HENRY JAMES
73
for hi<> aestheticism, Ambient's sister, who, in her faded velvet robe,
seemed to have the notion that "she made up very well as a Rossetti,"
was a weirdly affected imitation of everything that
in
Ambient was
original.
Ambient's own intense devotion to "every manifestation of hu–
man energy" i<> close to Pater's. And although James was to speak, a
decade after this story, of Pater's having had "a phosphorescence, not
a flame," there seems an inescapable kinship between Pater's aspira–
tion to
be
the hard gem-like flame and Strether's famous exhorta–
tion to
live.
Moreover, when Strether tries to convey the multiple–
imaged fascination of Madame de Vionnet in likening her to a Re–
naissance medallion, "to a goddess still partly engaged
in
a morning
cloud," "to a sea-nymph waist-high in the summer surge," to Cleo–
patra herself in her variety, we are not far from the elaborate spell
of Pater's Mona Lisa. A further comparison would have to reckon
with the fact that James' recurrent use of the word "morality" has
a residue, quite foreign to Pater, of the values of James' transcenden–
talist father. For Pater, despite
his
debt to Arnold, would hardly
have been able to rise to James' classic formulation, in the preface
to
The Portrait of a Lady,
that there is "no more nutritive or sug–
~tive
truth ... than that of the perfect dependence of the 'moral'
sense of a work of art on the amount of felt life concerned in pro–
ducing it." Yet Pater and Jamt>.s would be in accord with Mark
Am–
bient's "passion for form," and likewise with his conviction that the
artist must not falsify or smooth away details, but "must give the
impression of life itself."
The stories where James is writing from the heart of
his
own
aesthetic convictions are the best of the group, most of which belong
to the years 1893-6. These were crucial years for James. He had felt
that with
The Tragic Muse
he had reached a dead-end with the long
novel, and had turned to
his
anxious experiment with the stage. The
failure of
Guy Domville,
early in 1895, marked the end of that
chapter, and only a couple of weeks later he was writing to Howells:
"I
have
felt, for a long time past, that I have fallen upon evil days–
every sign or symbol of one's being in the least
wanted,
anywhere or
by any one having so utterly failed. A new generation, that I know
not, and mainly prize not, has taken universal possession." One great
change from the old days was that James had now found that the
magazines would hardly accept him any more, a serious matter for
