THE 6REAT GREY BABYLON
187
at
all
to bring
this
state of things about; it came rather of itself. I
had very few letters--I was afraid of letters. Three or four from
Henry Adams, three or four from Mrs. Wister, of which I only, as I
think, presented one." Before he had been three months in London he
had breakfasted at Lord Houghton's with John Morley and others,
and dined there with Tennyson, Schliemann, and Gladstone; and
''behold me after dinner conversing affably with
MI .
Gladston~
not by my seeking but by the almost importunate affection of Lord
H." Another time he found himself "being conversed with in low, but
harmonious tones by George Eliot," who showed, as he must have
expected, "a tendency to
aborder
only the highest themes." james's
social life was never so exceptional as
it
inevitably appears to unin–
structed Americans. Hardy and Meredith, for example, were seen in
the same Pall Mall clubs and many of the same drawing-rooms. His
p~age
into aristocratic circles was made easy by the respect that
literature still commanded in Victorian society, although he was
soon to complain that this was not sufficiently the case. A duke could
be trusted to broach rather low themes; and some daughter of an
ancient family, the flower of her race, seated with you in a room
aromatic of Queen Anne, would break silence now and then to
in–
quire what pack you hunted with or whether you went in much for
tennis. The company might be dull but the circumstances implied bet–
ter things past or to come, especially the ancestral houses, those
symbols of "shared experience" on a magnificent scale-"Montacute,
the admirable; Barrington, that superb Ford Abbey. These delicious
old houses, in the long August days,
in
the south of England
air,
on
the soil over which so much has passed and out of which so much
has come, rose before me like a series of visions." This is from the
notebooks; the whole passage is quintessential James. And to adjust
the vision to the fact became his great purpose as an artist, although
it meant that he had also to become a
kind
of English citizen-not
till
just before
his
death did he embrace legal citizenship.
No doubt his standards of good conversation were romantically
high; so at times was his faith in his own moral clairvoyance. "I
find people in general very vulgar-minded and superficial-and
it
is
only by a pious fiction, to keep myself going, and keep on the social
harness, that I succeed in postulating them as anything else or
better."
This
to
his
mother in 1879. Like the
Portrait,
begun the
