31 results in The Sacred Fount
III
- Henry James
- Edited by T. J. Lustig, Keele University
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- The Sacred Fount
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- 03 October 2019, pp 20-28
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Summary
I DID on the morrow several things, but the first was not to redeem that vow. It was to address myself straight to Grace Brissenden. “I must let you know that, in spite of your guarantee, it doesn't go at all—oh, but not at all! I’ve tried Lady John, as you enjoined, and I can't but feel that she leaves us very much where we were.” Then, as my listener seemed not quite to remember where we had been, I came to her help. “You said yesterday at Paddington, to explain the change in Gilbert Long—don't you recall?—that that woman, plying him with her genius and giving him of her best, is clever enough for two. She's not clever enough then, it strikes me, for three—or at any rate for four. I confess I don't see it. Does she really dazzle you?”
My friend had caught up. “Oh, you’ve a standard of wit!”
“No, I’ve only a sense of reality—a sense not at all satisfied by the theory of such an influence as Lady John’s.”
She wondered. “Such a one as whose else then?”
“Ah, that's for us still to find out! Of course this can't be easy; for as the appearance is inevitably a kind of betrayal, it's in somebody's interest to conceal it.”
This Mrs. Brissenden grasped. “Oh, you mean in the lady’s?”
“In the lady's most. But also in Long's own, if he's really tender of the lady—which is precisely what our theory posits.”
My companion, once roused, was all there. “I see. You call the appearance a kind of betrayal because it points to the relation behind it.”
“Precisely.”
“And the relation—to do that sort of thing—must be necessarily so awfully intimate.”
“Intimissima.”
“And kept therefore in the background exactly in that proportion.”
“Exactly in that proportion.”
“Very well then,” said Mrs. Brissenden, “doesn't Mr. Long's tenderness of Lady John quite fall in with what I mentioned to you?”
I remembered what she had mentioned to me. “His making her come down with poor Briss?”
“Nothing less.”
“And is that all you go upon?”
“That and lots more.”
Introduction
- Henry James
- Edited by T. J. Lustig, Keele University
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- The Sacred Fount
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- 03 October 2019, pp xxvi-lxxxviii
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on 17 February 1894, the 50-year-old Henry James attended a function at 65 Rutland Gate, Knightsbridge, less than a mile away from his flat at 34 De Vere Gardens in Kensington. This London dinner, which took place in what James later described as an ‘immaculate & lovable house’, was held by the literary hostess Blanche Alethea Crackanthorpe (1846–1928) and her husband, the barrister Montague Hughes Crackanthorpe (1832–1913). At some point during the evening, James encountered Stopford Brooke (1832–1916), the Irish-born man of letters and former cleric. The novelist mentioned their conversation in his notebook: ‘[l]ast night, at Mrs. Crackanthorpe’s, Stopford Brooke suggested to me 2 little ideas.’ The first of these ideas – that of a man ‘who has become afraid of himself when alone’ – never came to anything, though James reverted to it in his notebook on 16 May 1899 and 11 September 1900. The second idea, however, prompted immediate elaboration:
The notion of the young man who marries an older woman and who has the effect on her of making her younger and still younger, while he himself becomes her age. When he reaches the age that she was (on their marriage,) she has gone back to the age that he was.—Mightn't this be altered (perhaps,) to the idea of cleverness and stupidity? A clever woman marries a deadly dull man, and loses & loses her wit as he shows more & more. Or the idea of a liaison, suspected, but of which there is no proof but this transfusion of some idiosyncrasy of one party to the being of the other—this exchange & conversion? The fact, the secret, of the liaison might be revealed in that way. The two things—the two elements—beauty & “mind,” might be correspondingly, concomitantly exhibited as in the history of two related couples—with the opposition, in each case, that wd. help the thing to be dramatic[.] (CN 88)
This is the first glimpse of a novel which, for one contemporary reviewer, was ‘wellnigh unbelievable in its irrelevance’ and, for another, ‘an example of hypochondriachal subtlety run mad’ – a novel which, for a subsequent generation of critics, became an instance of ‘unassailable mastery’ and even ‘the first authentic masterpiece of the “modern movement”’.
Notes
- Henry James
- Edited by T. J. Lustig, Keele University
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- 03 October 2019, pp 184-214
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List of Abbreviations
- Henry James
- Edited by T. J. Lustig, Keele University
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- The Sacred Fount
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- 03 October 2019, pp xi-xii
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General Editors’ Preface
- Henry James
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The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James (hereafter CFHJ) has been undertaken in the belief that there is a need for a full scholarly, informative, historical edition of his work, presenting the texts in carefully checked, accurate form, with detailed annotation and extensive introductions. James's texts exist in a number of forms, including manuscripts (though most are lost), serial texts and volumes of various sorts, often incorporating significant amounts of revision, most conspicuously the so-called New York Edition (hereafter NYE) published by Charles Scribner's Sons in New York and Macmillan & Co. in London (1907–9). Besides these there are also pirated editions, unfinished works published posthumously and other questionable forms. The CFHJ takes account of these complexities, within the framework of a textual policy which aims to be clear, orderly and consistent.
This edition aims to represent James's fictional career as it evolves, with a fresh and expanded sense of its changing contexts and an informed sense of his developing style, technique and concerns. Consequently it does not attempt to base its choices on the principle of the ‘last lifetime edition’, which in the case of Henry James is monumentally embodied in the twenty- four volumes of the NYE, the author's selection of nine longer novels (six of them in two volumes) and fifty-eight shorter novels and tales, and including eighteen specially composed Prefaces. The CFHJ, as a general rule, adopts rather the text of the first published book edition of a work, unless the intrinsic particularities and the publishing history of that work require an alternative choice, on the ground that emphasis on the first context in which it was written and read will permit an unprecedented fullness of attention to the transformations in James's writing over five decades, as well as the rich literary and social contexts of their original publication.
There are inevitably cases where determining ‘the first published book edition’ requires some care. If, for instance, James expresses a preference for the text of one particular early book edition over another, or if the first edition to be published is demonstrably inferior to a later impression or edition, or if authorial supervision of a particular early edition or impression can be established, then a case can be made for choosing a text other than the first published book edition.
II
- Henry James
- Edited by T. J. Lustig, Keele University
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- The Sacred Fount
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- 11 April 2021
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- 03 October 2019, pp 9-19
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THE day was as fine and the scene as fair at Newmarch as the party was numerous and various; and my memory associates with the rest of the long afternoon many renewals of acquaintance and much sitting and strolling, for snatches of talk, in the long shade of great trees and through the straight walks of old gardens. A couple of hours thus passed, and fresh accessions enriched the picture. There were persons I was curious of—of Lady John, for instance, of whom I promised myself an early view; but we were apt to be carried away in currents that reflected new images and sufficiently beguiled impatience. I recover, all the same, a full sequence of impressions, each of which, I afterwards saw, had been appointed to help all the others. If my anecdote, as I have mentioned, had begun, at Paddington, at a particular moment, it gathered substance step by step and without missing a link. The links, in fact, should I count them all, would make too long a chain. They formed, nevertheless, the happiest little chapter of accidents, though a series of which I can scarce give more than the general effect.
One of the first accidents was that, before dinner, I met Ford Obert wandering a little apart with Mrs. Server, and that, as they were known to me as agreeable acquaintances, I should have faced them with confidence had I not immediately drawn from their sequestered air the fear of interrupting them. Mrs. Server was always lovely and Obert always expert; the latter straightway pulled up, however, making me as welcome as if their converse had dropped. She was extraordinarily pretty, markedly responsive, conspicuously charming, but he gave me a look that really seemed to say: “Don’t—there's a good fellow—leave me any longer alone with her!” I had met her at Newmarch before—it was indeed only so that I had met her— and I knew how she was valued there. I also knew that an aversion to pretty women—numbers of whom he had preserved for a grateful posterity— was his sign neither as man nor as artist; the effect of all of which was to make me ask myself what she could have been doing to him.
I
- Henry James
- Edited by T. J. Lustig, Keele University
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- The Sacred Fount
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- 03 October 2019, pp 3-8
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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 though 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.
Textual Introduction
- Henry James
- Edited by T. J. Lustig, Keele University
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- The Sacred Fount
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- 03 October 2019, pp xciv-xcv
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James's preliminary ideas for The Sacred Fount were recorded in the third volume of his notebooks on 17/18 February 1894, and in the sixth volume of his notebooks on 15 February 1899 and 16 May 1899 (see CN 88, 176, 184). The three typescript copies of The Sacred Fount, two of which were sent by James to Pinker on 25 and 26 July 1901, do not seem to have been preserved. There was no periodical version of the novel. The first UK edition of The Sacred Fount (here SFM) was published by Methuen and Company on or about 15 February 1901. James chose not to republish The Sacred Fount in The Novels and Tales of Henry James (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907–9) and did not directly discuss the novel in his Prefaces to that edition. The only other edition of the novel to be issued during James's lifetime was the first US edition (here SFS) published by Charles Scribner's Sons on or about 8 February 1901.
Compared to novels such as The Portrait of a Lady or The Ambassadors, where a first periodical version as well as a New York Edition text exists, the situation in the case of The Sacred Fount is straightforward. The copy text adopted in this edition is SFM rather than SFS. It is true that SFS was published a few days before SFM but this does not accord it priority in any meaningful sense: SFM is not a ‘descendant’ of SFS. On 15 October 1900, James Brand Pinker did suggest to Scribner's that Methuen ‘may like to take plates of your edition’. Yet this did not happen: the Methuen text consisted of 316 pages and the Scribner text of 319 pages. In this as in other cases, therefore, CFHJ policy is to adopt the first British edition as the copy text. Moreover, a comparison of SFM and SFS reveals that the former text is in general more reliable than the latter (see the Textual Variants).
In at least one case, an unusual binding error was made during the production of SFM. The present editor possesses a copy (once the property of Mudie's Select Library and Benn's Circulating Library) in which pages 257–72 are missing, having been replaced with a duplicate of pages 65–80.
Contents
- Henry James
- Edited by T. J. Lustig, Keele University
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- The Sacred Fount
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- 11 April 2021
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- 03 October 2019, pp vii-vii
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IV
- Henry James
- Edited by T. J. Lustig, Keele University
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- 03 October 2019, pp 29-40
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I HAVE said that I did many things on this wonderful day, but perhaps the simplest way to describe the rest of them is as a sustained attempt to avert that disaster. I succeeded, by vigilance, in preventing my late companion from carrying Mrs. Server off: I had no wish to see her studied—by anyone but myself at least—in the light of my theory. I felt by this time that I understood my theory, but I was not obliged to believe that Mrs. Brissenden did. I am afraid I must frankly confess that I called deception to my aid; to separate the two ladies I gave the more initiated a look in which I invited her to read volumes. This look, or rather the look she returned, comes back to me as the first note of a tolerably tight, tense little drama, a little drama of which our remaining hours at Newmarch were the all too ample stage. She understood me, as I meant, that she had better leave me to get at the truth— owing me some obligation, as she did, for so much of it as I had already communicated. This step was of course a tacit pledge that she should have the rest from me later on. I knew of some pictures in one of the rooms that had not been lighted the previous evening, and I made these my pretext for the effect I desired. I asked Mrs. Server if she wouldn't come and see them with me, admitting at the same time that I could scarce expect her to forgive me for my share in the invasion of the quiet corner in which poor Briss had evidently managed so to interest her.
“Oh, yes,” she replied as we went our way, “he had managed to interest me. Isn't he curiously interesting? But I hadn’t,” she continued on my being too struck with her question for an immediate answer—“I hadn't managed to interest him. Of course you know why!” she laughed. “No one interests him but Lady John, and he could think of nothing, while I kept him there, but of how soon he could return to her.”
General Chronology of James’s Life and Writings
- Henry James
- Edited by T. J. Lustig, Keele University
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- The Sacred Fount
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- 11 April 2021
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- 03 October 2019, pp xx-xxv
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