He dictated his best work. He did not, like poor Dencombe, succumb at fifty, but wrote his best work as he aged: “The Beast in the Jungle,” other late stories, and above all the three great novels: The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904). Later, age and its illness interrupted work, breakdowns both mental and physical. The American Scene (1907) was wonderful; there were fine things in the unfinished autobiography, in the unfinished novels; there were the prefaces to his work, written for The New York Edition—but late in his life there was depression and loss; there was renewed endeavor stopped short by further failure, until he suffered his first stroke on 2 December 1915. As he fell, he later told a friend, he had the thought: “So it has come at last—The Distinguished Thing.” Apparently it came wearing initial capitals, and if his life was almost over, his mind had not quite stopped its endeavor to work. After his second stroke his confusion mounted. A few days later he went back to work, as it were, riding on grooves established by sixty years of sentences in the morning. He was paralyzed on one side, but he could still speak, and the habit of two decades had been dictation. He called for his helper and worked again, making the clauses of his adult style:

… we simply shift nursling of genius from one maternal breast to the other and the trick is played, the false note averted…. Astounding little stepchild of God’s astounding young stepmother! … five miles off at the renewed affronts that we see coming from the great, and that we know they will accept. The fault is that they had found themselves too easily great, and the effect of that, definitely, had been, within them, the want of long provision for it.

Henry James dictated on; and on and on. The work survives the worker: Henry Moore without memory sketching in a wheelchair, Henry James on the bed of paralysis speaking a senseless syntax.

In his journals Emerson wrote, “To every reproach I know but one answer, namely, to go again to my work. ‘But you neglect your relations.’ Too true, then I will work the harder. ‘But you have no genius.’ Yes, then I will work the harder. ‘But you have detached yourself from people: you must regain some positive relation.’ Yes, I will work the harder.”

Emerson’s dutifulness is clear; his obsession is also clear, his egotism—and something like frigidity. Emerson was famous, of course; because of his lecturing, his fame was grossly public and personal, not abstract like the fame of writers known only through their books. How many dinners had he endured with fawning strangers, how many receptions? When he was old, tourists came to Concord hoping to glimpse him, the sage as a fleshy Taj Mahal. He deplored (like athletes or moviestars who cannot enter a pizza parlor) the pressing access of strangers. “Whom God hath put asunder,” he said, “why should man join together?”