writer. They may even wonder whether the second marriage
was not rather a silver wedding, with the old romantic mistress
cleverly disguised as a woman of the world. The different note was
possibly due more to the substitution of dictation for pen and ink
than to any profound change of heart. But whatever the reason,
their author certainly found it necessary to spend a good deal of
time working on the earlier tales before he considered them fit for
appearance in the company of those composed later. Some members
of the elder family he entirely cast off, not counting them worth the
expense of completely new clothes. Others he left in their place
more from a necessary, though deprecated, respect for the declared
taste of the reading public than because he loved them for their own
sake. It would, for instance, have been difficult to exclude Daisy
Miller from any representative collection of his work, yet the
popularity of the tale had become almost a grievance. To be
acclaimed as the author of Daisy Miller by persons blandly
unconscious of The Wings of the Dove or The Golden Bowl was a
reason among many for Henry James's despair of intelligent
comprehension. Confronted repeatedly with Daisy, he felt himself
rather in the position of some grande dame who, with a jewel-case
of sparkling diamonds, is constrained by her admirers always to
appear in the simple string of moonstones worn at her first dance.
From the moment he began to read over the earlier tales, he found
himself involved in a highly practical examination of the scope and
limits of permissible revision. Poets, as he pointed out, have often
revised their verse with good effect. Why should the novelist not
have equal license? The only sound reason for not altering anything
is a conviction that it cannot be improved. It was Henry James's
profound conviction that he could improve his early writing in nearly
every sentence. Not to revise would have been to confess to a loss
of faith in himself, and it was not likely that the writer who had
fasted for forty years in the wilderness of British and American
misconceptions without yielding a scrap of intellectual integrity to
editorial or publishing tempters should have lost faith in himself. But
he was well aware that the game of revision must be played with a
due observance of the rules. He knew that no novelist can safely
afford to repudiate his fundamental understanding with his readers
that the tale he has to tell is at least as true as history and the
figures he has set in motion at least as independently alive as the
people we see in offices and motor-cars. He allowed himself few
freedoms with any recorded appearances or actions, although
occasionally the temptation to correct a false gesture, to make it
"right," was too strong to be resisted. We have a pleasant instance
of this correction in the second version of The American. At her first
appearance, the old Marquise de Bellegarde had acknowledged the
introduction of Newman by returning his handshake "with a sort of
British positiveness which reminded him that she was the daughter
of the Earl of St. Dunstan's." In the later edition she behaves
differently. "Newman came sufficiently near to the old lady by the
fire to take in that she would offer him no handshake.... Madame de
Bellegarde looked hard at him and refused what she did refuse with
a sort of British positiveness which reminded him that she was the
daughter of the Earl of St. Dunstan's." There were good reasons why
the Marquise should have denied Newman a welcoming handshake.
Her attitude throughout the book was to be consistently hostile and
should never have been compromised by the significantly British
grip. Yet it is almost shocking to see her snatching back her first
card after playing it for so many years. She was to perform less
credible actions than shaking hands with an innocent American, as
her progenitor knew very well. He invited his readers, in the preface
to The American, to observe the impossible behaviour of the noble
Bellegarde family, but he realized that since they had been begotten
in absurdity the Bellegardes could under no stress of revision
achieve a very solid humanity. The best he could do for them was to
let a faint consciousness flush the mind of Valentin, the only
detached member of the family. In the first edition Valentin warned
his friend of the Bellegarde peculiarities with the easy good faith of
the younger Henry James under the spell of the magic word
"Europe. My mother is strange, my brother is strange, and I verily
believe I am stranger than either. Old trees have queer cracks, old
races have odd secrets." To this statement he added in the revised
version: "We're fit for a museum or a Balzac novel." A comparable
growth of ironic perception was allowed to Roderick Hudson, whose
comment on Rowland's admission of his heroically silent passion for
Mary Garland, "It's like something in a novel," was altered to: "It's
like something in a bad novel."

But the legitimate business of revision was, for Henry James, neither
substitution nor re-arrangement. It was the demonstration of values
implicit in the earlier work, the retrieval of neglected opportunities
for adequate "renderings. It was," as he explained in his final
preface, "all sensibly, as if the clear matter being still there, even as
a shining expanse of snow spread over a plain, my exploring tread,
for application to it, had quite unlearned the old pace and found
itself naturally falling into another, which might sometimes more or
less agree with the original tracks, but might most often, or very
nearly, break the surface at other places. What was thus
predominantly interesting to note, at all events, was the high
spontaneity of these deviations and differences, which become thus
things not of choice but of immediate and perfect necessity:
necessity to the end of dealing with the quantities in question at all."
On every page the act of re-reading became automatically one with
the act of re-writing, and the revised parts are just "those rigid
conditions of re-perusal, registered; so many close notes, as who
should say, on the particular vision of the matter itself that
experience had at last made the only possible one." These are words
written with the clear confidence of the artist who, in complete
possession of his "faculties," had no need to bother himself with
doubts as to his ability to write better at the end of a lifetime of hard
work and varied experience than at the beginning. He knew he could
write better. His readers have not always agreed with his own view.
They have denounced the multiplication of qualifying clauses, the
imposition of a system of punctuation which, although rigid and
orderly, occasionally fails to act as a guide to immediate
comprehension of the writer's intention, and the increasing passion
for adverbial interpositions. "Adjectives are the sugar of literature
and adverbs the salt," was Henry James's reply to a criticism which
once came to his ears.
It must be admitted that the case for the revised version relies on
other merits than simplicity or elegance to make its claim good. It is
not so smooth, nor so easy, nor, on the whole, so pretty as the older
form. But it is nearly always richer and more alive. Abstractions give
place to sharp definite images, loose vague phrases to close-locked
significances. We can find a fair example of this in The Madonna of
the Future, a tale first published in 1879. In the original version one
of the sentences runs: "His professions, somehow, were all half
professions, and his allusions to his work and circumstances left
something dimly ambiguous in the background." In the New York
Edition this has become: "His professions were practically somehow,
all masks and screens, and his personal allusions as to his
ambiguous background mere wavings of the dim lantern." In some
passages it would be hard to deny a gain of beauty as well as of
significance. There is, for instance, a sentence in the earlier account
of Newman's silent renunciation of his meditated revenge, in the
Cathedral of Notre Dame: "He sat a long time; he heard far-away
bells chiming off, at long intervals, to the rest of the world." In the
definitive edition of The American the passage has become: "He sat
a long time; he heard far-away bells chiming off into space, at long
intervals, the big bronze syllables of the Word."
A paragraph from Four Meetings, a tale worked over with extreme
care, will give a fair idea of the general effect of the revision. It
records a moment of the final Meeting, when the helplessly
indignant narrator is watching poor Caroline ministering to the vulgar
French cocotte who has imposed herself on the hospitality of the
innocent little New Englander.
"At this moment," runs the passage of 1879, "Caroline Spencer came
out of the house bearing a coffee pot on a little tray. I noticed that
on her way from the door to the table she gave me a single quick
vaguely appealing glance. I wondered what it signified; I felt that it
signified a sort of half-frightened longing to know what, as a man of
the world who had been in France, I thought of the Countess. It
made me extremely uncomfortable. I could not tell her that the
Countess was very possibly the runaway wife of a little hairdresser. I
tried, suddenly, on the contrary, to show a high consideration for
her."
The "particular vision" registered on re-perusal reveals states of
mind much more definite than these wonderings and longings and
vague appeals.
"Our hostess moreover at this moment came out of the house,
bearing a coffee-pot and three cups on a neat little tray. I took from
her eyes, as she approached us, a brief but intense appeal—the
mute expression, as I felt, conveyed in the hardest little look she had
yet addressed me, of her longing to know what as a man of the
world in general and of the French world in particular, I thought of
these allied forces now so encamped on the stricken field of her life.
I could only 'act,' however, as they said at North Verona, quite
impenetrably—only make no answering sign. I couldn't intimate,
much less could I frankly utter, my inward sense of the Countess's
probable past, with its measure of her virtue, value and
accomplishments, and of the limits of consideration to which she
could properly pretend. I couldn't give my friend a hint of how I
myself personally 'saw' her interesting pensioner—whether as the
runaway wife of a too-jealous hairdresser or of a too-morose pastry-
cook, say; whether as a very small bourgeoise, in fine, who had
vitiated her case beyond patching up, or even some character of the
nomadic sort, less edifying still. I couldn't let in, by the jog of a
shutter, as it were, a hard informing ray and then, washing my
hands of the business, turn my back for ever. I could on the contrary
but save the situation, my own at least, for the moment, by pulling
myself together with a master hand and appearing to ignore
everything but that the dreadful person between us was a 'grande
dame.'"
Anyone genuinely interested in "the how and the whence and the
why these intenser lights of experience come into being and insist
on shining," will find it a profitable exercise to read and compare the
old and the new versions of any of the novels or tales first published
during the 'seventies or 'eighties. Such a reader will be qualified to
decide for himself between the opinion of a bold young critic that "all
the works have been subjected to a revision which in several cases,
notably Daisy Miller and Four Meetings, amounts to their ruin," and
their writer's confidence that "I shouldn't have breathed upon the
old catastrophes and accidents, the old wounds and mutilations and
disfigurements wholly in vain. . . . I have prayed that the finer air of
the better form may sufficiently seem to hang about them and gild
them over—at least for readers, however few, at all curious of
questions of air and form."

VI

Explanatory prefaces and elaborate revisions, short stories and long

memories, were far from being the complete tale of literary labour
during the last eight years of Henry James's life. A new era for
English drama was prophesied in 1907. Led by Miss Horniman,
advocates of the repertory system were marching forward, capturing
one by one the intellectual centres of the provinces. In London,
repertory seasons were announced in two West-end theatres. Actor-
managers began to ask for "non-commercial" plays and when their
appeal reached Henry James it met with a quick response. The
theatre had both allured and repelled him for many years, and he
had already been the victim of a theatrical misadventure. His
assertions that he wrote plays solely in the hope of making money
should not, I think, be taken as the complete explanation of his
dramas. It is pretty clear that he wrote plays because he wanted to
write them, because he was convinced that his instinct for dramatic
situations could find a happy outlet in plays, because writing for the
stage is a game rich in precise rules and he delighted in the
multiplication of technical difficulties, and because he lived in circles
more addicted to the intelligent criticism of plays than to the
intelligent criticism of novels. The plays he wrote in the early
'nineties are very careful exercises in technique. They are derived
straight from the light comedies of the Parisian stage, with the
difference that in the 'nineties, for all their advertised naughtiness,
there were even stricter limits to the free representation of Parisian
situations on English stages than there are to-day. In The Reprobate,
a play successfully produced a few years ago by the Stage Society,
the lady whose hair has changed from black to red and from red to
gold is the centre of the drama, she holds the key to the position,
but all her complicating effect depends upon the past—pasts being
allowed on every stage comparative license of reference. The
compromising evidence is all a matter of old photographs and
letters, and the play loses in vividness whatever it may gain in
respectability. Nobody knew better than the author that The
Reprobate was not a good play. Terror of being cut forbade him to
work on a subject of intrinsic importance. With another hour
guaranteed, a playwright might attempt anything, but "he does not
get his hour, and he will probably begin by missing his subjects. He
takes, in his dread of complication, a minor one, and it's heavy odds
that the minor one, with the habit of small natures, will prove
thankless."
Other early plays had been converted into novels or tales and so
published. One of these, written originally for Miss Ellen Terry but
never produced by her, had appeared as an incongruous companion
to The Turn of the Screw in the volume entitled The Two Magics. A
few attentive readers had seen the dramatic possibilities of Covering
End, and when it was suggested to Henry James that he should
convert it into a three-act comedy for production by Mr. Forbes
Robertson (as he was then) and Miss Gertrude Elliot, he willingly
consented. Flying under a new flag, as The High Bid, the play was
produced in London in February, 1909, but only for a series of
matinées, the prodigious success of The Passing of the Third Floor
Back precluding the possibility of an evening for any other
production under the same management. Under the inspiration of
the repertory movement, other material was re-cast for acting. The
Other House was re-dictated as a tragedy. Owen Wingrave became
The Saloon, a one-act play produced by Miss Gertrude Kingston in
1910. Finally an entirely new three-act comedy, The Outcry, was
written round the highly topical subject of the sale of art treasures to
rich Americans. It was not produced during Henry James's life. At
the time when it should have been rehearsed he was ill and the
production was postponed. On his recovery, he went to the United
States for a year, and when he came back the day of repertory
performances had died in a fresh night of stars.
When The Outcry was given by the Stage Society in 1917, it was
evident that the actors were embarrassed by their lines, for by 1909,
when the play was written, the men and women of Henry James
could talk only in the manner of their creator. His own speech,
assisted by the practice of dictating, had by that time become so
inveterately characteristic that his questions to a railway clerk about
a ticket or to a fishmonger about a lobster, might easily be
recognized as coined in the same mint as his addresses to the
Academic Committee of the Royal Society of Literature. Apart from
this difficulty of enunciating the lines, The Outcry has all the
advantages over the earlier plays. The characters are real and they
act from adequate motives. The solution of the presented problem,
which requires, like most of the author's solutions, a change of
heart, is worked out with admirable art, without any use of the
mechanical shifts and stage properties needed in The Reprobate. It
is not very difficult to believe that if Henry James had been
encouraged twenty years earlier to go on writing plays he might
have made a name as a dramatist, but the faithful may be forgiven
for rejoicing that the playwright was sacrificed to the novelist and
critic.

VII

Many men whose prime business is the art of writing find rest and
refreshment in other occupations. They marry, or they keep dogs,
they play golf or bridge, they study Sanskrit or collect postage
stamps. Except for a period of ownership of a dachshund, Henry
James did none of these things. He lived a life consecrated to the
service of a jealous, insatiable, and supremely rewarding goddess,
and all his activities had essential reference to that service. He had a
great belief in the virtues of air and exercise, and he was expert at
making a walk of two or three miles last for as many hours by his
habit of punctuating movement with frequent and prolonged halts
for meditation or conversation. He liked the exhilaration of driving in
a motor-car, which gave him, he said, "a sense of spiritual
adventure." He liked a communicative companion. Indeed the
cultivation of friendships may be said to have been his sole
recreation. To the very end of his life he was quick to recognize
every chance of forming a friendly relation, swift to act on his
recognition, and beautifully ready to protect and nourish the warm
life of engendered affection. His letters, especially those written in
his later years, are more than anything else great generous gestures
of remembrance, gathering up and embracing his correspondents
much as his talk would gather up his hearers and sweep them along
on a rising flood of eloquence.
But that fine capacity for forming and maintaining a "relation"
worked, inevitably, within definite limits. He was obliged to create
impassable barriers between himself and the rest of mankind before
he could stretch out his eager hands over safe walls to beckon and
to bless. He loved his friends, but he was condemned by the law of
his being to keep clear of any really entangling net of human
affection and exaction. His contacts had to be subordinate, or indeed
ancillary, to the vocation he had followed with a single passion from
the time when, as a small boy, he obtained a report from his tutor as
showing no great aptitude for anything but a felicitous rendering of
La Fontaine's fables into English. Nothing could be allowed to
interfere for long with the labour from which Henry James never
rested, unless perhaps during sleep. When his "morning stint of
inventive work" was over, he went forth to the renewed assault of
the impressions that were always lying in wait for him. He was
perpetually and mercilessly exposed, incessantly occupied with the
task of assimilating his experience, freeing the pure workable metal
from the base, remoulding it into new beauty with the aid of every
device of his craft. He used his friends not, as some incompletely
inspired artists do, as in themselves the material of his art, but as
the sources of his material. He took everything they could give and
he gave it back in his books. With this constant preoccupation, it
was natural that the people least interesting to him were the
comparatively dumb. To be "inarticulate" was for him the cardinal
social sin. It amounted to a wilful withholding of treasures of alien
experience. And if he could extract no satisfaction from
contemplating the keepers of golden silence, he could gain little
more from intercourse with the numerous persons he dismissed from
his attention as "simple organisms." These he held to be mere waste
of any writer's time, and it was characteristic that his constant
appreciation of the works of Mrs. Wharton was baffled by the
popularity of Ethan Frome, because he considered that the gifted
author had spent her labour on creatures too easily comprehensible
to be worth her pains. He greatly preferred The Reef, where, as he
said, "she deals with persons really fine and complicated."
We might arrive at the same conclusion from a study of the prefaces
to the New York Edition. More often than not, the initial idea for a
tale came to Henry James through the medium of other people's
talk. From a welter of anecdote he could unerringly pick out the
living nucleus for a reconstructed and balanced work of art. His
instinct for selection was admirable, and he could afford to let it
range freely among a profusion of proffered subjects, secure that it
would alight on the most promising. But he liked to have the
subjects presented with a little artful discrimination, even in the first
instance. He was dependent on conversation, but it must be
educated and up to a point intelligent conversation. There is an early
letter written from Italy in 1874, in which he complains of having
hardly spoken to an Italian creature in nearly a year's sojourn, "save
washerwomen and waiters. This, you'll say, is my own stupidity," he
continues, "but granting this gladly, it proves that even a creature
addicted as much to sentimentalizing as I am over the whole mise
en scène of Italian life, doesn't find an easy initiation into what lies
behind it. Sometimes I am overwhelmed with the pitifulness of this
absurd want of reciprocity between Italy itself and all my rhapsodies
about it." Other wanderers might have found more of Italy in
washerwomen and waiters, here guaranteed to be the true native
article, than in all the nobility of Rome or the Anglo-Americans of
Venice, but that was not Henry James's way. For him neither pearls
nor diamonds fell from the lips of waiters and washerwomen, and
princesses never walked in his world disguised as goosegirls.
Friendships are maintained by the communication of speech and
letters. Henry James was a voluminous letter-writer and exhaustively
communicative in his talk upon every subject but one, his own work,
which was his own real life. It was not because he was indifferent to
what people thought of his books that he evaded discussion about
them. He was always touched and pleased by any evidence that he
had been intelligently read, but he never went a step out of his way
to seek this assurance. He found it safest to assume that nobody
read him, and he liked his friends none the worse for their
incapacity. Meanwhile, the volumes of his published works—visible,
palpable, readable proof of that unceasing travail of the creative
spirit which was always labouring behind the barrier of his silence—
piled themselves up year after year, to be dropped on to the tables
of booksellers and pushed on to the shelves of libraries, to be
bought and cherished by the faithful, ignored by the multitude, and
treated as a test of mental endurance by the kind of person who
organized the Browning Society. Fortunately for literature, Henry
James did not lend himself to exploitation by any Jacobean Society.
Instead of inventing riddles for prize students, he scattered about his
pages a number of pregnant passages containing all the clues that
are needed for keeping up with him. It was his theory that if readers
didn't keep up with him—as they admittedly didn't always—the fault
was entirely in their failure of attention. There are revelations in his
books, just as he declared them to be in the works of Neil Paraday.
"Extract the opinion, disengage the answer—these are the real acts
of homage."

VIII

From his familiar correspondence we need not hope to extract as

considered an opinion or as definite an answer as from the novels,
but his letters are extraordinarily valuable as sidelights, helping us to
see how it happened that any man was able to progress along so
straight a path from one end of his life to another. The two Volumes
of memories are clear evidence of the kind of temperamental make-
up with which Henry James was gifted, the two volumes of letters
show how his life contributed to preserve and enhance his rare
capacity for taking and keeping impressions. They show him too as
unusually impervious to everything which is not an impression of
visual images or a sense of a human situation. He was very little
troubled by a number of ideas which press with an increasing weight
upon the minds of most educated persons. Not until the outbreak of
the Great War was he moved to utter a forcible "opinion" about
affairs outside his personal range. He was delightfully free from the
common delusion that by grouping individuals in arbitrary classes
and by twisting harmless adjectives into abstract nouns it is possible
for us to think of more than one thing at a time and to conceive of
qualities apart from their manifestation. What he saw he possessed;
what he understood he criticized, but he never reckoned it to be any
part of his business to sit in judgment on the deeds of men working
in alien material for inartistic ends, or to speculate about the nature
of the universe or the conflict or reconciliation of science with
religion. He could let Huxley and Gladstone, the combatant
champions of Darwinism and orthodox theology, enrich the pages of
a single letter without any reference to their respective beliefs.
"Huxley is a very genial, comfortable being . . . But of course my talk
with him is mere amiable generalities." Of Gladstone there is a little
more, but again the personal impression is the thing sought. "I was
glad of a chance to feel the 'personality' of a great political leader—
or as G. is now thought here even, I think, by his partisans, ex-
leader. That of Gladstone is very fascinating—his urbanity extreme—
his eye that of a man of genius—and his apparent self-surrender to
what he is talking of without a flaw. He made a great impression on
me." One would like to know what the subject was to which
Gladstone had surrendered himself in his talk with this entranced
young American, who must surely, for his part, have been as much
reduced conversationally to "mere amiable generalities" as on the
occasion of his meeting Huxley. It is difficult to think of a single likely
point of contact between the minds of Gladstone and Henry James.
But that, for delicacy of registration, was an advantage. The
recording instrument could perform its work without the hindrance
of any distraction of attention from the man himself to the matter of
his speech, which did not presumably contain any germ for
cultivation into fiction.
His nationality saved Henry James from the common English
necessity of taking a side in the political game; and in the United
States nobody of his world had expected him to be interested in
politics. There is a pleasant account in The Middle Years of his
blankness when he was asked at a London breakfast-table for
"distinctness about General Grant's first cabinet, upon the formation
of which the light of the newspaper happened then to beat." The
question was embarrassing. "There were, it appeared, things of
interest taking place in America, and I had had, in this absurd
manner, to come to England to learn it: I had had over there on the
ground itself no conception of any such matter—nothing of the
smallest interest, by any perception of mine, as I suppose I should
still blush to recall, had taken place in America since the War."
Nothing of any great public interest, by any perception of his, was to
take place in Europe until the outbreak of another war at that time
far beyond the range of speculation. But if cabinets and parties and
politics were and remained outside the pale of his sensibility, he was
none the less charmed by the customs of a country where Members
of Parliament and Civil Servants could meet together for a leisurely
breakfast, thus striking "the exciting note of a social order in which
everyone wasn't hurled straight, with the momentum of rising, upon
an office or a store."

IX

Henry James came to England to admire. But his early reverence for
the men and women of an island with so fine and ancient a historic
tone as Great Britain soon faded. He had forgotten, in the first
passion of acquaintance, that the English are born afresh in every
generation and are about as new as young Americans, differing from
them chiefly in having other forms of domestic and ecclesiastical
architecture and smoother lawns to take for granted. He looked at
old stone castles and Tudor brickwork, at great hanging eaves and
immemorial gardens, and then he looked at the heirs of this heritage
and listened intently for their speech. This was disappointing, partly
because they spoke so little. "I rarely remember," he wrote when he
had lived through several London months, "to have heard on English
lips any other intellectual verdict (no matter under what provocation)
than this broad synthesis 'so immensely clever.' What exasperates
you is not that they can't say more but that they wouldn't if they
could."
How different was this inarticulate world from the fine civilization of
Boston, from the cultivated circle that gathered round Charles Eliot
Norton at Shady Hill. To that circle he appealed for sympathy,
complaining that he was "sinking into dull British acceptance and
conformity. . . . I am losing my standard—my charming little
standard that I used to think so high; my standard of wit, of grace,
of good manners, of vivacity, of urbanity, of intelligence, of what
makes an easy and natural style of intercourse! And this in
consequence of having dined out during the past winter 107 times!"
Great men, or at the least men with great names, swam into his ken
and he condemned them. Ruskin was "weakness pure and simple."
In Paris he found that he could "easily—more than easily—see all
round Flaubert intellectually." A happy Sunday evening at Madame
Viardot's provoked a curious reflection on the capacity of celebrated
Europeans to behave absurdly and the incapacity of celebrated
Americans to indulge in similar antics. "It was both strange and
sweet to see poor Turgenev acting charades of the most extravagant
description, dressed out in old shawls, and masks, going on all fours,
etc. The charades are their usual Sunday evening occupation and
the good faith with which Turgenev, at his age and with his glories,
can go into them is a striking example of the truth of that
spontaneity which Europeans have and we have not. Fancy
Longfellow, Lowell, or Charles Norton doing the like and every
Sunday evening!"
Whether or not all celebrated Americans behave with invariable
decorum, the astonished spectator of Turgenev's performance had
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