The Golden Bowl - Henry James [138]
What with the noble fairness of the place, meanwhile, the generous mood of the sunny gusty lusty English April, all panting and heaving with impatience or even at moments kicking and crying like some infant Hercules who wouldn’t be dressed; what with these things and the bravery of youth and beauty, the insolence of fortune and appetite so diffused among his fellow guests that the poor Assinghams, in their comparatively marked maturity and their comparatively small splendour, were the only approach to a false note in the concert, the stir of the air was such, for going, in a degree, to one’s head, that, as a mere matter of exposure, almost grotesque in its flagrancy, his situation resembled some elaborate practical joke carried out at his expense. Every voice in the great bright house was a call to the ingenuities and impunities of pleasure; every echo was a defiance of difficulty, doubt or danger; every aspect of the picture, a glowing plea for the immediate, and as with plenty more to come, was another phase of the spell. For a world so constituted was governed by a spell, that of the smile of the gods and the favour of the powers; the only handsome, the only gallant, in fact the only intelligent acceptance of which was a faith in its guarantees and a high spirit for its chances. Its demand – to that the thing came back – was above all for courage and good humour; and the value of this as a general assurance – that is for seeing one through at the worst – hadn’t even in the easiest hours of his old Roman life struck the Prince so convincingly. His old Roman life had had more poetry, no doubt, but as he looked back upon it now it seemed to hang in the air of mere iridescent horizons, to have been loose and vague and thin, with large languorous unaccountable blanks. The present order, as it spread about him, had somehow the ground under its feet, and a trumpet in its ears, and a bottomless bag of solid shining British sovereigns – which was much to the point – in its hand. Courage and good humour therefore were the breath of the day; though for ourselves at least it would have been also much to the point that with Amerigo really the innermost effect of all this perceptive ease was perhaps a strange final irritation. He compared the lucid result with the extraordinary substitute for perception that presided, in the bosom of his wife, at so contented a view of his conduct and course – a state of mind that was positively like a vicarious good conscience cultivated ingeniously on his behalf, a perversity of pressure innocently persisted in; and this wonder of irony became on occasion too intense to be kept wholly to himself. It wasn’t that at Matcham anything particular, anything monstrous, anything that had to be noticed, permitted itself, as they said, to ‘happen’; there were only odd moments when the breath of the day, as it has been called, struck him so full in the face that he broke out with all the hilarity of ‘What indeed would they have made of it?’ ‘They’ were of course Maggie and her father, moping – so far as they ever consented to mope – in monotonous Eaton Square, but placid too in the belief that they knew beautifully what their expert companions were in for. They knew, it might have appeared in these lights, absolutely nothing on earth worth speaking of – whether beautifully or cynically; and they would perhaps sometimes be a little less trying if they would only once for all peacefully admit that knowledge wasn’t one of their needs and that they were in fact constitutionally