There is an art to praising without laying it on too thick. To compliment fulsomely risks embarrassing the recipient of your adulation and stirring suspicion of your motives. We all come equipped with malnourished egos, and ill-calibrated compliments simultaneously elate and disappoint: “Finally, someone recognizes my genius,” we think. “Why didn’t he tell me last week?” Has anyone ever received a compliment, sincerely thanked the giver and let it go at that?
Henry James may be the literary
world’s foremost giver and receiver of compliments. Even when he dabbles with unctuousness, it
sounds gracious and eloquent and must have been delightful to receive. On this
date, September 28, in 1884, James writes a letter to Edgar Fawcett (1847-1904),
a prolific American novelist and poet forgotten long ago. That year Fawcett
published four novels and a volume of poems, Song and Story, which he had
sent to James. Earlier in 1884, in Princeton Review, Fawcett published
one of the first general essays devoted to James’ body of work, which already included
The American, “Daisy Miller,” Washington Square and The Portrait
of a Lady. James replies to Fawcett with an indelibly Jamesian aw-shucks:
“You treat me far too well,
& your praise is, like all your writing, very rich. I feel, on laying down
your article, as if I had swallowed a jug-full of lucent syrup tinct with cinnamon.”
Does that final phrase
sound familiar? Tincted means “to colour; to dye; to tinge, tint” (OED),
and by now is an obsolete cousin to tincture, which itself is almost obsolete. James is nicely quoting the
thirtieth stanza of Keats’ “The Eve of St. Agnes”: “. . . a heap / Of candied
apple, quince, and plum, and gourd; / With jellies soother than the creamy
curd, / And lucent syrops [sic], tinct with cinnamon.” Chug-a-lugging “a
jug-full of lucent syrup tinct with cinnamon” sounds ghastly but I suspect
Fawcett got the Keats allusion and appreciated the elaborate thank-you. We know
how James feels. In his next sentence he writes:
“But strange to say, the
liquid sweetness agrees with me, & I can only thank the friendly dispenser.”
1 comment:
James and H.G. Wells exchanged fruity compliments in the early days of Wells' career. But the Master's encomiums grew sere and stopped as the ratio of art to ideas in Wells' books came to favor the latter. (All can be found in David Lodge's entertaining novelization of Wells' life and erotic adventures, "A Man of Parts".)
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