Reading Henry James

Published: 1866
Length: 14,300 words, 36 pages
Genre: artists, love and money
Library of America volume: Complete Stories, 1864-1874
Etext: Project Gutenberg edition of the February, 1866, Atlantic Monthly

This is the first of Henry’s stories featuring artists, a type of character he will explore often in his fiction, though in this story, the art itself is secondary. An unnamed narrator is telling the story of love and marriage between a rich young painter, Locksley (his first name is not given), and Esther Blunt. The story begins as follows:

Do you remember how, a dozen years ago, a number of our friends were startled by the report of the rupture of young Locksley’s engagement with Miss Leary?

Henry begins by telling us of an event that is not part of this story, but may have led to it. Locksley was jilted, apparently, by this Josephine Leary, causing him to go off into nature to find himself, and to see things differently. In order to tell this story, Henry creates a narrator who inherited a number of personal effects of the painter, including his diary.

He left a mass of papers on all subjects, few of which are adapted to be generally interesting. A portion of them, however, I highly prize, — that which constitutes his private diary. It extends from his twenty-fifth to his thirtieth year, at which period it breaks off suddenly.

The narrator’s presentation is two long chapters, after which the remainder of the story is excerpts from the diary itself. So following a brief introduction by a narrator, we then have a story written in the first person by one of the protagonists.

Locksley’s diary begins with an entry in a town called Cragthorpe. He has set out to see the scenery of an area on the sea, and is enchanted by it. Staying at a tavern, he decides he wants to find a house in which to board, but the innkeeper was of no help. Setting out in a small rented boat, Locksley finds a quite little cove, “So bright, so still, so warm, so remote from the town, which lay off in the distance, white and semicircular!” He anchors his boat and wanders for a while. After the tide has gone out, he cannot use his boat to return to his lodgings, and he hails a man in a sailboat who picks him up. The sailor, Richard Blunt, “though most people [...] call me Captain, for short,” inquires as to Locksley’s “titles and pretensions.” Locksley replies, and tells the reader what his is about:

I told him no lies, but I told him only half the truth; and if he chooses to indulge mentally in any romantic understatements, why, he is welcome, and bless his simple heart! The fact is, that I have broken with the past. I have decided, coolly and calmly, as I believe, that it is necessary to my success, or, at any rate, to my happiness, to abjure for a while my conventional self, and to assume a simple, natural character. How can a man be simple and natural who is known to have a hundred thousand a year? That is the supreme curse. It’s bad enough to have it: to be known to have it, to be known only because you have it, is most damnable. I suppose I am too proud to be successfully rich. Let me see how poverty will serve my turn. I have taken a fresh start. I have determined to stand upon my own merits. If they fail me, I shall fall back upon my millions; but with God’s help I will test them, and see what kind of stuff I am made of. To be young, to be strong, to be poor,—such, in this blessed nineteenth century, is the great basis of solid success. I have resolved to take at least one brief draught from the pure founts of inspiration of my time.

Blunt offers to lodge Locksley in his home on the seaside, where he lives with his daughter, who “teaches music in a ladies’ school.” Locksley imagines her as a spinster:

This same daughter strikes me as rather a dark spot in the picture. Teacher in a young ladies’ school,—probably the establishment of which Mrs. M—— spoke to me. I suppose she’s over thirty. I think I know the species.

The next day, when he takes up his lodgings, Locksley meets Miss Blunt. “As for Miss Blunt’s being thirty, she is about twenty-four.” Locksley’s first impressions are quite positive: “…she is decidedly beautiful, – and in the grand manner: tall, and rather plump,” intelligent, amiable, proud, “in short, a woman of character.” Now the cast for this story is complete. After all, one needs but two characters for a love story.

First impressions, however, can be wrong. And Locksley, after a week in the Blunt home, discovers that he was mistaken about Miss Blunt:

She is not twenty-four, but twenty-seven years old. She has taught music ever since she was twenty, in a large boarding-school just out of the town, where she originally got her education. Her salary in this establishment, which is, I believe, a tolerably flourishing one, and the proceeds of a few additional lessons, constitute the chief revenues of the household. But Blunt fortunately owns his house, and his needs and habits are of the simplest kind. What does he or his daughter know of the great worldly theory of necessities, the great worldly scale of pleasures? Miss Blunt’s only luxuries are a subscription to the circulating library, and an occasional walk on the beach, which, like one of Miss Bronté’s heroines, she paces in company with an old Newfoundland dog. I am afraid she is sadly ignorant. She reads nothing but novels.

Locksley settles into his routine of painting and sketching, of dining and chatting with the Blunts. As time passes, they become familiar, even friendly. Locksley enjoys his talks with the Captain:

Like many gentlemen of his calling, the Captain is harassed by an irresistible desire to romance, even on the least promising themes; and it is vastly amusing to observe how he will auscultate, as it were, his auditor’s inmost mood, to ascertain whether it is prepared for the absorption of his insidious fibs. Sometimes they perish utterly in the transition: they are very pretty, I conceive, in the deep and briny well of the Captain’s fancy; but they won’t bear being transplanted into the shallow inland lakes of my land-bred apprehension. At other times, the auditor being in a dreamy, sentimental, and altogether unprincipled mood, he will drink the old man’s salt-water by the bucketful and feel none the worse for it.

Yet he ponders his own situation, and the stories he is telling:

Which is the worse, wilfully to tell, or wilfully to believe, a pretty little falsehood which will not hurt any one? I suppose you can’t believe wilfully; you only pretend to believe. My part of the game, therefore, is certainly as bad as the Captain’s.

One Sunday, Miss Blunt, having sprained her ankle, stays at home while here father goes to church. Locksley takes advantage of this to have a long chat with her, during which Miss Blunt gives quite a sermon about people and their attitudes toward others. She says that it is “a constant vexation to me to be poor,” and, in criticizing Locksley, tells him he should marry.

“Je ne demande pas mieux. Will you have me? I can’t afford it.”

“Marry a rich woman.”

I shook my head.

“Why not?” asked Miss Blunt. “Because people would accuse you of being mercenary? What of that? I mean to marry the first rich man who offers. Do you know that I am tired of living alone in this weary old way, teaching little girls their gamut, and turning and patching my dresses? I mean to marry the first man who offers.”

“Even if he is poor?”

“Even if he is poor, ugly, and stupid.”

“I am your man, then. Would you take me, if I were to offer?”

“Try and see.”

“Must I get upon my knees?”

“No, you need not even do that. Am I not on mine? It would be too fine an irony. Remain as you are, lounging back in your chair, with your thumbs in your waistcoat.”

Ah, so that’s the game: one is willing to marry for money and the other, who secretly has the money, is willing to marry someone without. There is, however, a third party, a Mr. Johnson, a fairly well-to-do lawyer who campaigns for Miss Blunt’s affections. But Captain Blunt doesn’t like this man; “somehow he isn’t for a man what my Esther is for a woman.” In fact, the Captain has set his sights on Locksley, in spite of his apparent poverty, him “being what we used to call a gentleman.”

Locksley is then ill for a fortnight, during which he is cared for by the Blunts. He remembers nothing of the period, and after he is better, the Captain tells him that Johnson proposed to Miss Blunt and that she turned him down.

Some days later, Locksley and the Blunts go out for a picnic by the sea. As the Captain wanted to sail for a while, Locksley and Miss Blunt are able to spend some time alone together. While nothing happens of import during this time, it seems that this is what convinces Locksley that he is in love with her. A few weeks later, the Captain being absent, Locksley tells Miss Blunt that he loves her, and asks her to marry him; she accepts. They are to be married just a few weeks later. Locksley has still not told her his secret, that he is rich; he decides he’ll wait for their honeymoon to break the news to her.

On the honeymoon, he gives her the diary to read, assuming she’ll see the part about his “hundred thousand a year.” She says, “I know it.” He asks what she knows:

“That you have a hundred thousand a year. But believe me, Mr. Locksley, I am none the worse for the knowledge. You intimated in one place in your book that I am born for wealth and splendor. I believe I am. You pretend to hate your money; but you would not have had me without it. If you really love me, — and I think you do, — you will not let this make any difference. I am not such a fool as to attempt to talk here about my sensations. But I remember what I said.”

“What do you expect me to do?” I asked. “Shall I call you some horrible name and cast you off?”

“I expect you to show the same courage that I am showing. I never said I loved you. I never deceived you in that. I said I would be your wife. So I will, faithfully. I haven’t so much heart as you think; and yet, too, I have a great deal more. I am incapable of more than one deception. — Mercy! didn’t you see it? didn’t you know it? see that I saw it? know that I knew it? It was diamond cut diamond. You deceived me; I deceived you. Now that your deception ceases, mine ceases. Now we are free, with our hundred thousand a year! Excuse me, but it sometimes comes across me! Now we can be good and honest and true. It was all a make-believe virtue before.”

She read the diary while Locksley was ill. In the end, they were both playing parts, and they each got what they wanted; or did they?

Esther Blunt is, perhaps, an early incarnation of Kate Croy, who, in Wings of the Dove, is an evil woman who machinates to obtain the fortune of a dying woman. Esther Blunt is, as her name suggests, a blunt woman. Opinionated and direct, she knows what she wants and gets it. What’s more, she keeps it for herself. We don’t know what becomes of Locksley after his marriage, but it is said earlier, by the narrator, that he died around age thirty.

Henry paints a delicate landscape of lies and deceit in this story, which, unlike his first two stories, begins using a fair amount of pungent dialog, something which Henry would refine in the coming years. He also paints a designing woman who succeeds in seducing a man in need of love. It is interesting that, around this time, he, and several others, became infatuated with Henry’s cousin Minnie Temple, who would later be the model for both Isabel Archer, in A Portrait of a Lady, and Milly Theale, in The Wings of the Dove. But in this story, the female character is the one who rules the game, not one who suffers or is dying. As Sheldon Novick notes, “She [Esther Blunt], after all, was the artist and actor; he only the audience, the reader, the victim.”