Henry the Great

A new literary quiz each week or so, usually with a theme. This week: All right, you horrible lot! No more Mr Nice Guy! This week is Henry James Week! There might be some muttering amongst the partisans of H. Melville or (more pardonably) M. Twain, but there's no real doubt that HJ is the premier American writer. Huckleberry Finn is the best American novel: Moby Dick has a whale in it; but for quantity and consistent quality there's no-one to match the Master. Identify these ten extracts. Don't draw conclusions from any proper names. “Henry James” scores nul points, by the way.

The quotations in these quizzes reflect my own tastes - Dead White Males, for the most part (Jane Austen, of course, counts as an honorary DWM). There will never be anything wilfully obscure. If you're the sort of person who sneers at the naïveté of the reviewers in the TLS and New York Review of Books, you'll recognize them at once. I welcome suggestions and insults. You'll find an e-mail tag lying around somewhere. Please put QUIZ in the subject line.

1)

    ‘Mother, dearest, it's all for the best, I can't help it, I love you just the same; let me go, let me go!’ Flossie stammered, kissing her again, struggling to free herself, and holding out her hand to Forrest. He saw now that she only wanted to get away, to leave everything behind her. Maisie was close at hand, on the threshold of the room, and as soon as Forrest looked at her he became aware that the weakness she had just shown had passed away. She had straightened herself again, and she was upright in her desolation. The expression of her face was a thing to remain with him for ever; it was impossible to imagine a more vivid presentment of blighted hope and wounded pride. Dry, desperate, rigid, she yet wavered and seemed uncertain; her pale, glittering eyes straining forward, as if they were looking for death. Forrest had a vision, even at that crowded moment, that if she could have met it there and then, bristling with steel or lurid with fire, she would have rushed on it without a tremor, like the heroine that she was. All this while the great agitation in the hall rose and fell, in waves and surges, as if Elmer Gantry and the agent were talking to the multitude, trying to calm them, succeeding for the moment, and then letting them loose again. Whirled down by one of the fitful gusts, a lady and a gentleman issued from the passage, and Forrest, glancing at them, recognised Mrs. Farrinder and her husband.

Answer

2)

    But with the opening of the door she encountered a shock, though for an instant she couldn't have named it; the next moment she saw it was given her by the face of the man advancing to let her out, an old lame porter of the station, who had been there in Mrs de Winter's time and who now recognized her. He looked up at her so hard that she took an alarm and before alighting broke out to him: “They've come back?” She had a confused, absurd sense that even he would know that in this case she mustn't be there. He hesitated, and in the few seconds her alarm had completely changed its ground: it seemed to leap, with her quick jump from the carriage, to the ground that was that of his stare at her. “Smoke?” She was on the platform with her frightened sniff: it had taken her a minute to become aware of an extraordinary smell. The air was full of it, and there were already heads at the window of the train, looking out at something she couldn't see.

Answer

3)

    Over and above the signal fact of the impression made on Lisa herself, the aspirant to his daughter's hand showed somehow the great marks and signs, stood before him with the high authenticities, he had learned to look for in pieces of the first order. William Gates knew, by this time, knew thoroughly; no man in Europe or in America, he privately believed, was less capable, in such estimates, of vulgar mistakes. He had never spoken of himself as infallible - it was not his way; but, apart from the natural affections, he had acquainted himself with no greater joy, of the intimately personal type, than the joy of his originally coming to feel, and all so unexpectedly, that he had in him the spirit of the connoisseur. He had, like many other persons, in the course of his reading, been struck with Keats's sonnet about stout Cortez in the presence of the Pacific; but few persons, probably, had so devoutly fitted the poet's grand image to a fact of experience. It consorted so with Mr Gates's consciousness of the way in which, at a given moment, he had stared at his Pacific, that a couple of perusals of the immortal lines had sufficed to stamp them in his memory. His ‘peak in Darien’ was the sudden hour that had transformed his life, the hour of his perceiving with a mute inward gasp akin to the low moan of apprehensive passion, that a world was left him to conquer and that he might conquer it if he tried. It had been a turning of the page of the book of life - as if a leaf long inert had moved at a touch and, eagerly reversed, had made such a stir of the air as sent up into his face the very breath of the Golden Isles. To rifle the Golden Isles had, on the spot, become the business of his future, and with the sweetness of it - what was most wondrous of all - still more even in the thought than in the act. The thought was that of the affinity of Genius, or at least of Taste, with something in himself - with the dormant intelligence of which he had thus almost violently become aware and that affected him as changing by a mere revolution of the screw his whole intellectual plane. He was equal, somehow, with the great seers, the invokers and encouragers of beauty - and he didn't after all perhaps dangle so far below the great producers and creators. He had been nothing of that kind before - too decidedly, too dreadfully not; but now he saw why he had been what he had, why he had failed and fallen short even in huge success; now he read into his career, in one single magnificent night, the immense meaning it had waited for.

Answer

4(Names unchanged.)

    Felix Young finished Gertrude's portrait, and he afterwards transferred to canvas the features of many members of that circle of which it may be said that he had become for the time the pivot and the centre. I am afraid it must be confessed that he was a decidedly flattering painter, and that he imparted to his models a romantic grace which seemed easily and cheaply acquired by the payment of a hundred dollars to a young man who made “sitting” so entertaining. For Felix was paid for his pictures, making, as he did, no secret of the fact that in guiding his steps to the Western world affectionate curiosity had gone hand in hand with a desire to better his condition. He took his uncle's portrait quite as if Mr. Wentworth had never averted himself from the experiment; and as he compassed his end only by the exercise of gentle violence, it is but fair to add that he allowed the old man to give him nothing but his time. He passed his arm into Mr. Wentworth's one summer morning - very few arms indeed had ever passed into Mr. Wentworth's - and led him across the garden and along the road into the studio which he had extemporized in the little house among the apple-trees. The grave gentleman felt himself more and more fascinated by his clever nephew, whose fresh, demonstrative youth seemed a compendium of experiences so strangely numerous. It appeared to him that Felix must know a great deal; he would like to learn what he thought about some of those things as regards which his own conversation had always been formal, but his knowledge vague. Felix had a confident, gaily trenchant way of judging human actions which Mr. Wentworth grew little by little to envy; it seemed like criticism made easy. Forming an opinion - say on a person's conduct - was, with Mr. Wentworth, a good deal like fumbling in a lock with a key chosen at hazard. He seemed to himself to go about the world with a big bunch of these ineffectual instruments at his girdle. His nephew, on the other hand, with a single turn of the wrist, opened any door as adroitly as a horse-thief. He felt obliged to keep up the convention that an uncle is always wiser than a nephew, even if he could keep it up no otherwise than by listening in serious silence to Felix's quick, light, constant discourse. But there came a day when he lapsed from consistency and almost asked his nephew's advice.
    “Have you ever entertained the idea of settling in the United States?” he asked one morning, while Felix brilliantly plied his brush.

Answer

5(Names unchanged.)

    People made way for her as she passed, others turned round and looked at her, and she received a great many greetings and pressings of the hand, all of which she accepted with the most delicate dignity. But though she smiled upon every one, she said nothing until she reached the last of the rooms, where she found her elder son. Then, “This is enough, sir,” she declared with measured softness to Newman, and turned to the marquis. He put out both his hands and took both hers, drawing her to a seat with an air of the tenderest veneration. It was a most harmonious family group, and Newman discreetly retired. He moved through the rooms for some time longer, circulating freely, overtopping most people by his great height, renewing acquaintance with some of the groups to which Urbain de Bellegarde had presented him, and expending generally the surplus of his equanimity. He continued to find it all extremely agreeable; but the most agreeable things have an end, and the revelry on this occasion began to deepen to a close. The music was sounding its ultimate strains and people were looking for the marquise, to make their farewells. There seemed to be some difficulty in finding her, and Newman heard a report that she had left the ball, feeling faint. “She has succumbed to the emotions of the evening,” he heard a lady say. “Poor, dear marquise; I can imagine all that they may have been for her!”

Answer

6)

    The single impression or particular vision most answering to the greatness of the subject would have been, I think, a certain hour of large circumnavigation that I found prescribed, in the fulness of the spring, as the almost immediate crown of a return from the Far West. I had arrived at one of the transpontine stations of the Pennsylvania Railroad; the question was of proceeding to Boston, for the occasion, without pushing through the terrible town - why “terrible,” to my sense, in many ways, I shall presently explain - and the easy and agreeable attainment of this great advantage was to embark on one of the mightiest (as appeared to me) of train-bearing barges and, descending the western waters, pass round the bottom of the city and remount the other current to Harlem; all without “losing touch” of the Pullman that had brought me from Washington. This absence of the need of losing touch, this breadth of effect, as to the whole process, involved in the prompt floating of the huge concatenated cars not only without arrest or confusion, but as for positive prodigal beguilement of the artless traveller, had doubtless much to say to the ensuing state of mind, the happily-excited and amused view of the great face of New York.

Answer

7)

    I can say now neither what determined nor what guided me, but I went straight along the lobby, holding my candle high, till I came within sight of the tall window that presided over the great turn of the staircase. At this point I precipitately found myself aware of three things. They were practically simultaneous, yet they had flashes of succession. My candle, under a bold flourish, went out, and I perceived, by the uncovered window, that the yielding dusk of earliest morning rendered it unnecessary. Without it, the next instant, I saw that there was someone on the stair. I speak of sequences, but I required no lapse of seconds to stiffen myself for a third encounter with Sikes. The apparition had reached the landing halfway up and was therefore on the spot nearest the window, where at sight of me, it stopped short and fixed me exactly as it had fixed me from the tower and from the garden. He knew me as well as I knew him; and so, in the cold, faint twilight, with a glimmer in the high glass and another on the polish of the oak stair below, we faced each other in our common intensity. He was absolutely, on this occasion, a living, detestable, dangerous presence. But that was not the wonder of wonders; I reserve this distinction for quite another circumstance: the circumstance that dread had unmistakably quitted me and that there was nothing in me there that didn't meet and measure him.

Answer

8(Names unchanged.)

    It was an occasion, I felt - the prospect of a large party - to look out at the station for others, possible friends and even possible enemies, who might be going. Such premonitions, it was true, bred fears when they failed to breed hopes, though it was to be added that there were sometimes, in the case, rather happy ambiguities. One was glowered at, in the compartment, by people who on the morrow, after breakfast, were to prove charming; one was spoken to first by people whose sociability was subsequently to show as bleak; and one built with confidence on others who were never to reappear at all - who were only going to Birmingham. As soon as I saw Gilbert Long, some way up the platform, however, I knew him as an element. It was not so much that the wish was father to the thought as that I remembered having already more than once met him at Newmarch. He was a friend of the house - he wouldn't be going to Birmingham. I so little expected him, at the same time, to recognise me that I stopped short of the carriage near which he stood - I looked for a seat that wouldn't make us neighbours.
    I had met him at Newmarch only - a place of a charm so special as to create rather a bond among its guests; but he had always, in the interval, so failed to know me that I could only hold him as stupid unless I held him as impertinent. He was stupid in fact, and in that character had no business at Newmarch; but he had also, no doubt, his system, which he applied without discernment. I wondered, while I saw my things put into my corner, what Newmarch could see in him - for it always had to see something before it made a sign. His good looks, which were striking, perhaps paid his way - his six feet and more of stature, his low-growing, tight-curling hair, his big, bare, blooming face. He was a fine piece of human furniture - he made a small party seem more numerous. This, at least, was the impression of him that had revived before I stepped out again to the platform, and it armed me only at first with surprise when I saw him come down to me as if for a greeting. If he had decided at last to treat me as an acquaintance made, it was none the less a case for letting him come all the way. That, accordingly, was what he did, and with so clear a conscience, I hasten to add, that at the end of a minute we were talking together quite as with the tradition of prompt intimacy. He was good-looking enough, I now again saw, but not such a model of it as I had seemed to remember; on the other hand his manners had distinctly gained in ease. He referred to our previous encounters and common contacts - he was glad I was going; he peeped into my compartment and thought it better than his own. He called a porter, the next minute, to shift his things, and while his attention was so taken I made out some of the rest of the contingent, who were finding or had already found places.

Answer

9)

    I stopped in front of the secretary, looking at it very idiotically; for what had it to say to me after all? In the first place it was locked, and in the second it almost surely contained nothing in which I was interested. Ten to one the papers had been destroyed; and even if they had not been destroyed the old woman would not have put them in such a place as that after removing them from the green trunk - would not have transferred them, if she had the idea of their safety on her brain, from the better hiding place to the worse. The secretary was more conspicuous, more accessible in a room in which she could no longer mount guard. It opened with a key, but there was a little brass handle, like a button, as well; I saw this as I played my lamp over it. I did something more than this at that moment: I caught a glimpse of the possibility that Miss Estella wished me really to understand. If she did not wish me to understand, if she wished me to keep away, why had she not locked the door of communication between the sitting room and the sala? That would have been a definite sign that I was to leave them alone. If I did not leave them alone she meant me to come for a purpose - a purpose now indicated by the quick, fantastic idea that to oblige me she had unlocked the secretary. She had not left the key, but the lid would probably move if I touched the button. This theory fascinated me, and I bent over very close to judge. I did not propose to do anything, not even - not in the least - to let down the lid; I only wanted to test my theory, to see if the cover would move. I touched the button with my hand - a mere touch would tell me; and as I did so (it is embarrassing for me to relate it), I looked over my shoulder. It was a chance, an instinct, for I had not heard anything. I almost let my luminary drop and certainly I stepped back, straightening myself up at what I saw. Miss Havisham stood there in her nightdress, in the doorway of her room, watching me; her hands were raised, she had lifted the everlasting curtain that covered half her face, and for the first, the last, the only time I beheld her extraordinary eyes. They glared at me, they made me horribly ashamed. I never shall forget her strange little bent white tottering figure, with its lifted head, her attitude, her expression; neither shall I forget the tone in which as I turned, looking at her, she hissed out passionately, furiously:
    “Ah, you publishing scoundrel!”
    I know not what I stammered, to excuse myself, to explain; but I went toward her, to tell her I meant no harm. She waved me off with her old hands, retreating before me in horror; and the next thing I knew she had fallen back with a quick spasm, as if death had descended on her, into Miss Estella's arms.

Answer

10(Names unchanged.)

    It brought her back to her unanswered question. “To what do you go home?”
    “I don't know. There will always be something.”
    “To a great difference,” she said as she kept his hand.
    “A great difference - no doubt. Yet I shall see what I can make of it.”
    “Shall you make anything so good - ?” But, as if remembering what Mrs. Newsome had done, it was as far as she went.
    He had sufficiently understood. “So good as this place at this moment? So good as what you make of everything you touch?” He took a moment to say, for, really and truly, what stood about him there in her offer - which was as the offer of exquisite service, of lightened care, for the rest of his days - might well have tempted. It built him softly round, it roofed him warmly over, it rested, all so firm, on selection. And what ruled selection was beauty and knowledge. It was awkward, it was almost stupid, not to seem to prize such things; yet, none the less, so far as they made his opportunity they made it only for a moment. She'd moreover understand - she always understood.
    That indeed might be, but meanwhile she was going on. “There's nothing, you know, I wouldn't do for you.”
    “Oh yes - I know.”
    “There's nothing,” she repeated, “in all the world.”
    “I know. I know. But all the same I must go.” He had got it at last.
    “To be right.”
    “To be right?”
She had echoed it in vague deprecation, but he felt it already clear for her. “That, you see, is my only logic. Not, out of the whole affair, to have got anything for myself.”
    She thought. “But with your wonderful impressions you'll have got a great deal.”
    “A great deal” - he agreed. “But nothing like you. It's you who would make me wrong!”
    Honest and fine, she couldn't greatly pretend she didn't see it. Still she could pretend just a little. “But why should you be so dreadfully right?”
    “That's the way that - if I must go - you yourself would be the first to want me. And I can't do anything else.”
    So then she had to take it, though still with her defeated protest. “It isn't so much your being ‘right’ - it's your horrible sharp eye for what makes you so.”
    “Oh but you're just as bad yourself. You can't resist me when I point that out.”
    She sighed it at last all comically, all tragically, away. “I can't indeed resist you.”
    “Then there we are!” said Strether.

Answer

1)
The Bostonians. Olive Chancellor and Basil Ransom have fought a long duel for the possession of Verena Tarrant: this is the moment when Olive feels the full horror of defeat. The Bostonians is one the most accessible of the novels: a romantic tale without a trace of romance in it.


Back to Question 1

2)
The Spoils of Poynton. The smoke that Fleda Vetch sniffs is, of course, from Poynton itself: the great house has, as it were, settled the question of who is to enjoy its treasures .... I have to say that although this is one of my favourite HJ novels, it always gives me pleasure when Poynton goes up in flames. The place is a nauseating mausoleum of knick-knacks. Mrs Gereth gets exactly what she deserves.


Back to Question 2

3)
The Golden Bowl. Adam Verver, the main figure in this extract, is, so far as I know, the first billionaire in American Literature. What would a thousand million 1902 dollars be worth today? He could certainly have looked Big Bill in the eye without wincing.


Back to Question 3

4)
The Europeans. This delicious early work is perhaps the freshest, most purely delightful thing HJ ever wrote.


Back to Question 4

5)
The American. The absurdly melodramatic plot of this early novel allows HJ to bring off some wonderful effects: here, for instance, the luckless Newman gives irremediable offence to his prospective mother-in-law without suspecting for a moment that he is doing so.


Back to Question 5

6)
The American Scene. Give yourself as many bonus points as you like if you identified this passage from the fascinating travel book that HJ wrote on his return to the United States after twenty years in Europe.


Back to Question 6

7)
The Turn of the Screw. You deserve a nice easy one, for getting this far. Can anyone explain to me why this is HJ's most famous book? It's always seemed pretty ordinary to me - ordinary HJ, that is.


Back to Question 7

8)
The Sacred Fount. [Opening paragraphs.] After an easy one, a not-so-easy one .... This novel arouses critical hostility even to this day. The strangeness of the plot is more than matched by the obscurity of the treatment, but the true James-lover is bound to be mesmerized by it. Every great writer parodies himself from time to time, and that's certainly the case here. I can tell you that it's the only book I've ever read which seemed more incomprehensible but more enjoyable the second time I read it than the first.


Back to Question 8

9)
The Aspern Papers. I hope this easy one makes up for the previous one. I chose the most dramatic moment from one of HJ's best-known works ....


Back to Question 9

10)
The Ambassadors. I end with the last words of my favourite of all the novels, the one which introduced me to the demanding splendour of HJ's final period. As your reward for getting to the end of this Quiz, you may add a bonus of ten million to the pathetic collection of points you scored off your own bat. Please become a Jamesian, if you're not one already! He is full of richness.


Back to Question 10

Don't bottle up your contempt and fury. Mail to davidjw@mindspring.com

Return to Start

Last Updated: 8 October 2004