THE GREAT GREY BABYLON
185
to which he was now assimilating himself. He was, as he said of
Daudet, "not an occasional or desultory poet" but "a soldier in the
great anny of constant producers," the anny of Balzac and Dickens.
The serial was a stupid convention, he insisted; yet it was sociable;
and he must have been gratified to feel that readers were saying, as
one of his characters says of
Daniel Deronda,
"I should have liked it
to continue indefinitely, to keep coming out always, to be one of the
regular things of life."
It was his way to define his limits in proportion as he extended
them: a letting out, a pulling in. Settled in England, a success and
on
his
own, he began to evolve a vast inner structure of habit and
scruple which rendered
him
firm, even hard, wherever he might be
touched. It could give way surprisingly at times but it was always
there: the sea-wall against a fearful fluidity within.
If
he felt the
nostalgia "of doing absolutely what one pleases," he could also
write apropos of a story he was planning: "the question, as a matter
of ethics, seems to me to have but one answer; if he had offered
mar–
riage to Miss Rosslyn (or whatever her name) by that offer he
should abide." And his heroes will usually abide by their contracts
and do the correct thing, however special their reasons. So too with
their manners. The invalid soldier of his early story who felt that "a
man was not to go a-wooing in his dressing-gown and slippers" was
the forefather of all those Jamesian gentlemen who will make a
perpetual fuss about rising or smoking in the presence of ladies; and
Isabel's book
is
unmistakably the portrait of a
lady-an Il Cortegiarw
for the new American aristocracy.
This flagrant decorum, as the elder James might have called it,
was carried to excess and tended toward self-parody. At its best it was
a necessary part of the chivalrous atmosphere of the novels. And
it had its dramatic uses, as when Isabel, seeing Osmond seated while
Mme. Merle
is
standing, guesses their guilty intimacy. In all this
there
is
again an element of simple self-gratification on James's part.
If
free spirits
ought
to behave decorously in an age corrupted by
romantic ethics and Bohemian manners, the practice nevertheless re–
flects the author's own fiercely conservative instincts. "I doubt
whether there was ever a provincial man of quality so punctilious in
breeding as he is," wrote Tocqueville of the American in Europe.
"He
is
full of scruples and at the same time of pretensions." And
