Now if you accept this state of things and are content with it as the result of your co-education, I am with you; I accept it as one of the mystical first facts of Nature. I accept it somewhat in the spirit of Carlyle when somebody told him that Harriet Martineau had “accepted the Universe”, and he said, “By God, she’d better.” But if you have any idea that co-education would do more than parade the sexes in front of each other twice a day, if you think it would destroy their deep ignorance of each other or start them on a basis of rational understanding, then I say first that this will never happen, and second that I (for one) should be horribly annoyed if it did.

  I can reach my meaning best by another route. Very few people ever state properly the strong argument in favour of marrying for love or against marrying for money. The argument is not that all lovers are heroes and heroines, nor is it that all dukes are profligates or all millionaires cads. The argument is this, that the differences between a man and a woman are at the best so obstinate and exasperating that they practically cannot be got over unless there is an atmosphere of exaggerated tenderness and mutual interest. To put the matter in one metaphor, the sexes are two stubborn pieces of iron; if they are to be welded together, it must be while they are red-hot. Every woman has to find out that her husband is a selfish beast, because every man is a selfish beast by the standard of a woman. But let her find out the beast while they are both still in the story of “Beauty and the Beast”. Every man has to find out that his wife is cross — that is to say, sensitive to the point of madness: for every woman is mad by the masculine standard. But let him find out that she is mad while her madness is more worth considering than anyone else’s sanity.

  This is not a digression. The whole value of the normal relations of man and woman lies in the fact that they first begin really to criticise each other when they first begin really to admire each other. And a good thing, too. I say, with a full sense of the responsibility of the statement, that it is better that the sexes should misunderstand each other until they marry. It is better that they should not have the knowledge until they have the reverence and the charity. We want no premature and puppyish “knowing all about girls”. We do not want the highest mysteries of a Divine distinction to be understood before they are desired, and handled before they are understood. That which Mr. Shaw calls the Life Force, but for which Christianity has more philosophical terms, has created this early division of tastes and habits for that romantic purpose, which is also the most practical of all purposes. Those whom God has sundered, shall no man join.

  It is, therefore, a question of what are really the co-educators’ aims. If they have small aims, some convenience in organisation, some slight improvement in manners, they know more about such things than I. But if they have large aims, I am against them.

  HENRY JAMES

  An artist who is at once individual and complete attracts a type of praise which is a sort of disparagement; and even those who overrate him underrate him. For the tendency is always to insist on his art; and by art is often meant merely arrangement. Because a very few colours can be harmoniously arranged in a picture, it is implied that he has not many colours on his palette. And as a study by Henry James was often in its tones something of a nocturne in grey and silver, even his eulogists managed to imply something slight or even thin about his work. Before attempting to touch upon what was really peculiar in the tone of it, it is necessary to correct, and even to contradict, this tenuous impression by the reminder of what he had in common with other great writers. For Henry James must be considered as a great man of letters; and the greatness itself is something which existed in geniuses utterly unlike him. It might seem startling and even comic to compare him to Dickens or even to Shakespeare; but what makes him great is what makes them great, and what alone can make a literary man in the ultimate sense great. It is ideas; the power of generating and making vivid an incessant output of ideas. It is untrue to say that what matters is quality and not quantity. Most men have made one good joke in their lives; but to make jokes as Dickens made them is to be a great man. Many forgotten poets have let fall a lyric with one really perfect image; but when we open any play of Shakespeare, good or bad, at any page, important or unimportant, with the practical certainty of finding some imagery that at least arrests the eye and probably enriches the memory, we are putting our trust in a great man. We are taking at random from a whole store of what are truly to be called great inventions when we think of Mrs. Todgers’ wooden leg, or Mr. Fledgby’s nose, or Mr. Pecksniff’s pinions, or Mr. Swiveller’s double-bedded room.

  And wide as the distance may seem, it is true, in exactly the same sense, that we are taking at random from a treasury of unique inventions when we think of any two or three of the numberless new ideas of Henry James; of the two people who grew afraid of the mystical coincidence of never meeting; of the man who ceased to exist when he was left alone; of the mysterious unity that ran through all a writer’s books like “the figure in the carpet”; of the pearls that were counted false for purposes of respectability and real for purposes of sale; of the sudden supernatural calm created like a garden in the skies by the breakdown of the brain at its busiest; of the wife who would not justify herself to her husband because his whole life was in his chivalry; and so on through a thousand more. Such an idea, though it may be as delicate as an atmosphere, is nevertheless as precise as a pun. It cannot be a coincidence; it is always a creation. He has been attacked for making a great deal of small things; but most of those who attacked him were making a great deal of large nothings. The point that is important about him is not whether the things with which he dealt were as small as some think them, or as large as he could make them; whether it was a fine shade in vulgarity or an occult tenacity of vice; whether it was the restless ten minutes of a visitor coming too early, or the restless ten years of a lover moved too late. The point is that the things were things; that we should have lost them if he had not given them; that no mere perfections of prose would have been a substitute for them; in short, that he never wrote about nothing. Each small notion had the serious thing called value — like a jewel, or, like what is both smaller and more valuable than a jewel, a seed.

  His greatness is the greatest thing about him, therefore, and it is of a kind with that of other creative men. But when this large and rather neglected aspect has first been allowed for, it is possible to consider him as a peculiar and fastidious writer. Certainly his work is of a sort to which it is difficult to do justice amid the pulsation of the direct public energies with which most of us who are at all public-spirited feel ourselves concerned today. We should need to be at leisure in those large and vague spaces of gardens and great neglected houses which are the background of so many of his spiritual dramas, to grow fond of the fine shades of a whole science of shadows and slowly appreciate the multitudinous colours of what seems at first monochrome. Some of his finest stories were ghost stories; and one must be alone to meet a ghost. And yet even the phrase I use indicates its own limitations, for no one seized more swiftly than Henry James the greatness of this awful time, in which we have to think even of ghosts in crowds. He had always been in his innermost being a mystic, and the dead were near to him; and he rose more magnificently, perhaps, than any other to that hour in which the dead were so living and so near to us all. A unique purity and disinterestedness had always attended his pen, and he had the reward of it in realising moral proportion. He had never failed to see small things; nor did he fall into the more modern and enlightened error of failing to see big ones. He had no difficulty in adjusting his subtlety to the stupendous simplicity of a war for justice; his brain, like a Nasmyth hammer, had not unlearnt in a long course of tapping how to fall and shatter.

  That he should feel the prodigy of the Prussian insult to mankind will only surprise those who have read him superficially; or perhaps only read his more superficial sketches. He by no means exhibits manners as more than morals; though he may exhibit manners as more than many would think them. In a story like The Turn of the Screw he has rather the character of a divine detective. The woman who probes the stagnant secret of the depraved boy and girl is resolved to forgive and, therefore, unable to forget. She is a kind of inquisitor; and her morality is altogether of the old thorough and theological sort. It is a summons to repent and die, rather than a vague capacity to die and repent. And when at the last the deliverance of the boy’s soul seems to be delayed by the appearance at the window of his evil genius, “the white face of the damned”, it is perhaps the one place in all modern literature where that monosyllable is not a joke. And it is strongly significant that men of any belief and no belief have universally fallen back on such phraseology to find terms for the sneering savagery of the present enemy of Christendom. Honest grey-haired atheists are found judging the Prussian upon the paradoxical principle that there may be heaven, there must be hell. And the nations can find nothing but the language of demonology to describe a certain poison of pride, which is none the less a tyranny because it is also a temptation.

  Henry James always stood, if ever a man did, for civilisation; for that ordered life in which it is possible to tolerate and to understand. His whole world is made out of sympathy; out of a whole network of sympathies. It is a world of wireless telegraphy for the soul; of a psychological brotherhood of men of which the communications could not be cut. Sometimes this sympathy is almost more terrible than antipathy; and his very delicacies produce a sort of promiscuity of minds. Silence becomes a rending revelation. Short spaces or short speeches become overweighted with the awful worth of human life. Minute unto minute uttereth speech, and instant unto instant showeth knowledge. It is only when we have realised how perfect is the poise of such great human art that we can also realise its peril, and know that any outer thing which cannot make it must of necessity destroy it.

  It has been customary to talk of Henry James’s American origin as something almost antagonistic to the grace and rarity of his art. I am far from sure that this is not to miss a fine and serious strain in it. There is an element of idealism in the American tradition, which is very well typified in the sincere and sometimes exaggerated external deference to women. This particular sort of purity in the perceptions, very marked in him, he had originally owed, I think, to something other than the more mellow and matured European life in which he came afterwards to take his deepest pleasures. The older civilisation gave him the wonderful things he wanted; but the wonder was his own. His attitude in private life remains for anyone who has seen it as something infinitely higher than politeness; an attitude towards things, and something that can only be called an impersonal reverence. Despite all their modernism, some of his love stories have a dignity that might be dressed in the clothes of an antique time. They should have moved upon high-terraced lawns among great and gentle ladies, and their squires who were something more than gentlemen. As Mr. Yeats says somewhere:

  There have been lovers whose thought love should be So much compounded of high courtesy, That they would sigh and quote with learned looks Precedents out of beautiful old books.

  The books of Henry James will always be beautiful; and I believe they are young enough to be old.

  THE STRANGE TALK OF TWO VICTORIANS

  The Faith always returns in a counter-attack; and it is generally not only a successful attack but almost always a surprise attack.

  Here more than anywhere it is the unexpected that happens; the religion supposed to be rotting away slowly in unlettered peasantries was found present in pressing numbers in the new industrial towns; the creed compassionately tolerated in a few old sentimentalists is today making converts among the young almost entirely of the hard-headed logicians.

  But this tendency to a reconciliation with intellectuals, once regarded as a reconciliation with irreconcilables, has produced, among other queer points in the position, this fact; that the newest group consists rather too much of those who are in a position to teach, while there is not yet a sufficient crowd, or larger public, of those who are in a position to learn. There is, for instance, a huge mass of material in Catholic history for very good novels or plays; and there are a considerable proportion of Catholics capable of writing them; but there is not yet a sufficient number of ordinary readers capable of reading them, in the sense of understanding them. This is especially true of the high historic quality of irony.

  An Englishman realising the real religious history of his country constantly comes upon small social and political episodes, of which the irony is as grand as Greek tragedy; and then he remembers most of the other Englishmen, and has to own that it would be Greek to them. The very ironic point which gives him grim gratification would be quite pointless, because the public at large would probably take the suggestion quite seriously and never even see the joke.

  So, till very lately at least, the public hardly saw the joke of talking about the Virgin Queen or the Glorious Revolution. You cannot have drama without a public; you cannot have irony without an instructed public.

  I was wondering the other day whether anybody had thought of a play, or rather a scene, which could be a very fine scene written by anybody well read in eighteenth-century England. It might be called “Five Irishmen.”

  Seated round a table in a coffeehouse (but conspicuously not drinking coffee) would be Goldsmith, an old Tory almost a Jacobite; Sheridan, a younger Whig almost a Jacobin; Burke, a Whig more alarmist than any Tory about disturbing the balance of the British Constitution (which he had largely made up out of his own highly imaginative head); Grattan, a Whig orator also, but native to the Irish Parliament; and (if he could be dragged in somehow) somebody more dangerous, like Lord Edward of Tone, foreshadowing the Irish Rebellion. All these men were Protestants. All, either in their own persons or through their families, could be traced back in some way to the time when it seemed that the heart of Ireland was broken; and for a man who did not abandon the Faith there was no normal hope on earth.

  I think somebody could make a fine study, in several stages, of how layer after layer began to crack and that awful forbidden ancestral Thing rose slowly to overshadow them like a ghost. They would begin decorously, of course, probably discussing Catholic Emancipation with cold pagan liberality; and the wine and the words and the Irish passion for personal recrimination, and especially for family reminiscence, would bring strange things spouting from the depths; and through a wild scene I actually seemed suddenly to hear the high voice of Sheridan, shrill with intoxication, crying out some taunt: “Have ye forgotten that, O’Bourke?” And then I remembered that an audience in a London theatre would probably make nothing of the notion of that great eternal Thing terribly returning; because any number of them do not know that it is eternal and hardly that it is great.

  In Edith Sitwell’s very graceful sketch of Queen Victoria, I came on another quaint little drama, which in this case would be a duologue. Also, in this case, the thing really happened. It is there described briefly and impartially; but anyone knowing persons and period can easily understand and expand it; and to me it is enormously amusing; amusing and also enormous. It has exactly that grim Greek irony of the contrast between great things known and the greater thing that is not known. It was a discussion, and even a dispute between two very eminent Victorians. It was concerned with the news of the proclamation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception.

  They were both good men; they were both men of the first prominence in the public eye. Both had the finest culture of the Protestant; both had a faint streak of the prig; but both had a warmth of generous conviction for their own favourite causes; neither certainly was a fool; neither was a No-Popery man in the narrow and vulgar sense; both believed themselves flooded with the full daylight of the age of enlightenment and liberty; and, at the same time, both had hobbies and intelligent interests that might soften them toward older religious traditions.

  One was a great reader of the Fathers and the first devotional literature; the other had a genuine taste in what was still often regarded as the childish cheap jewellery of medieval painting. One was a High Churchman of the Oxford Movement; the other was a liberal Lutheran. One was the great Gladstone; the other was Albert, the Prince Consort.

  The two men talked and disagreed. They sharply disagreed. The point on which they disagreed was extraordinary. But it was not a hundredth part as extraordinary as the part on which they agreed.

  Mr. Gladstone was greatly grieved because he had found the Prince Consort in a state of indecent hilarity, he thought, over the news about the Immaculate Conception. Indecent hilarity is not a vice conspicuously staining Prince Albert’s name, any more than Gladstone’s; two more solemn disputants would be hard to find. But Prince Albert was the more cheerful, because (he said in effect) it is always a good thing when an evil system tottering to its fall, does some one wildly insane and frantic act of arrogance; which will quite certainly bring it to a final crash. Rome had staggered along somehow till now; but, obviously, Rome would never have a leg to stand on after this.