THE GREAT GREY BABYLON
189
and there is no reason to dispute him. His English friendships were
gratifying. Those with Gosse, Stevenson, Du Maurier, and other
writers and artists appeased some of his early desire for intellectual
companionship; and there was another kind of pleasure in the gaily
maternal company of voluble
femmes du monde
like Fanny Kemble
and Mrs. Greville. Seldom did such associations reach into the depths
where the passions were formed-at any rate, not yet, although
the author of
The Awkward Age
(1898) would at last feel the
poetry of the London hostess as deeply as ever he did that of Minny
Temple. What did penetrate at once was a sense of the society as a
whole: its human types, manners, routines, houses, charms, horrors.
This worldly image or imaged world he embraced with an in–
tensity to which his confirmed nostalgia doubtless contributed-no
insider like a reformed outsider. And he became the extremely critical
champion of luxury and privilege. "Can you imagine anything so
vulgar as the gold?" his sister Alice was to demand, referring to the
gifts at a wedding where it was reported that the bride even carried
a silver prayer-book. "Surely," James replied, "a lady who can eat off
gold ought to be able to afford to pray out of silver!" This was a
joke; but when he announced, although not to his sister, "I can
stand a great deal of gold," it was not only a confession and a boast
but a challenge.
If
gold was "vulgar," there was something hardly
less so, which was the failure to appreciate it; the refusal, on what–
ever doctrinaire grounds, to admit its sheer weight
in
the realm of
the actual, its capacity to benefit and to harm. To benefit or harm
individuals, that is, for his great sense of the importance of human
beings was as ever. The aristQcratic society was the men and women
who made it up; its quality appeared in the quality of their minds and
relations. He was forever observing people-a friend, a fellow-guest, a
man on a park bench; and so the unpleasanter facts of the existing
beau monde
by no means escaped him. Indeed his identification with
it was advertised by his habit of taking it more seriously than
it
took itself; and he knew the discomfort of playing the self-appointed
scourge to people who were beyond caring. But although he became
occupied to the point of obsession with the actual abuses of money
and leisure, he never questioned the aristocratic ideal itself. He did
not even think of the existing aristocracy as a class among. others. All
the crowded and laborious life beyond it was for him so much Limbo,
