Spencer Alley: Henry James and The Sacred Fount

Wednesday, September 7, 2016

Henry James and The Sacred Fount

Elliott & Fry
Henry James
1884
albumen print
National Portrait Gallery, London

She came slowly and a little wearily down the vista, and her sad, shy advance, with the massed wood on either side of her, was like the reminiscence of a picture or the refrain of a ballad. What made the difference with me – if any difference had remained to be made – was the sense of this sharp cessation of her public extravagance. She had folded up her manner in her flounced parasol, which she seemed to drag after her as a sorry soldier his musket.

I neither moved nor spoke till she had come quite near me, and as she also gave no sound the meaning of our silence seemed to stare straight out. It absolutely phrased there, in all the wonderful conditions, a relation already established; but the strange and beautiful thing was that as soon as we had recognized and accepted it this relation put us almost at our ease. "You must be weary of walking," I said at last, "and you see I've been keeping a seat for you."

I had finally got up, as a sign of welcome, but I had directly afterwards resumed my position, and it was an illustration of the terms on which we met that we neither of us seemed to mind her being on her feet. She stood before me as if to take in – with her smile that had by this time sunk quite to dimness – more than we should, either of us, after all, be likely to be able to say.

I none the less – from simply sitting with her there – gathered in the sense of more things than I could have named, each of which as it came to me, made my compassion more tender. Who of us all could say that his fall might not be as deep? – or might not at least become so with equal opportunity.

– from The Sacred Fount by Henry James (originally published in 1901, excerpts from the scene on pages 131-136 of the Grove Press edition, 1953, edited by Leon Edel).