The beauty was ... that people had references, and that a reference was then, to my mind, whether in a person or an object, the most glittering, the most becoming ornament possible, a style of decoration one seemed likely to perceive figures here and there, whether animate or no, quite 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, left him
     considerably compromised.