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"Live All You Can." Over the next half-decade or so, the autobiography's "fadograph of a yestern scene" loses its glow of childhood happiness. But as he marched to the threshold of his middle years, James located himself: "What had I ever been and could I ever be but a man of imagination at the active pitch?" Much like James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the autobiography ends with James ready "to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race."
William Faulkner has called Henry James "one of the nicest old ladies I ever knew." But allowing for all that was overly fastidious, snobbish and unworldly about him, the James who emerges from the autobiography looks much more like a staunch culture hero. More than any other 19th century U.S. literary figure, with the possible exception of Poe, he pioneered the idea that the art of fiction was not peripheral and frivolous, but central and serious. Master of an elegantly involuted style which Critic Cyril Connolly has dubbed the "Mandarin," James sometimes carried it to the point of "euphonious nothings," but far more frequently captured "the subtlest inflections of sensibility and meaning." In durability and steady growth of craft and vision, he evaded the fate Scott Fitzgerald had in mind when he wrote that there are no second acts in American lives. James's last novels (The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl, The Wings of the Dove) are his best.
Henry James lived life too much at second hand, and knew it. He tried to make up for lack of experience with intensity of perception. He said his yes to life in his late fiction, but it had behind it the pathos of a shy lifetime of noes: "Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that, what have you had? . . . The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have . . . Live, live!"
*An 18th century Swedish scientist and philosopher who professed to have received a revelation of the Second Coming of Christ. He believed that God Himself was the Divine Man, that through infinite love Man could become the image of his Creator. The Swedenborgian Church still claims 5,647 U.S. members.