groan under the accumulation and the
weight of.

It is surprising that, loving this new life so ecstatically, James
should so seldom attempt to leave any detailed description of it in his
reminiscences. He is constantly describing his raptures: he only
occasionally describes the thing he was rapturous about. Almost all he
tells us about "the extravagant youth of the aesthetic period" is that
to live through it "was to seem privileged to such immensities as
history would find left her to record but with bated breath." He recalls
again "the particular sweetness of wonder" with which he haunted certain
pictures in the National Gallery, but it is himself, not the National
Gallery, that he writes about. Of Titian and Rembrandt and Rubens he
communicates nothing but the fact that "the cup of sensation was thereby
filled to overflowing." He does, indeed, give a slender description of
his first sight of Swinburne in the National Gallery, but the chief fact
even of this incident is that "I thrilled ... with the prodigy of this
circumstance that I should be admiring Titian in the same breath with
Mr. Swinburne."

Thus the reminiscences are, in a sense, extraordinarily egotistic. This
is, however, not to condemn them. Henry James is, as I have already
said, his own greatest character, and his portrait of his excitements is
one of the most enrapturing things in the literature of autobiography.
He makes us share these excitements simply by telling us how excited he
was. They are exactly the sort of excitements all of us have felt on
being introduced to people and places and pictures we have dreamed about
from our youth. Who has not felt the same kind of joy as Henry James
felt when George Eliot allowed him to run for the doctor? "I shook off
my fellow-visitor," he relates, "for swifter cleaving of the air, and I
recall still feeling that I cleft it even in the dull four-wheeler."
After he had delivered his message, he "cherished for the rest of the
day the particular quality of my vibration." The occasion of the message
to the doctor seems strangely comic in the telling. On arriving at
George Eliot's, Henry James found one of G.H. Lewes's sons lying in
horrible pain in the middle of the floor, the heritage of an old
accident in the West Indies, or, as Henry James characteristically
describes it:--

a suffered onset from an angry bull, I seem to recall, who had
tossed or otherwise mauled him, and, though beaten off