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a literary life." Her great heroine is her grandmother, who, through
the privations of "the period euphemistically called the Reconstruction,"
managed a large family with wonderful courage, without ever appear–
ing
anything but graceful and charming and firm about bedtime prayers.
"She was an individual being if ever I knew one, and yet she never
did or said anything to make herself conspicuous."
Miss Porter's hero is Henry James, and in the finest essay in this
book, the title essay, she places Henry in the domestic environment
of the James family with a brilliance which perhaps only Henry
him–
self has ever equaled. But the two views do not really compete; Miss
Porter's, unlike James's, is the imaginatively sympathetic but brilliantly
common sense perception. Of the famous occasion when Thackeray
commented on young Henry's "extraordinary jacket" she remarks:
"The celebrated Mr. Thackeray, fresh from England, seated as an hon–
ored much-at-ease guest in the James library, committed an act which
iIOmehow explains everything that is wrong with his novels." And of
Henry James Senior, she remarks a little later: "He had won his right
to
gaiety of heart in love"-which is quite serious and true. Then
she adds: "After many a victorious engagement with the powers of
darkness, he had Swedenborg and all his angels round about, bearing
him
up; which his son was never to have"-who but another eight–
eenth-century wit could have produced that fine balance of sympathy
and common sense irony? And then we come down to plain, amused
sense: "And he had not been lately ridiculed by Mr. Thackeray, at
least not to his face."
Miss Porter's architecture is the domestic architecture of eighteenth–
century St. Francisville. Her flower is the kind of rose that grew in the
backyards of such houses-the Cabbage Rose or the Damask. Her
artist is Pierre-Joseph Redoute (1750-1840), who devoted his life to
botanical pictures. Her musicians are Lully, Rameau, Purcell, Monte–
verdi.
And her favorite among her peers-if we can judge by frequency
of allusion-is E. M. Forster, even though, as she hastens to tells us
in
her feminine way, she has never met him. What she admires is
Forster's "beautiful, purely secular common sense whirl1 can hardly be
distinguished
in
its more inspired moments from a saintly idealism."
At the center of her attention always are people, Man, the glory, jest,
and riddle of the world.
Miss Porter's ideas as well as her tastes have been shaped by her
inheritance from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,
and she has a steady scorn of dogmatic attitudes; there is loving ap–
proval
in her comment on that glance of Virginia Woolrs "which
