PENGUIN CLASSICS
THE PRINCESS CASAMASSIMA
HENRY JAMES was born in 1843 in Washington Place, New York, of Scottish and Irish ancestry. His father was a prominent theologian and philosopher, and his elder brother, William, is also famous as a philosopher. He attended schools in New York and later in London, Paris and Geneva, entering the Law School at Harvard in 1862. In 1865 he began to contribute reviews and short stories to American journals. In 1875, after two prior visits to Europe, he settled for a year in Paris, where he met Flaubert, Turgenev and other literary figures. However, the next year he moved to London, where he became so popular in society that in the winter of 1878–9 he confessed to accepting 107 invitations. In 1898 he left London and went to live at Lamb House, Rye, Sussex. Henry James became a naturalized citizen in 1915, was awarded the Order of Merit, and died in 1916.
In addition to many short stories, plays, books of criticism, autobiography and travel, he wrote some twenty novels, the first published being Roderick Hudson (1875). They include The Europeans, Washington Square, The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians, The Princess Casamassima, The Tragic Muse, The Spoils of Poynton, The Awkward Age, The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl.
DEREK BREWER is Life Fellow (formerly Master) of Emmanuel College, and Emeritus Professor of English, at the University of Cambridge. He has taught and lectured at many universities in this country and abroad, especially in Japan. He has written and edited a number of books, mostly on English medieval literature, but his Symbolic Stories (1980) covers authors from early periods up to the nineteenth century. He has also published articles on twentieth-century literature, and a substantial book of poems, Seatonian Exercises and Other Verses (Unicorn Press, 2000).
PATRICIA CRICK, one-time Scholar of Girton College, Cambridge, is a teacher of Modern Languages.
GEOFFREY MOORE was General Editor for the works of Henry James in Penguin Classics. He died in 1999.
Edited with an introduction by
Derek Brewer
Notes by Patricia Crick
Penguin Books
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First published by Macmillan & Co. 1886
Published in Penguin Books 1977
Reprinted in Penguin Classics with an introduction and notes 1987
22
Introduction copyright © Derek Brewer, 1987
Notes copyright © Patricia Crick, 1987
All rights reserved
The text is taken from the first edition of 1886; the author’s preface to the New York Edition of 1909 appears on pp. 33–48
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-192210-2
Introduction
A Note on the Text
Preface to the New York Edition of 1909
THE PRINCESS CASAMASSIMA
Notes
The Princess Casamassima must be read by anyone interested in the contrasts between wealth and poverty, fineness of spirit and vulgarity, terrorism and beauty, as they attract and afflict our feelings. It is as relevant today as when it was first published in 1886. Our dilemmas are almost as acute, the agonies, though different, are hardly less, the solutions are as hard as ever to find.
The central thread of story is straightforward. The hero is Hyacinth Robinson, the bastard son of a nobleman who is murdered by his mistress, a French dressmaker, Hyacinth’s mother, who is therefore imprisoned for life. Hyacinth is adopted by a humble spinster dressmaker who worked with the girl, Miss Pynsent, and brought up in poverty. He develops tastes and interests in art and beauty which make him acutely conscious of his sordid surroundings and the even greater poverty and suffering of many of those around him. He is drawn into circles of semi-secret radical politics. In a moment of excitement, led on by his radical friends, he makes a ‘sacred vow’ to further the radical cause by assassinating, when called on, a major political figure. But just after this, he is taken up by the young and beautiful Princess Casamassima, after whom the novel is named. She introduces him into the world of wealth and beauty, delicate feelings and perceptions. The nobility and fascination of this world as represented by the Princess seem to him to offset the corruption it may cause elsewhere. He loses his faith in radical schemes, in ‘the beastly cause’, as he comes to call it, to which he has committed himself. Yet he feels in honour bound not to deny his vow. Hence arises a tragic dilemma, only to be solved by his suicide, which has its own nobility.
The following works have been consulted in preparing this Introduction: S. Gorley Putt, The Fiction of Henry James, Penguin Books, 1968; Derek Brewer, Symbolic Stories, D. S. Brewer, 1980; W. J. Tilley, The Background of The Princess Casamassima, University of Florida Monographs, Humanities No. 5, 1960.
The story is intrinsically moving, with great depths. At the same time James enfolds it in a wealth of observation and meditation, wit and compassion. The pace of narration is not fast, and the book is to be read steadily, not rapidly.
At every re-reading the density of the texture and the force of the narrative grow upon one. Much that may seem mysterious on a first reading becomes clearer on closer attention, just as the wealth of detail within a great painting becomes clearer the longer it is looked at. The aim of this introduction is to sketch out some of the major structures and sources of this remarkable novel which is set, unusually for James, in the London of the poor, ‘the huge tragic city, where unmeasured misery lurked beneath the dirty night’(p. 293).
The range of characters portrayed in the novel is as wide as that of Dickens, but much more generally convincing. Both the rich and the poor are justly rendered with a sure and delicate touch. James’s strength is not in realistic imitation, copious evocation of local detail, though his sense of the reality of the background is very sure. His main strength, his principal interest, lies in his rendering of the quality of character in delicate effects. Conrad’s comment that James is the historian of ‘fine consciences’ was never better illustrated. A leading example is that of Miss Pynsent. What other novelist could so effectively portray this humble, not very adept, poor dressmaker, and make us see, without sentimentality, the shining quality of her character? An instance is when she is visited by the robustly attractive Millicent Henning, once a little guttersnipe from a dissolute family in Lomax Place where Miss Pynsent still lives. Millicent remarks on the decline in Miss Pynsent’s humble dressmaking business. This decline is due to Miss Pynsent’s remorse at taking Hyacinth to see his mother dying in prison, thus revealing his origins to him and burdening him with what he feels is a shameful secret.
[Millicent’s] allusion to her shrunken industry seemed to Miss Pynsent very cruel; but she reflected that it was natural one should be insulted if one talked to a vulgar girl. She judged this young lady in the manner of a person who was not vulgar herself, and if there was a difference between them she was right in feeling it to be in her favour. Miss Pynsent’s ‘cut’, as I have intimated, was not truly fashionable, and in the application of gimp and the distribution of ornament she was not to be trusted; but morally, she had the best taste in the world. (p. 97)
Such moral taste is itself a beauty, and sets the tone of the book. By these high standards the broken-down old fiddler, Mr Vetch, and M. Poupin, the foolish exiled French Communist bookbinder, such an artist at his work, are fully worthy of our sympathy and admiration. M. Poupin has ‘an extraordinary decency of life and a worship of proper work’ (p. 124). Paul Muniment, the worker at a wholesale chemist’s who becomes Hyacinth’s mentor and best friend, is not an artist like Mr Vetch and M. Poupin. He has a scientific mind, tries to avoid emotion, and is an advanced and ruthless revolutionary who wishes not to abolish prisons, but to imprison ‘the correct sort’. As remarked on at Hyacinth’s first encounter with him at Poupin’s, his face denoted ‘a kind of joyous moral health’ (p. 128).
It is the function of the historian of fine consciences, and a main interest of the book, to define and explore the gradations of moral character. James is not a simple moralist. The gradations he is interested in run from ‘fineness’ of moral taste to ‘vulgarity’ more subtly than from goodness to wickedness, though connected with that scale. Thus Paul Muniment, we are told in the same passage, has ‘a heavy mouth and rather vulgar nose’, and an ‘admirably clear, bright eye, light-coloured and set very deep; for though there was a want of fineness in some of its parts, his face had a marked expression of intelligence and resolution’. There is an ambiguity of character here which reflects the ambiguous part Muniment plays in the development of Hyacinth’s fate. Such ambiguity is part of the novel’s picture of the mysterious complexity of life.
Most, but not all, the ‘fine’ characters are working class. Lady Aurora, who differs from her rich family in being shy, awkward, not beautiful and not well-dressed, with little money of her own, occupies her time in personal philanthropy amongst the poor, paid for by strictly economizing in her own needs. She is ‘fine’ though perhaps ineffectual. The other upper-class characters are mainly, and convincingly in the moral sense, vulgar, like Captain Sholto, the rich, worldly, idle man who claims to love the Princess Casamassima. And even the beautiful Princess herself, whose brilliance epitomizes the world of art and beauty which captivates Hyacinth, is by contrast with Lady Aurora just a trifle vulgar. It is Lady Aurora who, as a matter of course, treats Hyacinth as ‘a gentleman’ and pays ‘homage to the idea of his refinement’ (p. 427; ‘… his fine essence’ appears in the New York Edition of 1909).
Hyacinth himself is characterized by the absence of vulgarity. The Princess speaks to him about himself during his visit to her (rented) country-house, Medley Park, which so opens his eyes to the beauty of the world.
‘You haven’t a vulgar intonation, you haven’t a common gesture, you never make a mistake, you do and say everything exactly in the right way. You come out of the hole you have described to me, and yet you might have stayed in country-houses all your life.’ (p. 337).
This is highly satisfactory in a hero who deserves our admiration as well as our pity. Part of the grounds of the pity, and the essence of the novel, is rendered in the same passage when, after a conversational faux pas which Lady Aurora would never have made,
Five minutes later she [the Princess] broke into an exclamation which touched him almost more than anything she had ever done, giving him the highest opinion of her delicacy and sympathy and putting him before himself as vividly as if the words were a little portrait. ‘Fancy the strange, the bitter fate: to be constituted as you are constituted, to feel the capacity that you must feel, and yet to look at the good things of life only through the glass of the pastry-cook’s window!’
Their conversation flourishes and in the end, ‘He told her, in a word, what he was’ (p. 337), that is, the story of his birth. This is to Hyacinth his shameful secret, yet in a curious way neither she nor we feel it is ‘vulgar’. Hyacinth is at times conscious of the ‘noble’ blood in him, and this and his French origin seem both for him and for James to account for something of his moral quality, his artistic interest in his trade of bookbinding, his capacity to learn French and Italian, and to relish the beauty of art and nature. He certainly inherits nothing evil; only his origins and circumstances breed in him a divided nature. It is a superb irony that this wondrous visit to Medley Park comes soon after he has made the ‘sacred vow’ to do the desperate deed which shall help destroy this world of beauty and privilege and will cost him his life.
Neither Hyacinth nor any other good character is presented as unduly grand. James shows his torments and incomprehensions, though Hyacinth always seems outwardly self-assured. The novelist frequently refers to him even patronizingly, as ‘our little bookbinder’. His features are finely cut, his hair handsome, his clothes neat and clean, but he is shorter than the Princess and never a commanding presence. The discontented starving working men who meet in the dirty smoky club-room of the ‘Sun and Moon’ speak foolishly and repetitively. There is no sentimentalization of the poor by James himself, who gently mocks Lady Aurora and the Princess for idealizing the poor. The misery of poverty is the more effectively rendered, as in the long account of the meeting in Chapter 21. James’s detail is sufficient to realize the physical atmosphere, and faultless in itself. We smell the damp foul air.
A sidelight on Hyacinth’s situation which shows how close to life James could come, even if he rarely offered trivial daily detail, is given by the autobiographical memoir of J. M. Dent,* who was also an exceedingly poor bookbinder in London in the mid-1880s. As an apprentice he was paid 12s. 6d. (in decimal currency 62½p) a week, and his bare lodgings cost 14s. (70p). His brother helped him or he could not have survived. His working hours were 8.00 a.m. to 8.00 p.m., and he often worked overtime (for which he was paid) till 10.00 p.m., after which he had an hour’s walk home. He was desperately lonely. Nevertheless like Hyacinth he squeezed in a few social hours and, being of a very different character from Hyacinth, married at twenty-one, when his apprenticeship was finished and he could earn, as presumably Hyacinth does throughout most of the book, 28s. (£1.40p) a week. A little later Dent even managed a trip to Italy, which had the same blissfully enlightening effect upon what he calls his sordid struggle for a living as Medley Park, Paris and Venice had upon Hyacinth. The trip to Italy cost some £13 or £14, which shows again how accurate is James’s assessment of the financial possibilities of Hyacinth’s own life-enhancing visit to Paris and Venice.
There is much that is mysterious or uncertain in the novel, and Hyacinth is a very different character from J. M. Dent (who became the famous publisher of the Everyman Library and much else). James gives us a central character who registers with great sensitivity the bafflingly complex web of life’s contradictions in which he struggles like a fly. The point of view from which the story is told is in general that of Hyacinth himself, and much that is obscure to him in the narrative remains obscure to us. How significant, for example, is the international revolutionary network? It exists, but how extensively? How strong, how widely rooted in the people is it? We can guess, but we do not know. What are the Princess’s motives? She gives us hints, and we hear her discussed by her aged companion, Madame Grandoni, with her alienated husband Prince Casamassima, where for once the narrative is not focused through Hyacinth’s own perceptions. Even here we have only Madame Grandoni’s assessment of Christina’s springs of action (p. 259). The Princess is beautiful, energetic, clever and bored. She takes up the ‘cause’ of the people because it is not as banal as her normal social life. There is something spiritually wanton about her, which is part of her wilful, irresponsible charm. Her irrationality is part of her nature. She comes to the hero like the medieval Lady Fortuna, beautiful and unreliable, arbitrarily to give and to take away.
As James says in the Preface to the New York Edition of 1909, ‘one can never tell everything’. Many things in the novel we pick up from hints and suggestions, as Rose Muniment construes the love of Lady Aurora for Paul Muniment, and as we eventually construe the fact that Paul and the Princess appear to become lovers, as well as conspirators in a serious political plot. When James writes in his Preface of how characters float up in his mind, and he has to think about them, it is as if they have a real objectivity and a real mystery for him, which he is anxious to do justice to for the reader’s sake. And indeed this is surely also how we really do ‘know’ – or do not know – people in real life. Some parts of action and character we see clearly, others progressively less so, and some we can only guess. Almost all personality is puzzling. There are plain questions we cannot ask even our closest, best-known friends, partly because a straight answer from the complexity of human feeling and action is actually impossible. James takes full advantage of the paradox that some of the most objectively real aspects of another person’s character, and perhaps of our own, are those which it is impossible to know, at least for certain. In the course of the novel there are things he refuses to tell, on the grounds that he does not know. Much as he loves the Princess and is jealous of Paul, Hyacinth has surely never been her lover; when he meets the Princess’s husband the author comments, ‘It is needless to go into the question of what Hyacinth, face to face with an aggrieved husband, may have had on his conscience…’ (p. 516; in the New York Edition, this passage begins ‘It is forbidden us to try the question of what Hyacinth…’). Even in the case of Millicent Henning, deciding whether or not to tell Hyacinth the truth about her evening engagement, the novelist says, ‘I know not exactly in what sense Miss Henning decided…’ (p. 536; ‘We are not to know exactly…’ appears in the New York Edition), and readers are left to decide for themselves, according to their experience of the world, their own innocence and their estimate of Millicent’s character, whether she does indeed tell the truth, and whether Hyacinth himself believes her.
The novel takes on the solidity, and the uncertainty, of a ‘history’ because of the novelist’s own genuine sense of the reality of character and event, and consequently of his own inevitably partial knowledge. But James characteristically revels in what to him is mysterious, rather more than what to him is clear. Mystery and uncertainty are of the essence of both character and plot. James enhances this effect because so much of the plot is concerned with a political conspiracy which of its nature tries to avoid discovery.
James also chooses an indirect form of narrative to deepen our sense of mystery and uncertainty. Thus neither of the great climaxes of Hyacinth’s adult life is directly described. The first is the meeting with the international conspirator and organizer of terrorism, Diedrich Hoffendahl. Feeling in Hyacinth, and in the reader, is powerfully built up in the description of the preliminary evening meeting at the ‘Sun and Moon’ and in the long ride in the cab late at night through unknown streets with Muniment, Poupin and the third serious conspirator, the German Schinkel. But the only description of the actual meeting with Hoffendahl and Hyacinth’s giving his ‘sacred vow’ is the rather general account which Hyacinth gives to the Princess at Medley. Thus the viewpoint of Hyacinth is stressed, with its limitations of knowledge and mixture of feelings, to strong artistic effect.
The second climax is Hyacinth’s suicide. This is built up to in the descriptions of a moving sequence of visits and discussions, with Mr Vetch, Millicent Henning, the Princess. We read with the anxious attention of dread and sympathy and expectation. The event itself is only realized in its subsequent discovery by the Princess and Schinkel. The complexity of motivation, Hyacinth’s deep torment, his final decisiveness against himself, are all left the more effectively for us to deduce for ourselves, following and sharing the ignorance, anxiety and grief of the Princess as she seeks to find Hyacinth before he does the dreadful deed, whose simplicity cuts through the complexity of feeling and motive.
The sense of mystery, of objects only partially perceived but sensitively responded to, is partly created by the subtlety and the qualifications of James’s characteristic style, which may puzzle a reader coming fresh to it. It is not calculated for rapid narration of easily observable events, but for evoking delicate nuances, registering uncertainties and possibilities. James’s style in The Princess Casamassima has not reached the extreme tortuosity of the later novels. It still reflects enough of the directly experienced material world to give us solid handholds and even clear signposts. Like Whistler’s famous contemporary picture of Battersea Bridge, although mists surround, and luminosity is as puzzling as it is enlightening, we can still see the solid object of contemplation, still follow a clear narrative. The text of the 1886 edition, here reprinted for the first time, is somewhat simpler, if perhaps a little stiffer, than the text of the New York Edition of 1909, which James polished, though he did not fundamentally change it.
James’s style is well suited to a story whose very essence is concerned with speculation about a secret conspiracy, uncertain and threatening. Such a sense, such speculation, is intrinsic to all James’s greater work, whether long or short. It is at the heart of The Turn of the Screw, to give an obvious example.
The focus is on the inner life, and James makes little attempt to mimic the style of actual speech. Consider, for example, the paragraph describing part of Hyacinth’s conversation with the Princess at Medley Park in Chapter 24:
It was impossible that our young man should not feel, at the end of ten minutes, that he had charmed the Princess into the deepest, most genuine attention… The reader may judge whether he had passed through a phase of excitement… but that had finally spent itself, through a hundred forms of restlessness, of vain conjecture… He would have detested the idea… and though it could not fail to be agreeable to him to perceive that… he could still not guess how very remarkable, in such a connection, the Princess thought his composure… She had the air – or she endeavoured to have it…; nevertheless… (pp. 334–5)
The passage begins with a double negative which denies any chance that Hyacinth may be conceited, yet allows his enjoyment of Christina’s attention in the next sentence. The double negative mutes the effect without denying it. It is a characteristic of James’s style, avoiding commitment, asserting by paradox. Hyacinth’s emotion is then allowed to escape in generalizations. The conditional ‘would have detested’ opens a possibility to the reader in order to close it, and more negatives precede the Princess’s positive response. Even there James goes on to modify the clear impression of the ‘air’ she had – or appeared to have. The reader’s understanding advances slowly, as along a road where there are many possible alternatives presented, testing the winding way, not always quite certain where he has arrived, until he casts a glance back to see that tentativeness of advance has always been impelled by firmness of purpose. James modified the passage slightly in the New York Edition, but its essence is unchanged.
The central interest of the story is psychological and moral-aesthetic (not moralizing in any obvious, didactic sense). States of feeling are obscure, fluid, in contrast to physical circumstance. James sets the realistic physical circumstances plainly enough for his purpose, and there are beautiful descriptions not only of beautiful things, but also of things ugly and oppressive in themselves. The setting of the novel is of the greatest importance because the misery and squalor of the multitude, which are contrasted with the beauty and comfort of the few, are the source of the central dilemma. But the novel is about human responses, not physical actuality for its own sake.
The interest in character is more deeply personal than even James himself probably realized. There is no reason to doubt the account in his Preface that the idea for The Princess Casamassima grew from his walking the streets of London, and his consciousness both of London’s wealth and of the misery of the millions who lived amongst it and were excluded from it. ‘What would I do in such circumstances?’ was a natural question for one so sympathetic, sensitive, imaginative, intelligent, as Henry James. James shows himself asking precisely this question in his comment on The Portrait of a Lady. He remarks how the characters floated into his mind ‘all in response to my primary question, “Well, what will she do?” ’ * It is pre-eminently the question a novelist asks himself, as opposed to the storyteller of a traditional tale, whose whole outline is already fully known to him and to his audience or reader. The novelist has to think of a character, imagine his or her feelings, establish motives, which give rise to actions, which concern other people, who react to the principal character’s ideas, feelings, and so forth, in a sequence. The novel achieves its sense of being a ‘history’ by being, as it were, a ‘displaced autobiography’, or an autobiographical fantasy, which needs knowledge for the description of attendant circumstances, but which depends on imagined personal response to those circumstances.
Thus it is that James the novelist projects himself, sympathetic, sensitive, imaginative and intelligent, into the situation of one deprived of social advantage, doomed for ever to miss appreciation of, or as in the novel he terms it even more significantly, being ‘initiated’ (p. 164), into the beautiful things of the world. In this novel, James’s hero, his ‘little presumptuous adventurer, with his combination of intrinsic fineness and fortuitous adversity’ (Preface, p. 43) is clearly an imaginative surrogate for the author. In this respect The Princess Casamassima is one of James’s most personal novels, even if it is a cliché of criticism that the novel is also one of James’s socially most engaged writings.
Though James’s sympathetic detachment allows him to pursue his thoughtful analytical exploration without that kind of personal projection which distorts a work of art, he is nevertheless more deeply engaged here (as in all his greater novels) than the emphasis on comment and analysis, if left unqualified, may suggest. He is not a bland explorer of other people’s misery by the device of a superficial personal transposition. His identification with his hero is profound. Though James’s own life was not a tragedy, Hyacinth’s deeply wounded sensibility is James’s, his joys are those of James, his ambiguity towards his project is the ambiguity of James himself towards life, and the frustration of Hyacinth is the expression of a deep sense of exclusion from life in James himself. Hyacinth could only resolve his terrible dilemma by suicide, presenting us with a spectacle of tragic frustration which James himself only escaped by the practice of that art which was, in one sense, itself a retreat from the life of action.
James recognized this recessive aspect of himself in other places, notably in the curious late story ‘The Jolly Corner’, published in 1908. In this story the hero, Spencer Bryden, returns, as did James himself in 1904, to the United States after a long absence in Europe. In his childhood home he meets the ghost of his other potential self, that self which remained at home. This other self, if realized, would have made money and tasted power; in other words, would have lived rather than written about life. The duality of character is deep in James. It is the source of much of his ambiguity, his power to see both sides of a question. Hyacinth also, to his destruction, can see each side of the question so well that the only action available to him is self-destruction, which is itself a symbolic statement, the only work of art available to him. In James the incapacity for action no doubt has deep roots in his personal psychological makeup (richly examined in Leon Edel’s biography*), of which that famously obscure physical disability which prevented him from joining in the American Civil War was probably as much symptom as cause.
Hyacinth Robinson’s origins are of course nothing like those of James in real life, but they are a significant version of the childhood fantasy, experienced by many people, first revealed by Freud and called by him ‘the family romance’. James identifies himself (and the reader) with this fantasy, the essence of which is that the small child believes, in some part of him, that his real parents are persons of great distinction, of royal or noble status, and that those whom he knows as parents, however fond of them he may be, are merely bringing him up. Royal but obscure parentage is a common feature of folk-tale and romance, those predominantly psychological forms of traditional narrative. Thus James’s ‘history’ has also, at a deeper level, a resemblance to folk-tale. Hyacinth’s delicacy and refinement are emphasized from the first. Throughout the book his noble blood, though illegitimate, is taken both by himself and by the author as a source both of shame and of his intrinsically superior quality, which allows him, though poor and with little formal education, to pass for a gentleman.
There is nothing totally improbable in all this, and the hero of a novel needs to be interesting and unusual in some respects. These circumstances of origin are turned by James to practical realistic effect. Nevertheless the melodramatic circumstances of Hyacinth’s begetting and birth are an image comparable to a fairy-tale, in which the lowly hero, with whom both author and reader must identify themselves, is revealed to have more in him, to be more noble, than the commonplace world realizes. As in a fairy-tale, too, the story of Hyacinth is one of growing up, of maturation.
The fairy-tale itself, though a traditional form, depends on personal self-projection on to the hero or heroine. Its centre of action is the web of relationships with parent-figures which, being more general than ‘the family romance’, may be called ‘the family drama’. At the very core of The Princess Casamassima is James’s own personal fairy-tale or myth, which can be traced in so many of his novels, whether the protagonist be male or female. As in a fairy-tale the other characters are, at their deepest level, father- or mother-figures, or projections of the protagonist’s own developing psyche. The mother-figures and father-figures, here Miss Pynsent and the equally humble elders, Mr Vetch and M. Poupin, though protective become inadequate. In so far as that shows that the hero has outgrown them it reveals his own genuine maturity and self-reliance. The other significant character at this deep psychological non-realistic level is Paul Muniment, to be seen as a complement to the hero himself. The figure of Muniment is, as it were, all that part of the totality of growing up which is not represented by the character of the hero himself. Hyacinth and Muniment are thus the complementary aspects of a total central protagonist. Paul Muniment is only a little older than Hyacinth, and is everything that Hyacinth is not: calm, decisive, undivided in himself, resolute in action, not a gentleman. Hyacinth and Paul together represent that ‘twinned hero’ who exists in so many of James’s other novels, and is, psychologically speaking, the total central protagonist. Paul is action and Hyacinth is feeling. Together they make a whole. Yet Paul, at the literal level, for all his friendliness, leads Hyacinth into the path of death. The total ‘hero’ is divided against himself. In the psyche, as James seems to feel, action kills feeling. Yet action is called for, and is not condemned. In the economy of the deep central fairy-tale or mythic structure Muniment is that aspect of the total hero which survives in the harsh world, tougher, more vulgar, than his higher self, represented by Hyacinth.
The structure of all fairy-tales has another major significant figure; the Other, female if the protagonist is male, and naturally enough in the fairy- or folk-tale, a princess. It is she whom the hero seeks as he breaks out of the constricting family circle of parent-figures. She is the magnet and the prize, representing all that the hero yearns for, of art, beauty, love. The device in the plot by which Hyacinth, the hero of humble origins, yet wonderfully self-assured, is brought into contact with the Princess is perhaps somewhat awkward, but their meeting is a psychological necessity to the story as a whole.
Here James’s personal fairy-story varies from the traditional pattern. In that, the hero carries out various adventures and after a complicated series of events wins the princess. Hyacinth, in contrast, is sought out by, rather than seeks, the Princess. Hyacinth represents that aspect of the maturing hero which is without aggression. All his desires are channelled into the enjoyment, but not the possession, of beauty and art. Yet a hero must act. The course of the story demands that, carried away in a rare moment of exaltation, he should promise to take action – an action which in the end he nobly refuses to take in its positive form, yet the obligation of which, as a sacred vow, by self-sacrifice, he nobly fulfils upon himself. Taken at a more realistic level, which corresponds to the deeper psychological pattern, Hyacinth fails to realize the full sexual desire that would be natural to a lively and reasonably well-fed young man, except when he has cause to be jealous of Paul Muniment with the Princess. He has a kind of impotence. Even the beautiful and lusty Millicent, who has a genuine fondness for him, is shown only to arouse desire when Hyacinth has the devastating intuition that his time has come and that the Princess has dropped him. The Princess is fond of Hyacinth, but never feels, apparently, any more sexual interest in him than he in her. What happens is that the relatively coarse-grained, sturdy Paul Muniment, his hands stained from his chemical work, representing those positive aspects of the ‘total’ hero that Hyacinth cannot, becomes her lover.
The traditional fairy-tale pattern is one of successful achievement. The hero breaks out of the family circle and wins the princess. Only that aspect of the total hero which Hyacinth cannot sustain, but which is represented by Paul Muniment, achieves that success. What then is there for Hyacinth but death? And he must kill himself. No father-figure giant quells him. Hostile father-figures are notably absent in this tale. The tragedy of Hyacinth, so sympathetically explored by Henry James, and common enough in life, is that of the hero who fails to grow up, who cannot achieve positive action, much as he longs to. Some deep inhibition holds him back.
In the pattern of folk-tale and fairy-tale such inhibition is commonly represented by a hostile character in the story, and if we pursue this line of thought – remembering always that we are working at the deeper psychological level which all rich stories possess – we must further question the Princess. She is a kind of witch. She offers a vision of art and wealth to Hyacinth, and he falls in love with the ensemble to such an extent that his love for the beautiful things of life prevents him taking the action he has vowed to perform. He does not kill himself because he is afraid of his assignment to assassinate a powerful political figure, but because he has lost his faith in revolution, which would destroy beautiful things. In this he represents James’s own views, as we know from his letters and essays referring to the French Revolution. But the equation of a powerful political figure with the world of art is only partial. Hyacinth’s refusal to destroy is also an inability to create, and reflects deeper internal conflicts in the story. The Princess is a witch-figure who fatally lures the hero away from his proper course of action. She is also, from another point of view, herself the object of art which is both desirable yet unattainable. She is a temptress whose wiles could only be overcome if she herself were overcome, either by being taken and subdued as a lover, or by being completely rejected. Perhaps Paul Muniment does both. Hyacinth can neither conquer and live in the world of art and beauty, nor reject and destroy it. The Princess is the beautiful but dangerous mother-figure who destroys the hero.
Such is the deep, inner pattern of The Princess Casamassima which can easily be related to the intrinsic fable or myth of many of James’s other stories, large and small. Its evocation is the ultimate source of the power, as of the ambiguity, of the book. The sensitive exploration of the dilemma enhances our appreciation of it. It is, after all, part of the lives of most of us, and by rendering it in such a variety of circumstance James reveals a part of ourselves to ourselves with a sensitivity and a beauty that makes its recognition an act both of sympathy and encouragement which strengthens our own sensitivities and courage.
Many elements went to the making of The Princess Casamassima. The inner fable and the general sense of London life have been mentioned. There were also literary sources, and information which must have been gleaned from newspapers, reinforcing the mixture of imagination and fact that makes up the novel.
The prime literary source seems to be the novel Virgin Soil by Turgenev, which James reviewed in its French version Les Terres vierges for the periodical the Nation in 1877. The hero of Virgin Soil, Nezhdanov, is the illegitimate son of a nobleman who becomes involved with revolutionaries, falls in love with an aristocratic lady, loses her to a comrade, becomes disillusioned with socialism, and finally commits suicide in bitterness of heart and despair of all values. The resemblance is sufficient to allow us to suppose that it influenced James, consciously or unconsciously. Yet there are many things in The Princess Casamassima which do not appear in Virgin Soil and many differences of emphasis and interest.
Another supporting influence of a different kind, especially in the earlier pages of The Princess Casamassima, comes from Dickens. The characterization of Paul Muniment’s crippled sister, Rose, whom he devotedly looks after, owes something to that of the crippled dolls’ dressmaker Jenny Wren in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend. The unselfpitying sharpness of tongue and observation of a home-bound crippled woman, and something of the turn of phrase, are common to both. One can see why James needed to create such a character. Paul Muniment needs to be given some domestic background, partly to fill out our picture of a human being, partly to show his real unaffected personal goodness, partly to create a common ground on which Hyacinth may meet him. The domestic background of Paul Muniment as a low-paid solitary bachelor in lodgings would not offer much in the way of psychological observation nor variety of interest. For him to be married would change the conception of a ruthlessly single-minded man determined on revolution. He needs to be shown with some warmth of feeling, which his support for his crippled sister reveals.
The situation of Rose allows the introduction of another, different character, Lady Aurora Langrish. She is genuine English gentry, shy and ungainly in person; she occupies her time in works of personal help to the poor, as did a number of ladies of her time. She does not indulge in the pleasures of her rich family and provides another version of possible response to poverty and deprivation. Though not strictly a ‘Dickensian’ figure it is by the creation of the Dickensian Rose Muniment that Lady Aurora can be brought to meet Paul, whom she comes to love hopelessly, and to be contrasted with the Princess.
We meet another ‘Dickensian’ character briefly in the opening pages of the novel. The formidable Mrs Bowerbank, wardress of the prison, recalls no specific Dickensian character, but her function, her masterful masculinity, her style of talk, and the touch of patronizing amusement with which her manners on her visit to Miss Pynsent’s little parlour are described, all recall Dickens. So do the grim Millbank prison and the dying prisoner to which Miss Pynsent is eventually persuaded to bring the child. Here the Dickensian influence leads to a non-Dickensian realism without Dickensian grotesquerie. James did actually visit Millbank prison to learn what it was like. Whatever faint echoes of Dickensian prison scenes may be aroused, his description, atmospheric, with only brief detail, deeply humane, is fully Jamesian.
After the prison visit, the novel jumps some eight years and we find that Hyacinth is an apprentice bookbinder. James makes his surrogate hero into a fine craftsman with a deep aesthetic sense. He is as near to being an artist, whether of words or materials, like James, as could plausibly be arranged for one so poor. James’s genius led him to choose a trade which both lent itself to his personal fable and to the kind of social action and interest which are the general concern of the novel. Many of the revolutionaries of the time were skilled artisans. Such persons, of superior quality, with some education, acutely conscious of the terrible poverty just beneath their own status, able to assess the disparity of such suffering with the vast wealth of the privileged few, were naturally attracted to the radical and revolutionary ideas which were proliferating throughout Europe, where other regimes were more oppressive than in England.
Educated readers, of the kind to whom James hoped to appeal, were aware both of the European social situation, and also of the increasing acts of terrorism that resulted from them. Most people, including James himself, did not believe that England herself was on the brink of revolution. The British working-man was thought to be too sensible, and James himself notes ‘the desire which one finds in the Englishman, in proportion as he rises in the world, to approximate to the figure of the gentleman’.* Both J. M. Dent in real life and Hyacinth in the novel illustrate the young Englishman’s desire and capacity to achieve ‘the figure of the gentleman’. But the state of England was nonetheless alarming and James himself was struck, as so many observers have been before and since, with the spectacle of England’s decline. In January 1885, when he had already contracted to write The Princess Casamassima, he wrote in a letter to Grace Norton, in words which still find an echo today:
There is very little ‘going on’ – the country is gloomy, anxious, and London reflects its gloom. Westminster Hall and the Tower were half blown up two days ago by Irish Dynamiters, there is a catastrophe to the little British force in the Soudan in the air… and a general sense of rocks ahead in the foreign relations of the country – combined with an exceeding want of confidence – indeed a deep disgust – with the present ministry in regard to such relations. I find such a situation as this extremely interesting, and it makes me feel how much I am attached to this country and, on the whole, to its sometimes exasperating people. The possible malheurs – reverses, dangers, embarrassments, the ‘decline’, in a word, of old England, go to my heart, and I can imagine no spectacle more touching, more thrilling and even dramatic, than to see this great precarious, artificial empire, on behalf of which, nevertheless, so much of the strongest and finest stuff of the greatest race (for such they are) has been expended, struggling with forces which perhaps, in the long run, will prove too many for it.
‘Deep popular discontent’ was noted in the Saturday Review in March 1882. A letter to The Times of 2 March 1885 commented that a recent demonstration by the unemployed ‘ought surely to arouse all thinking men to a sense of the gravity of the dangers which threaten this country if the Government intend to take no steps to relieve the miseries of these starving thousands’.
The crisis was by no means confined to England. All the countries of Europe shared in the general discontent. In France in 1871 occurred the brief revolution of the Commune which was still vividly remembered. In the novel, its ideals are cherished by M. Poupin. In other countries, especially in Russia, where autocracy and misery were much greater, there was an ever-increasing urgency for radical revolution, to remove the corrupt rich who governed. Who should replace them, and how, admitted of many answers. There was a great variety of radical thought, a confusion in the minds of most between socialism, communism, nihilism. What was certain was the series of terrorist bomb attacks and assassinations in Europe and England. The Times reported a series of attacks in Russia in 1879 and 1880, culminating in the assassination of the Tsar in 1881; but 1884 and 1885, when The Princess Casamassima was in James’s mind, were also reported as being much troubled. Readers of The Times in 1884 and 1885 were informed of many European terrorist attempts.
Britain was not free from such events. The most shocking was the murder in May 1882 of Lord Frederick Cavendish, Chief Secretary for Ireland, and of the Undersecretary Thomas Burke, in Phoenix Park in Dublin by the Fenians. In March 1883 the Local Government Board Offices in London were blown up and at the same time there was an unsuccessful attempt to blow up the offices of The Times itself. In October 1883 two underground railways in London were dynamited in order to catch the crowds coming from an exhibition. In February 1884 part of Victoria Station was blown up; in May Scotland Yard (the London police headquarters), houses in St James’s Square, and Nelson’s Column were all attacked; and there was an attempt in December to blow up London Bridge. During the next few months successful and damaging attempts were made to bomb the House of Commons, Westminster Hall and the Tower of London.
Many of these attacks were due to the Irish question and many were bombings. In detail they were only indirectly stimulating to James. Bombing was too indiscriminate, and he lacked knowledge of Ireland. But they contributed strongly to the general sense in England of insecurity, and to the general English fear of international conspiracy and terrorism which he uses in the novel.
James knew and was interested especially in the English, of whom his view was characteristically ambivalent. While he preferred to live in ‘our dear old stupid, satisfactory London’, that ‘grimy Babylon by the Thames’, he saw England’s decline; he saw the corruption of the rich and the suffering of the poor. London incorporated so much that helped to feed international terrorism: poverty, despair, exclusion from the surrounding wealth. Internationally organized terrorism offered practical examples of mysterious threats to life and order. There was a general suspicion amongst the English educated classes that some internationally organized group existed which was dedicated to overturning society in its present form. This international secret organization of terrorism therefore affected his imagination all the more in that it reinforced his personal fairy-tale anxieties.