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Contributors to this Volume.

ALLEN, GRANT.

ALMOND, HELY HUTCHINSON.

ARNOLD, MATTHEW.

AUSTIN, ALFRED.

BENHAM, REV. W.

BETHAM-EDWARDS, MISS M.

CHESNEY, JANE.

COLENSO, FRANCES ELLEN.

COLVIN, SIDNEY.

DUBLIN, THE ARCHBISHOP OF.

EDWARDS, MRS. E. H.

EVANS, ARTHUR J.

FORBES, URQUHART A.

GARDNER, PROFESSOR PERCY.

HICKEY, E. H.

HITCHMAN, FRANCIS.

HUEFFER, F.

JACK, PROFESSOR WILLIAM.

JAMES, HENRY, JUN.

JONES, W. BENCE.

MACDONELL, AGNES.

MEREDITH, GEORGE.

MARSHALL, MRS. JULIAN.

MARTIN, FRANCES.

MARTIN, ROBERT J.

ODELL, W., JUN.

OLIPHANT, MRS.

POLLOCK, LADY.

QUILTER, HARRY.

ROSSETTI, WM. M.

SAINTSBURY, GEORGE.

SEELEY, PROFESSOR J. R.

WALPOLE, SPENCER.

WESTMINSTER, THE DEAN OF.

MACMILLAN'S MAGAZINE.

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MACMILLAN'S MAGAZINE.

NOVEMBER, 1880.

VI.

THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY.1

ISABEL ARCHER was a young person of many theories; her imagination was remarkably active. It had been her fortune to possess a finer mind than most of the persons among whom her lot was cast; to have a larger perception of surrounding facts, and to care for knowledge that was tinged with the unfamiliar. It is true that among her contemporaries she passed for a young woman of extraordinary profundity; for these excellent people never withheld their admiration from a reach of intellect of which they themselves were not conscious, and spoke of Isabel as a prodigy of learning, a young lady reputed to have

read the classic authors-in translations. Her paternal aunt, Mrs. Varian, once spread the rumour that Isabel was writing a book-Mrs. Varian having a reverence for books-and averred that Isabel would distinguish herself in print. Mrs. Varian thought highly of literature, for which she entertained that esteem that is connected with a sense of privation. Her own large house, remarkable for its assortment of mosaic tables and decorated ceilings, was unfurnished with a library, and in the way of printed volumes contained nothing but half a dozen novels in paper, on a shelf in the apartment of one of the

Miss Varians. Practically, Mrs. Varian's acquaintance with literature was confined to the New York Interviewer; as she very justly said, after you had read the Interviewer, you had no time for anything else. Her tendency, however, was rather to keep the Interviewer out of the way of her daughters; she was determined to bring them up seriously, and they read nothing at all. Her impression with regard to Isabel's labours was quite illusory; the girl never attempted to write a book, and had no desire to do so. She had no talent for expression, and had none of the consciousness of genius; she only had a general idea that people were right when they treated her as if she were rather superior. Whether or no she were superior, people were right in admiring her if they thought her so; for it seemed to her often that her mind moved more quickly than theirs, and this encouraged an impatience that might easily be confounded with superiority. It may be affirmed, without delay, that Isabel was probably very liable to the sin of self-esteem; she often surveyed with complacency the field of her own nature; she was in the habit of taking for granted, on scanty evidence, that she was right; impulsively, she often admired herself. Meanwhile her errors and delusions were frequently such as a biographer

Entered according to Act of Congress in the year 1880, by Henry James, jun., in the office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington.

No. 253.-VOL. XLIII.

B

interested in preserving the dignity of his heroine must shrink from specifying. Her head was full of premature convictions and unproportioned images, which had never been corrected by the judgment of people who seemed to her to speak with authority. Intellectually, morally, she had had her own way, and it had led her into a thousand ridiculous zigzags. Every now and then she found out she was wrong, and then she treated herself to a week of passionate humility. After this she held her head higher than ever again; for it was of no use, she had an unquenchable desire to think well of herself. She had a theory that it was only on this condition that life was worth living; that one should be one of the best, should be conscious of a fine organisation (she could not help knowing her organisation was fine), should move in a realm of light, of natural wisdom, of happy impulse, of inspiration gracefully chronic. It was almost as unnecessary to cultivate doubt of oneself as to cultivate doubt of one's best friend; one should try to be one's own best friend, and to give oneself, in this manner, distinguished company. The girl had a certain nobleness of imagination which rendered her a good many services, and played her a great many tricks. She spent half her time in thinking of beauty, and bravery, and magnanimity; she had a fixed determination to regard the world as a place of brightness, of free expansion, of irresistible action; she thought it would be detestable to be afraid or ashamed. She had an infinite hope that she should never do anything wrong. She had resented so strongly, after discovering them, her mere errors of feeling (the discovery always made her tremble, as if she had escaped from a trap which might have caught her and smothered her), that the chance of inflicting a sensible injury upon another person, presented only as a contingency, caused her at moments to hold her breath. That always seemed to her the worst thing

that could happen to one. On the whole, reflectively, she was in no uncertainty about the things that were wrong. She had no taste for thinking of them, but whenever she looked at them fixedly she recognised them. It was wrong to be mean, to be jealous, to be false, to be cruel; she had seen very little of the evil of the world, but she had seen women who lied and who tried to hurt each other. Seeing such things had quickened her high spirit; it seemed right to scorn them. Of course the danger of a high spirit is the danger of inconsistency-the danger of keeping up the flag after the place has surrendered; a sort of behaviour so anomalous as to be almost a dishonour to the flag. But Isabel, who knew nothing of the forces that life might bring against her, flattered herself that such contradictions would never be observed in her own conduct. Her life should always be in harmony with the most pleasing impression she should produce; she would be what she appeared, and she would appear what she was. Sometimes she went so far as to wish that she should find herself some day in a difficult position, so that she might have the pleasure of being as largely heroic as the occasion demanded. Altogether, with her meagre knowledge, her inflated ideals, her confidence at once innocent and dogmatic, her temper at once exacting and indulgent, her mixture of curiosity and fastidiousness, of vivacity and indifference, her desire to look very well and to be, if possible, even better; her determination to see, to try, to know; her combination of the delicate, desultory, flame-like sultory, flame-like spirit and the eager and personal young girl, she would be an easy victim of scientific criticism, if she were not intended to awaken on the reader's part an impulse more tender and more purely expectant.

It was one of her theories that Isabel Archer was very fortunate in being independent, and that she ought to make some very enlightened use of

her independence. She never called it loneliness; she thought that weak; and besides, her sister Lily constantly urged her to come and stay with her. She had a friend whose acquaintance she had made shortly before her father's death, who offered so laudable an example of useful activity that Isabel always thought of her as a model. Henrietta Stackpole had the advantage of a remarkable talent; she was thoroughly launched in journalism, and her letters to the Interviewer, from Washington, Newport, the White Mountains, and other places, were universally admired. Isabel did not accept them unrestrictedly, but she esteemed the courage, energy, and good-humour of her friend, who, without parents and without property, had adopted three of the children of an infirm and widowed sister, and was paying their school-bills out of the proceeds of her literary labour. Henrietta was a great radical, and had clear-cut views on most subjects; her cherished desire had long been to come to Europe and write a series of letters to the Interviewer, from the radical point of view-an enterprise the less difficult as she knew perfectly in advance what her opinions would be, and to how many objections most European institutions lay open. When she heard that Isabel was coming, she wished to start at once; thinking, naturally, that it would be delightful that they should travel together. She had been obliged, however, to postpone this enterprise. She thought Isabel a glorious creature, and had spoken of her, covertly, in some of her letters, though she never mentioned the fact to her friend, who would not have taken pleasure in it, and was not a regular reader of the Interviewer. Henrietta, for Isabel, was chiefly a proof that a woman might suffice to herself and be happy. Her resources were of the obvious kind; but even if one had not the journalistic talent and a genius for guessing, as Henrietta said, what the public was going to want, one was not

sex.

therefore to conclude that one had no vocation, no beneficent aptitude of any sort, and resign oneself to being trivial and superficial. Isabel was resolutely determined not to be superficial. If one should wait expectantly and trustfully, one would find some happy work to his hand. Of course, among her theories, this young lady was not without a collection of opinions on the question of marriage. The first on the list was first on the list was a conviction that it was very vulgar to think too much about it. From lapsing into a state of eagerness on this point, she earnestly prayed that she might be delivered; she held that a woman ought to be able to make up her life in singleness, and that it was perfectly possible to be happy without the society of a more or less coarse-minded person of another The girl's prayer was very sufficiently answered; something pure and proud that there was in her-something cold and stiff, an unappreciated suitor with a taste for analysis might have called it-had hitherto kept her from any great vanity of conjecture on the subject of possible husbands. Few of the men she saw seemed worth an expenditure of imagination, and it made her smile to think that one of them should present himself as an incentive to hope and a reward of patience. Deep in her soul-it was the deepest thing there-lay a belief that if a certain impulse should be stirred, she could give herself completely; but this image, on the whole, was too formidable to be attractive. Isabel's thoughts hovered about it, but they seldom rested on it long; after a little it ended by frightening her. It often seemed to her that she thought too much about herself; you could have made her blush, any day in the year, by telling her that she was selfish. She was always planning out her own development, desiring her own perfection, observing her own progress. Her nature had for her own imagination a certain garden-like quality, a suggestion of perfume and murmuring boughs, of shady bowers and length

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