The Histories

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 1864 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 such an inveterate diner-out 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 naturalized in 1915, was awarded the O.M., and died in 1916.

In addition to many short stories, plays, books of criticism, autobiography and travel, Henry James wrote some twenty novels, Watch and Ward being the first and Roderick Hudson the second. Others include The American, Daisy Miller, The Europeans, Washington Square, The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians, The Princess Casamassima, The Tragic Muse, The Spoils of Poynton, What Maisie Knew, The Awkward Age, The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl.

GEOFFREY MOORE was born in London. After war service in the R.A.F. he read English at Cambridge. His career as an academic has included appointments at the universities of Wisconsin, Tulane, New Mexico, Southern California, Kansas and Harvard. In 1955 he became the first full-time lecturer in American literature at a British university (Manchester), and from 1962 to 1982 he was Professor of American Literature (now Emeritus) at the University of Hull.

Geoffrey Moore has run a weekly arts programme on American radio, and edited and produced for BBC Television. He was a contributor to the Times Literary Supplement for many years and is now a regular reviewer for the Financial Times. His other publications include Poetry from Cambridge in Wartime (1947). The Penguin Book of Modern American Verse (1954), Poetry Today (1958), American Literature and the American Imagination (1964), American Literature (1964), and The Penguin Book of American Verse (1977, revised 1983).

Geoffrey Moore is General Editor for the works of Henry James in Penguin and, in addition to Roderick Hudson, has edited and introduced The Portrait of a Lady and Daisy Miller for the Penguin Classics.

PATRICIA CRICK, one-time scholar of Girton College, Cambridge, is a teacher of modern languages.

RODERICK HUDSON

Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand

Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 2196, South Africa

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.

INTRODUCTION

He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars.

… Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars.

William Blake, Jerusalem

[The works of] almost all the great American novelists offer evidence of the persistent difficulty of using characters to illustrate ideas while at the same time investing them with a dramatic and personal vitality that breaks the bounds of any assigned representational function. Perhaps this explains why in the treatment of James, and, even more, of Hawthorne and Melville, it is conspicuously easier for critics to derive the allegorical significance of character from symbols and formal devices, abstractly considered, than from the complicated and modifying inclusion of these within the dramatic rendering of experience… Readers of [James’s] books sometimes act as if they are obliged to get beyond everything that is obvious, including their ‘merely’ personal reactions to it, so as to reach the supposedly deeper realms of meaning. As a consequence, the word ‘meaning’ has become associated not with what we experience as we read but… with what we figure out after we are through. My point throughout is that the meaning of these novels is apprehended only by our whole sensibility, including the simplest forms of excitement and amusement. This can be shown only by pointing to specific passages…

Richard Poirier, The Comic Sense of Henry James

When Henry James was in his sixties and living at Lamb House in Rye he undertook the self-imposed task of revising those of his fictions that he considered worthy. The first book he chose for the New York Edition (1907–9) was Roderick Hudson, and he recalls in his Preface that it was begun in Florence in the spring of 1874, and ‘earnestly pursued during a summer partly spent in the Black Forest and… during three months passed near Boston’. He calls it ‘my first attempt at a novel, a long fiction with a “complicated” subject’.

This is a little disingenuous, since in 1871 he had published a novel the subject of which was quite complicated – although it was sufficiently short to run for only five numbers in the Atlantic Monthly (August to December). It was called Watch and Ward, and James thought highly enough of it to revise it for book publication three years after Roderick Hudson appeared in the Atlantic (January to December 1875). However, it failed – as the critic of the Nation said at the time – to present people who were believable; they are merely mouthpieces for the author’s ideas and feelings. The setting is the United States, but the background is vague – in contrast to Roderick Hudson, in which, once James gets into his stride, the reader’s imagination is kindled by the description of Italy and of James’s Roman circle, on whom some of the characters are based. What had happened to produce such a change?

The answer is maturity – and a close reading of the novels of Turgenev, Balzac, George Eliot and George Sand. When James decided to dedicate himself to writing and produced his first piece for the North American Review he was twenty-one years old. This article shows that James had already in theory the right ideas. He sees clearly, for example, what is good in Sir Walter Scott – how ‘life-like’ his ‘portraits’ are. But it took him ten years to produce anything like the same effects. In those ten years he paid his first visit to Italy (1869–70). It was this, and a subsequent visit between 1872 and 1874, which gave him the inspiration which brings Roderick Hudson to life.

There is a modernity about the technique which is unusual for 1874. It begins in medias res. Although a great deal of Mallet history follows later, James merely informs us at the beginning that a certain Rowland of that name, having two weeks to spare before sailing to Europe, had arranged to spend them with Cecilia, ‘the widow of a nephew of his father’. The fact that Rowland has such a symbolic surname is probably meant to signify both his identification with the artistic process he so much admires in Roderick and the heavy sobriety of his character. On the face of it ‘Rowland Mallet’ ought to be the name of the sculptor – but, of course, that would never do. The name is banal – whereas ‘Roderick Hudson’ has a brave exploratory ring. Another unusual feature for a nineteenth-century novel is the ‘peripheral’ opening. Why so much about Rowland when the story is about Roderick? This is a technique used successfully by twentieth-century novelists – Scott Fitzgerald, for example, in the original version of Tender is the Night. The hero is not forced on us at the outset in the manner of the traditional nineteenth-century novel. We grow into awareness. James gives a more fundamental reason in the 1907 Preface: ‘The centre of interest throughout is in Rowland Mallet’s consciousness, and the drama is the very drama of that consciousness’.

Rowland is well-off and given to charitable impulses; he wants passionately ‘to care for something or for somebody’. At this point our hero, in the person of Roderick Hudson, appears on cue – or at least the mention of him brought up by Cecilia showing Rowland one of his statues. It is of a youth drinking from a gourd, and the word ‘Thirst’ is engraved in Greek on the pedestal. Rowland is immensely impressed and declares the sculpture a work of genius. Later that day the artist himself appears, and Rowland’s reaction – as set down in James’s limpid and loving prose – is so remarkable as to be worth noting in detail:

Hudson was a tall slender young fellow, with a singularly mobile and intelligent face. Rowland was struck at first only with its responsive vivacity, but in a short time he perceived it was remarkably handsome. The features were admirably chiselled and finished, and a frank smile played over them as gracefully as a breeze among flowers. The fault of the young man’s whole structure was an excessive want of breadth.^* The forehead, though it was high and rounded, was narrow; the jaw and the shoulders were narrow, and the result was an air of insufficient physical substance. But Mallet afterwards learned that this fair slim youth could draw indefinitely upon a fund of nervous force which outlasted and outwearied the endurance of many a sturdier temperament. And certainly there was life enough in his eye to furnish an immortality! It was a generous dark grey eye, in which there came and went a sort of kindling glow which would have made a ruder visage striking, and which gave at times to Hudson’s harmonious face an altogether extraordinary beauty…^* He was clad from head to foot in a white linen suit… He wore a bright red cravat, passed through a ring altogether too splendid to be valuable; he pulled and twisted, as he sat, a pair of yellow kid gloves; he emphasised his conversation with great dashes and flourishes of a light silver-tipped walking-stick, and he kept constantly taking off and putting on one of those slouched sombreros which are the traditional property of the Virginian or Carolinian of romance…

This remarkable figure – the very model of the bohemian artist – is allowed to prattle away, his act including mimicry of Mr Striker, his employer at the law firm where he is a student. When he has gone, Cecilia reveals more about his background. He is in his early twenties, his father – a Southern gentleman – drank himself to death, and his mother returned to her New England origins. Another character is introduced: Mary Garland, a plain girl who is a distant cousin, and clearly devoted to Roderick.

Rowland invites Roderick for a walk and, affected by the beauty of the Connecticut Valley, reflects on ‘this virtual quarrel of ours with our own country’. Roderick is inspired to advocate the practice of ‘American art’. We should ‘fling Imitation overboard’, he says, ‘and fix our eyes upon our National Individuality.’ Although James is poking fun at an idea so gauchely presented, he is also broaching a subject which was to occupy him for much of his writing life: the International theme. Not for a James hero (or heroine) the stay-at-home existence of a Natty Bumppo or a Hester Prynne. He must forever be the agent for contrasting respectable, unimaginative, puritanical America with glittering, decadent, fascinating Europe.

Out of the blue, Rowland asks Roderick whether he would like to go to Rome. Surprised, Roderick soon recovers and leads his new-found friend home to see more of his work. He breaks the news to his mother, with whom he lives – a difficult task, for, says Roderick, ‘She would fain see me all my life tethered to the law, like a browsing goat to a stake.’ Such archaisms, which are common in the novel, consort oddly with the modernity of the over-all technique. Like Mary, Cecilia is not happy at the idea of giving Roderick up. She also sounds a note of warning on the danger of befriending him. However, Rowland – naïve to the last – believes in ‘the essential salubrity of genius’. He calls on Mrs Hudson and finds Mary and Mr Striker also there, both resentful. It is a delicate moment. Rowland has only known Roderick three days. He tells his unbelieving audience that he expects Roderick to become a great artist. Mary finds the whole thing too much like a fairy tale (‘Your coming here all unknown, so rich and so polite, and carrying off my cousin in a golden cloud’). Rowland realizes how much he is ‘meddling with the simple stillness of this little New England home’.

There is a clue at the beginning of Chapter IV which hints at the reason for Roderick’s eventual downfall: his spirits are at the mercy of every change in his circumstances. They are now high, and Cecilia says that he has become so good that he might almost be going not to the Old World but to the Next (as indeed, by a supreme irony, he finally does). James’s observation of this mercurial personality is acute, and strangely convincing in spite of its being at times exaggeratedly melodramatic. Rowland has in the meantime become so interested in Mary Garland that he is completely taken aback when Roderick tells him – as the new-found friends are nearing Europe – that he and Mary are engaged.

In Rome, after three months looking at sculpture, Rowland asks Roderick if he ‘feels wise’. ‘Verily,’ replies Roderick – another archaism which will haunt us through the book, and even persist into James’s Preface. Later, Roderick is sketching the statue of Juno in the gardens of the Villa Ludovisi when three people approach. Fiat lux! It is the first appearance of Christina Light. She is accompanied by a grande dame and an elderly man with ‘a little black eye which glittered like a diamond, and rolled about like a ball of quicksilver, and a white moustache, cut short and stiff, like a worn-out brush’. They are Mrs Light and the Cavaliere Giacosa. But it is Christina who occupies the centre of the stage. Roderick is stunned into ‘submissive adoration’ by:

… A pair of extraordinary dark blue eyes, a mass of dusky hair over a low forehead, a blooming oval of perfect purity, a flexible lip just touched with disdain, the step and carriage of a tired princess – these were the general features of his vision… She left a vague sweet perfume…

‘If beauty is immoral,’ says Roderick, Christina ‘is the incarnation of evil’. This is strangely reminiscent of Rapaccini’s daughter in Hawthorne’s story of that name. Beatrice, the supremely beautiful, has been transformed by her scientist father into a poisonous creature and infects her lover Giovanni.

Roderick works hard all day on a statue of Adam and chatters ‘half the night away in Roman drawing-rooms’. Adam is put into marble and ‘all the world’ comes to see it. Eve takes another three months, and Roderick becomes the talk of Rome. It is in the next chapter (VI) that we have our first introduction to characters drawn from James’s Roman circle. The most important is Gloriani, ‘an American sculptor of French extraction or remotely perhaps of Italian’. This man of forty with ‘a definite, practical scheme of art’, a maker of florid and meretricious statues, may well, thinks Leon Edel,^* be based on William Wetmore Story, about whom James was later to write a memoir. Then there is ‘little’ Sam Singleton, an immensely sympathetic character who seems to be a combination of Eugene Benson and John Rollin Tilton, the New Hampshire painter. Augusta Blanchard, Edel suggests, is based on either Lizzie Boott or Sarah Clarke. About the most colourful character in the group, however, Edel is strangely mute. This is Madame Grandoni, the widow of a German archaeologist, who has since married a Neapolitan music-master and been abandoned by him for a prima donna assoluta. Not that these tendencies towards a roman-à-clef interpretation matter much to us today; what they do tell us, however, is how richly (and acidly) James could etch his acquaintances.

After Adam and Eve, Roderick wildly proclaims his intentions of sculpting Beauty, Wisdom, Power, Daring, Morning, Night, the Ocean etc. Gloriani is scornful but changes his tune when he sees a photograph of Roderick’s Thirst. All the same, he keeps repeating as he looks at it, ‘You can’t keep it up!’ The artist, he quite properly points out, cannot afford to wait for the Muse. He must carry on regardless, a sentiment to be echoed over and over again by Rowland. At this point, Roderick announces that he can work no more, and the friends part – Roderick for Switzerland and Germany, and Rowland for England. Vaguely disquieted, Rowland reassures himself that his young impetuous protégé will be kept on an even keel by his engagement to Mary Garland – an irony almost too heavy for the reader to bear. Annoyed, after some time, that he has heard nothing from Roderick, Rowland sends a brief note through bankers, and learns that he is in Baden-Baden. Roderick wants more money. When Rowland meets him in Geneva, he hears that Roderick has been ‘dangling about several very pretty women’. We are not yet a third of the way through the novel and already an ominous note has been sounded; we know in our hearts that Roderick’s history from then on will be one of decline.

At first, however, Roderick seems to recapture some of his old inspiration. He begins to model a new statue, which he calls A Lady Listening. Gloriani is jubilant; Roderick has been unable to ‘keep up the transcendental style’. In the Bertie Wooster kind of language with which James characterizes Gloriani, he has him say ‘It’s deuced clever, it’s deuced knowing, it’s deuced pretty, but it isn’t the topping high art of three months ago’. Then, when Rowland and Roderick are having one of their customary arguments in Roderick’s studio, there occurs one of the great dramatic moments of the novel (Chapter VIII).

After a peremptory ring of the bell, the door is flung open and there appears ‘an imposing voluminous person’. It is Mrs Light, accompanied by the Cavaliere. Behind them is Christina, ‘following her companions with the same maidenly majesty as before, and leading her great snow-white poodle, who was decorated as before with motley ribbons…’ So remarkable is her presence that she seems to take over the novel. She certainly takes over the company, speaking with outrageous directness about Mamma’s mercenary intentions for her. Mrs Light is hoping for a prince for her daughter, but at the worst – as Madame Grandoni says later – ‘she would take a duke, an English lord, or even a young American with a proper number of millions’. Accordingly, she goes to look at Roderick’s statues in Rowland’s room. The Cavaliere hovers in the background, giving Rowland ‘an odd sense of looking at a little waxen image adjusted to perform certain gestures and emit certain sounds. It had once contained a soul, but the soul had leaked away…’

Rowland pays a return call on the Lights and finds them living in grand style. He passes through half a dozen rooms before being ushered into ‘an immense saloon, at one end of which sat the mistress of the establishment with a piece of embroidery’. She motions him to look behind a screen at the window and there is Roderick modelling Christina: ‘… her shoulders bare, her magnificent hair twisted into a classic coil, her head admirably poised. Meeting Rowland’s gaze she smiled a little, only in the depths of her blue-grey eyes, without moving. She looked divinely beautiful.’

Christina is more than la princesse lointaine, however – more than a mere symbol of the eternal femme fatale. She is all too human – as Rowland, Roderick and the unfortunate Prince learn to their cost. Apart from the character traits which made James reluctant to let her go, so that he brought her back later in his career (The Princess Casamassima, 1886), she is also a creature of whim (‘a complex, wilful, passionate, creature’). She boasts of having turned away an Austrian count because he ‘must have measured from ear to ear at least a yard and a half… “Many thanks, Herr Graf… but your face is too fat.” ’ So, too, is Rowland’s, she tells him, tactless as always (Roderick’s, we remember, is too thin). Everyone is pleased with the bust of Christina; Roderick has captured her essence, not just her beauty. Gloriani comes round (‘Capital handling of the neck and throat…’, ‘By Jove, there’s my statue in the flesh’). Roderick’s fame is such that the fashionable women of Rome rush to him, only to be turned away because they are not ‘interesting’. He agrees, however, to ‘do’ Augusta Blanchard for a certain Mr Leavenworth.

Mrs Light gives a ball. Looking more ravishing than ever, Christina takes Rowland aside. She wishes to know whether he really considers Roderick a genius and, on being satisfied, proceeds to analyse him. He has no manners, but he has the ‘sacred fire’. Finally, she worms it out of Rowland that Roderick is engaged to Mary Garland. Later, he and Roderick have another argument about work. Roderick resents advice because ‘when you expect a man to produce beautiful and wonderful works of art you ought to allow him a certain freedom of action’. For all his outburst, however, he settles down with Rowland at Frascati, where they enjoy the early spring.

Into their pastoral retreat there come – wonder of wonders! – the Lights, the Cavaliere and the Prince Casamassima. They are just, as it were, passing through. We have already met the Prince at the ball, where Christina had rejected him. He continues to pay court, however, for he is hopelessly in love. He even watches Christina stroll away with Roderick without a word, his jaw ‘propped up with his cane’. He has a princely fortune as well as a title, and means to marry Christina. Mrs Light wishes Rowland to see that Roderick is safely out of the way. A rhetorician like Roderick, she unleashes the floodgates for three and a half pages of hopes, dreams – and woe, if she cannot get Christina to marry the Prince. At the end of this saga Rowland says dryly ‘I certainly hope you will nail him.’ This wayward beauty who ‘has played at kissing-games with people who now stand on the steps of thrones’ reappears, flushed, from her walk with Roderick.

In Chapter XIII, half-way through the novel, the incident of the blue flower brings matters to a head. Rowland, wandering alone in the Coliseum, hears Roderick and Christina talking below him. Christina wants, she says, a man she can ‘perfectly respect’, a man who will be ‘large in character, great in talent, strong in will’. Roderick always speaks of himself as a failure; his voice is not the voice of a conqueror. ‘Give me something to conquer,’ says Roderick, like a schoolboy getting ready for a ‘dare’. Whether falling in with this unspoken idea or in order to change the subject, Christina points to a little flower sprouting from the top of a wall twenty feet away. She wonders if it is as ‘intensely blue’ as it appears. Roderick immediately sets off on a dangerous climb to get it. Rowland – and it is at points such as this that we realize he is far more complicated than his priggish utterances suggest – has a sense of ‘sudden admiring glee’. If Roderick could only bring it off it would ‘have a sort of masculine eloquence as an answer to Christina’s sinister persiflage’. But he sees that Roderick will probably kill himself, and intervenes. Roderick is pale and angry, but obviously not entirely unhappy at this unexpected turn of events. What, remarkably, is uppermost in his mind is that he has made Christina ‘obey’ (presumably a reference to his ordering her ‘in a voice almost thunderous’ to sit down, and having her do so).

Roderick doggedly goes on with the Leavenworth statue but once again (horror of Puritan horrors!) takes to staying out until four in the morning. One wonders whether – for all his cultivation of so-called ‘bad company’ – the youthful Roderick is not still a virgin. His reaction to the performance of the Costa Rican envoy’s wife is comically prudish: ‘It was awfully low,’ Roderick said; ‘all of a sudden I perceived it and bolted.’ According to James’s description, all that happened was that the ‘mistress of the house had worn a yellow satin dress and gold heels on her slippers, and at the close of the entertainment had sent for a pair of castanets, tucked up her petticoats and danced a fandango, while the gentlemen sat cross-legged on the floor’. However, Rowland is sufficiently moved by Roderick’s heinous conduct for once to lose his temper: ‘Oh, miserable boy! When you have hit your mark and made people care for you, you shouldn’t twist your weapon about at that rate in their vitals.’

This is a precursor of his fatal outburst at the end of the novel – embodying an analysis so mercilessly accurate (and justified) that, coming on top of everything else, it precipitates Roderick’s self-destruction. However, I cannot forbear from picking up this unwittingly erotic reference on another level, for it comes in a long line of symbolic pointers to the relationship between Rowland and Roderick.

That Rowland is cast in the role of father-figure is clear – with regard to Christina as well as Roderick. But he is also (in the Victorian sense) a lover, not – as James’s conscious mind would have us believe – of Mary alone. Rowland’s real love, from the beginning, has been Roderick. Before declaring his belief in Roderick’s genius to the family circle, he feels it necessary to reassure them as to ‘the purity of his intentions’. In a letter to Cecilia he says ‘I can’t give him up’. At the end, James says ‘Roderick had filled his life. His occupation was gone.’ Rowland, Mary and Christina are rivals for the love of Roderick and all three are stronger than the artist, whose voice was described at the beginning as a ‘not altogether masculine organ’ – this Roderick who impulsively links arms with Rowland. When Roderick does his ‘dare’, as we have seen, Roderick feels masculine solidarity. In death, after a fall which would in reality have mangled him horribly, Roderick is as unmarked as one of his own statues. Goodbye, my fancy. Farewell, my lovely. It is not just because you are an artist that you are allowed to break all the rules; you are in your own way as beautiful as Christina.

Wandering through the Trastevere one day, Rowland encounters Christina in the church of St Cecilia. They speak of Roman Catholicism, which she is embracing in order to marry Casamassima. For his own part, says Rowland, ‘I don’t see an opening as big as your finger-nail where I could creep into it’ – a phrase straight out of Henry James Sr or brother William. They speak also of Roderick. Since he is in love with her, says Rowland, her great influence should be exerted for good. Hudson – as he now calls him – ‘does not need, as an artist, the stimulus of strong emotion, of passion. He is better without it; he is emotional and passionate enough when he is left to himself…’ In other words, hands off, Christina! What Rowland does not admit to himself is that if Roderick had no Christina-figure it would be necessary for him to invent one: a ‘transcendental’ statue of Beauty. He is not in love with her; he is in love with what she represents. Nor is she in love with him – except, as she later admits, as a brother (‘Then I could adore him. I would nurse him, I would wait on him and save him all disagreeable rubs and shocks’). Neither Roderick nor Christina has the intestinal fortitude for love, that ‘ever-fixèd mark, / That looks on tempests and is never shaken’. Sensing the rivalry, Christina asks Rowland sarcastically if there were not some novel in which a beautiful wicked woman who has ensnared a young man has his ‘father’ come to beg her to let him go. If she gives him up, will she be doing something ‘magnanimous, heroic, sublime’?

Rowland goes to the studio and finds Roderick carving ‘a lazzarone lounging in the sun; an image of serene, irresponsible, sensuous life’. Leavenworth is with him. ‘Something in the style of the Dying Gladiator?’ he asks. ‘Oh no,’ says Roderick, ‘he is not dying, he is only drunk.’ Humourlessly, Leavenworth protests that intoxication is not a proper subject for sculpture. ‘No cork has ever been drawn at my command!’ he adds. This is a comic set-piece of first quality, and James has Roderick lead his patron further into absurdity by answering his remarks seriously. The discovery of a copy of Christina’s bust produces the unsolicited information that she has accepted Prince Casamassima. Leavenworth does not notice that Roderick is immensely affected by this news, and commands the unveiling of the statue he has commissioned. Roderick twitches off the dust-sheet, and Culture stands revealed, to the evident approval of its patron. Roderick, however, disowns it. At this point Rowland steps in and tells him that he is standing ‘on the edge of a gulf’ – a significant remark in view of what is to happen later. He must make the effort of will necessary for finishing his work.

What can Rowland do to make Roderick work like little Sam Singleton? He conceives the idea of bringing Mrs Hudson and Mary Garland to Italy; they, he thinks, could perhaps be the voice of Roderick’s conscience. He does not actually say this, however. What he says is that he took Roderick away and now it is his duty to ‘restore him to their hands’. After some reflection, Roderick decides that this is what he wants, too. Impulsively, he telegraphs and receives the reply that they will be on their way immediately. As time passes, Rowland expects to learn that Roderick has gone to Leghorn to meet the ship, but, having heard nothing, he hurries to Roderick’s lodgings in order to check. As he reaches the hall entrance he is overtaken by Roderick, and at that very moment Mary Garland – who has arrived earlier – advances from within. She looks past Rowland at her fiancé, and her eyes, when they meet Rowland’s again, are ‘formidable’.

She soon settles down, however, and is impressed by the sights of Rome. At the same time she is also frightened: ‘Before me lies an immense new world, and it makes the old one, the poor little narrow familiar one I have always known, seem pitiful.’ In the evenings she sits, seemingly content, with a piece of needlework – ‘penny plain’ to Christina’s ‘twopence coloured’. Roderick tells Rowland that his mother and Mary are no help. On the contrary – another week and he will want to poison them. Rowland is shocked to the depths of his bourgeois soul by this expression of the artist’s impatience with anything and everything that gets in the way of his work (and, indeed, with Christina so much on his mind, his life, too!). He plunges into one of his ‘Miserable boy!’ routines, exclaiming that they are the most perfect of women – which, even if it were true, would matter little to Roderick.

Gloriani comes to mock at a bust that Roderick has made of his mother and stays to marvel at the ‘poetry of fidelity’ that he has put into it. The plans for Christina’s marriage drag on. Mrs Hudson and Mary are invited to tea with Madame Grandoni, and they go with Roderick. Christina arrives, uninvited. Afterwards, she tells Rowland that she has taken an ‘immense fancy’ to Mary. Two days later, Rowland receives a visit from the Cavaliere Giacosa. He is in great distress; Christina has broken off her marriage. Mrs Light wants Rowland (the father-figure again) to bring Christina to her senses. On the way, he calls at Roderick’s lodgings and finds him lying ‘like a Buddhist in an intellectual swoon’, dressed in white (also like a bride?) and smelling a large white rose. He is very happy. Christina tells Rowland that the real reason for throwing over the Prince-was not love of Roderick but what amounts to moral integrity, inspired by the character of Mary – for ‘She in my place wouldn’t marry Casamassima’.

When Mrs Light realizes that Rowland has not been able to change Christina’s mind (in fact, as we know, he has not even tried), she descends to insults. Rowland tells the Cavaliere of the reason for Christina’s refusal – that she does not love the Prince – and of the ‘great elevation’ of her attitude, a perfect example of conscience-haunted New England confronting worldly-wise Europe. The Cavaliere hints darkly of a ‘sword of Damocles’ poised above Christina’s head: ‘It hangs by a hair.’ She is ‘to be given ten minutes to recant, under penalty of feeling it fall.’ Poor Cavaliere! Knowing what he knows, he cannot but be torn to the depths of his soul by the knowledge that the once-happy event of which he was so much a part should be used in this mercenary and punitive way.

The secret is, of course – as Rowland and Madame Grandoni work out between them – that the ‘Cavaliere, as he stands, has always needed to be explained’. He is explained, says Rowland, unusually perspicacious in such matters, ‘by the hypothesis that three-and-twenty years ago, at Ancona, Mrs Light had a lover’. Why has Christina, aware of how passionately fond of her the Cavaliere has been, never smelt a rat? Precisely because her mother’s incredibly shabby treatment of him put her off the scent. On receiving the news, Christina gives in. At first blush, this seems out of character. ‘That’s all nonsense,’ says Madame Grandoni, to think that she would care for the world’s opinion. ‘It is nonsense to us, yes,’ says Rowland; ‘but not to the proudest girl in the world, deeply wounded in her pride and not stopping to calculate probabilities, but muffling her shame with an almost sensuous relief in a splendour that stood within her grasp and would cover everything.’

Rowland calls ‘on the evening of the morrow’ upon Mrs Hudson and finds Roderick with her, in the depths of despair. In his self-laceration he says outrageous and wounding things to his uncomprehending mother, and we wonder, once again, how Rowland could have been so lacking in foresight and sensitivity as to bring her and Mary over – apart, that is, from the fact that James needed them for the enrichment of the plot. With them still tucked away in Northampton, and Roderick in Rome, we should simply have gone on with the Rowland–Roderick–Christina story, which has already been heavily exploited by the time Mrs Hudson and Mary are brought into the action at the end of Chapter XVI.

You can’t help me, poor mother – not with kisses nor tears nor prayers! Mary can’t help me – not for all the honour she does me nor all the big books on art that she pores over. Mallet can’t help me – not with all his money nor all his good example nor all his friendship; which I am so immensely well aware of; not with it all multiplied a thousand times and repeated to all eternity!

Rowland realizes that Roderick is now ‘talking passionately, desperately, sincerely, from an irresistible need to throw off the oppressive burden of his mother’s confidence’. She cannot understand what her son is saying. Rowland supplies the answer: ‘It’s what Roderick says. He’s a failure!’ Mrs Hudson ‘tossed her head and timidly bristled’. At last the truth comes out: ‘I have only been thinking night and day of another woman!’ cries Roderick. He angrily denounces Christina’s ‘infernal coquetry and falsity’. There follows the most perceptive (and damaging) description of Roderick’s nature that we have had so far:

Of his never thinking of others save as they figured in his own game, this extraordinary insensibility to the injurious effects of his eloquence was a capital example; the more so as the motive of his eloquence was never an appeal for sympathy or compassion… He never saw himself as part of a whole; only as the clear-cut, sharp-edged, isolated individual…

There was no space in [her] tiny maternal mind for complications of feeling, and one emotion existed only by turning another over flat and perching on top of it. She was evidently not following Roderick at all in his dusky aberrations…

The next day she comes to Rowland’s apartment: ‘Her visit was evidently intended as a formal reminder of forgotten vows.’ Roderick has told her to sell her house in Northampton to pay his debts! While this is going on, Roderick has been admiring his own statues and is called away sharply by Rowland. What does he propose? The answer is: nothing. Rowland suggests that they go and live near Florence in apartments that Mrs Hudson can rent cheaply. Roderick insists that Rowland come with them. ‘If I go with you,’ says Rowland, ‘will you try to work?’ This mild plea elicits another passionate response from Roderick:

Try – try! work – work! In God’s name don’t talk that way, or you’ll drive me mad! Do you suppose I am trying not to work? Do you suppose I stand rotting here for the fun of it? Don’t you suppose I would try to work for myself before I tried for you?

The Villa Pandolfini, where the apartments are, is a delight in the Florentine summer, but the household takes its tone from Roderick, talking with whom is ‘like skating on thin ice’. His companions have ‘a constant mental vision of spots designated “dangerous.” ’

To make matters worse, Mrs Hudson constantly turns her eyes on Rowland ‘in the mutest, feeblest, the most intolerable reproachfulness… in the unillumined void of the poor lady’s mind [her accusations] loomed up like vaguely-outlined monsters’. This thoroughly Jamesian description is embedded in a chapter (XXII) which excels itself in felicity of phrasing. Mrs Hudson’s displeasure conveys ‘an overwhelming imputation of brutality’. One can well imagine the young James suffering in a similar way – perhaps in a domestic circumstance? There is the occasional sexist remark: ‘Women are said by some authorities to be cruel; I know not how true this is, but it may at least be pertinent to remark that Mrs Hudson was intensely feminine.’

Mary, however, is a great help. If she had ‘withdrawn her hand, her heart had by no means recovered its liberty… She spoke of Roderick as she might have done of a person suffering from a serious malady’. Even she, however, finds it hard to understand Roderick, for she had ‘believed that he possessed “genius,” and… supposed that genius was to one’s spiritual economy what a large bank account was to one’s domestic.’ This is only one of a number of sarcastic references to the incomprehension of the philistine in these matters.

One beautiful night at the end of August, there is a ‘perfect moon’. Mrs Hudson, who has by now suffered a complete metamorphosis from Northampton days, is sitting with Mary looking like ‘a little old malevolent fairy’. Mary is crying. Roderick comes upon them and Mrs Hudson ventures timidly to say that it is a beautiful night. This sets Roderick off again.

‘Take me at least out of this terrible Italy’, he cries. He wants to go ‘where nature is coarse and flat, and men and manners are vulgar’ – Germany, he suggests. Rowland compromises by offering them Switzerland. On their way through the St Gothard Pass they stop and Rowland gathers flowers for Mary. At one point, where a flower is out of reach, he thinks that he will emulate Roderick with Christina Light in the Coliseum. ‘Will you trust me?’ he rather oddly asks, wondering whether Mary will ‘shriek and swoon as Christina had done’. She does not, of course, and Rowland, red in the face, brings the flower back. She asks why he did it and he wants to say ‘Because I love you!’ But, says James, ‘it was not morally possible’. He says instead: ‘Because I wanted to do something for you.’

They stay in a ‘little unpainted inn’ at Engelthal and do a great deal of walking, Rowland hoping all the while that Mary’s interest in Roderick might be languishing. Yet, noble friend that he is, he reminds Roderick that he has agreed not to break off his engagement to Mary. Pressed, Roderick says that although Mary is a marvellous girl he doesn’t care for her. A few days later, Rowland tries to sound out Roderick on the subject of Christina. He wonders aloud where she is and ‘what sort of a life she is leading her prince’. While he is speaking, Roderick is watching the giant shadow of a figure on the mountainside and takes some time to reply. Finally he says ‘She’s a humbug!’ Childishly, he claims that he forced her in the end to admit that he is ‘a great man’. To spare his sensibilities, she promised to ‘turn off her prince, and the idea of her doing so made me as happy as to see a perfect statue shaping itself in the block’. Rowland, of course, cannot tell the bitter Roderick the real reason for Christina’s sudden change of mind. ‘The poor girl’, he says simply, ‘did the best she could.’

The giant shadow turns out to be little Sam Singleton. He stays for a while, always working, putting Roderick to shame. Later in the week Rowland and Roderick go to Engelberg, and in the church of the monastery (‘remarkable, like most of the churches of Catholic Switzerland, for a hideous style of devotional ornament’), Rowland encounters the Prince and Princess Casamassima. Christina tells the Prince that she wishes to speak to Rowland alone, and he, courteous as always, falls in with her wishes. She wants to know, of course, how Roderick has taken the news of her marriage. Rowland in his turn asks after the Cavaliere. After some hesitation, Christina says that he has retired to Ancona on a pension. She is anxious that Rowland should know that she was sincere – ‘I was beaten and broken; they were stronger than I.’ The Prince comes back at this point and then, very briefly, Roderick. He is so struck by her presence that all reproach is driven from his mind. At the door of her inn Christina stops and looks back.

Roderick is so quiet that Mary Garland inquires what happened to him at Engelberg. In an atmosphere of oppressive heaviness, Rowland feels ‘conscious of a sudden collapse in his moral energy; a current that had been flowing for two years with liquid strength seemed at last to pause and stagnate.’ Roderick asks Rowland for a thousand francs so that he can go to Interlaken to see Christina. He believes that she has encouraged him. What profit does he expect to derive from his excursion? Merely being near Christina, he replies; ‘she has waked me up amazingly’. When Rowland refuses the money, he says that he will borrow it from Mary. This immediately brings Rowland round. He gives Roderick the keys to his money box and suggests (will he never learn?) that with ‘so much steam on’ it would be better to use it for something more creative. ‘Hanging about Christina Light’ will do him no good. Roderick as always is magnificently impatient with such mundane logic: ‘I want what she gives me, call it by what name you will.’ In the face of Rowland’s protests he says that he will take the money ‘only under compulsion’. While Rowland is pondering this odd remark Roderick goes away, to reappear with the news that Mary has given him all she had: twenty-four francs: ‘That’s not enough’. Rowland feels a ‘movement of irrepressible elation’. Now, surely, Roderick has ‘shattered the last link in the chain which bound Mary to him’? But, of course, it is not so.

Roderick says that he feels ‘an insurmountable aversion’ to taking Rowland’s money. With ‘the ring of his fine old Virginian pomposity’ he announces that he has suffered and that there are things that Rowland does not know about. Rowland turns pale. ‘These things – what are they?’ Roderick says mysteriously that they are ‘women, principally, and what relates to women’. Rowland, he says, has ‘no imagination – no sensibility, nothing to be touched’. He has been obtuse toward Christina, for example; she had taken a fancy to him:

There is something monstrous in a man’s pretending to lay down the law to a sort of emotion with which he is quite unacquainted – in his asking a fellow to give up a lovely woman for conscience’ sake when he has never had the impulse to strike a blow for one for passion’s!… If you can’t understand it, take it on trust and let a poor visionary devil live his life as he can!

Rowland cannot take this ‘insolence of egotism’ any longer. He overflows with anger, telling Roderick that he is ‘incredibly ungrateful’ and talking ‘arrogant nonsense’. Just because he has not spoken of his feelings does not mean to say that he has none. ‘I have been constant,’ says Rowland in just about the most priggish statement that he has made so far; ‘I have been willing to give more than I received.’ Roderick is scornful. He has made sacrifices? Yes, says Rowland. In the first place it was a perpetual sacrifice to live with such a ‘transcendent egotist’. Roderick cannot believe his ears; it had never struck him that way. He has ‘a sudden violent curiosity for news about himself’. Rowland tells him how selfish he is and how he has put up with it for the sake of what went with it. Roderick is not only taken aback, he is obviously deeply wounded: ‘I have been eager, grasping, obstinate, vain, ungrateful, indifferent, cruel?… you have wanted to part company, to bid me go on my way and be hanged?’ he asks incredulously. ‘Repeatedly,’ says Rowland; ‘Then I have had patience and forgiven you.’ ‘Forgiven me, eh?’ says Roderick. ‘Suffering all the while?… I must have been hideous.’ Rowland reveals his love for Mary, and how he has kept it secret because of Roderick’s engagement. Roderick cannot understand how Rowland can have felt these things for two years and not said anything. He tells Rowland in his blunt way ‘She idolises me, and if she never were to see me again she would idolise my memory.’ ‘This might be vivid insight and it might be profound fatuity,’ thinks Rowland, still unwilling to face the truth. Roderick goes on a walk – his last: ‘To have been so stupid damns me more than anything!… Certainly I can shut up shop now… I am fit only to be alone. I am damned!’

These words are so fraught with obvious implication that we are not unprepared for the tragedy of the last chapter. The day continues oppressively heavy and in the evening Rowland is startled by ‘a portentous growl of thunder’. ‘My boy, my boy, where is my boy?’ cries Mrs Hudson in her thoroughly exasperating way. ‘Mr Mallet, why are you here without him?’ Poor Rowland is blamed for bringing them there. When Mary says ‘Could you find him? Would it be of use?’ he realizes the truth of Roderick’s words. Mary is quite prepared to sacrifice Rowland on the altar of her love for Roderick. At breakfast, Roderick has still not appeared. It is a magnificent day. Rowland wanders over the mountains until he sees Singleton approaching. ‘Come down!’ the painter calls. He is looking at something at the bottom of ‘a great rugged wall’. It is Roderick’s body. Although he has fallen from a great height, he is ‘singularly little disfigured’. He has a strangely serene expression, and the rain has conveniently washed away all trace of blood. ‘He was a beautiful fellow!’ says Singleton. Exactly – and he remains beautiful even after falling down a mountain-side.

Since Roderick’s death occurs off-stage, the moment of climax is given to Mary Garland, who ‘in the face of the staring, pitying, awe-stricken crowd, had flung herself with the magnificent movement of one whose rights were supreme, and with a loud tremendous cry, upon the senseless vestige of her love.’ Here, as at some other points where there is high drama, one sees that James can easily fall into the language of the novelette in propria persona and not just when he is writing in character – as in the case of Roderick.

RODERICK HUDSON

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION