The Story in The Sacred Fount

Published in 1901, Henry James's The Sacred Fount is usually described as being the first example of his 'late' style, and on the whole critics have tended to agree that it was not a success: that, in the words of Edmund Wilson, it was 'mystifying, even maddening';¹ that it would drive a man mad to seek a clear answer to its puzzles and ambiguities;² that only when 'the riddle has been abandoned' can the novel be enjoyed as other novels are enjoyed; and that James must have meant that no clear answer to its 'riddle' existed.³ This throwing up of the hands in the face of James's novel, and refusal to follow it as a story, was an odd business, and it seems to me one ought to have another look at the matter.

Let me briefly recapitulate the opening of the novel. The narrator (unnamed) has arrived at Paddington station en route for a weekend at Newmarch, a grand country house in the Midlands, and on the platform he recognizes – and shies away from – a man named Gilbert Long, evidently to be one of his fellow-guests and someone he has hitherto disliked as uncivil and oafish. But to his surprise Long greets him warmly and strikes him as strangely transformed – courteous, intelligent, and easy in manner. They agree to share a compartment, and Long, who goes to find a porter to shift his luggage, returns with a lady. She is unknown to the narrator, or so he thinks, but turns out to be Grace Brissenden, whom he has met at Newmarch in previous years and who, even more than Long, appears transformed; she looks ten years younger and even beautiful – as had decidedly not been the case before. It appears that her husband Guy is to follow by a later train, escorting a certain Lady John; and while Long is buying a newspaper, Mrs Brissenden agrees with the narrator as to Long's remarkable improvement and puts it down to Lady John's influence: 'it has positively given him a mind and a tongue'. The three travel together to Newmarch, giving the narrator much food for thought.

At Newmarch it is a magnificent August afternoon, and the guests are strolling in the great gardens. The narrator comes upon the portrait painter Ford Obert, deep in conversation with the beautiful and gentle Mrs Server (whom the narrator has also met before at Newmarch). They have a 'sequestered' air, but to the narrator's surprise Obert gives him a look as if begging to be rescued. He accordingly joins them, and the three soon mingle with a further group, including the aforesaid Lady John. She strikes the narrator as 'pretty, prompt, hard, and, in a way that was special to her, a mistress at once of "culture" and of slang'. As they move near the house, to dress for dinner, the narrator asks Obert what had been the matter between him and Mrs Server earlier in the day. Obert says that he had been frightened; it had been as if May Server had wanted to make love to him. She was not the calm person she had been when he painted her portrait a year or two before; she was restless and 'too beastly unhappy'.

The theme of metamorphosis is then sounded a further time. The narrator finds, as he thinks, a stranger in his bedroom. It is Guy Brissenden, Mrs Brissenden's young husband, whom the narrator had met a few years before at the time of the marriage, but who appears now so desperately aged, so infinitely mournful, that the narrator did not recognize him. Guy has, 'for some reason', been put in the bachelor wing, and the narrator has to help him find his room.

Late the same evening the narrator, who regards Ford Obert as an expert on human appearances, asks him his opinion of the Brissendens. He himself has by now arrived at a general theory: that where couples are separated by a great disparity of ages, the younger may have to pay for the elder – may need...