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The artist is present in every page of every book from which he sought so assiduously to eliminate himself.
The Notebooks of Henry James
It all hung together; they were subject, he and the great vagueness, to an equal and indivisible law.
The Beast in the Jungle
In A Small Boy and Others, Henry James (1956) remembers himself, as a child, peering with intense curiosity through the iron fence of a country place in New York City and rubbing “his contemplative nose” against the railing (p. 17). He extends all his sympathy to the small boy foredoomed “to go without many things, ever so many—as all persons do in whom contemplation takes so much the place of action.” James imagines that as a youngster he had been guaranteed a license for reckless adventure only because “some timely conviction” on the part of his parents must have suggested that “the only form of riot or revel ever known to him would be that of the visiting mind.” Although he spent his time “wondering and dawdling and gaping,” James profited from it, he felt assured, by “inspired application” as from “an education like another.” Rather than live as most men, he would live by impressions, caught by observation and finely turned in the matrix of subjective passion. What could not be directly experienced would be desperately longed for and pursued in imagination as a prime value.
Edmund Gosse, a personal friend of the author, reports in Aspects and Impressions (1922) an incident that shows the gaping James now—as a man—trying to see into the face of what he had never known. Gosse draws an impressive and sad picture. He first explains that