The Princess Casamassima

by Henry James

  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.

  HENRY JAMES

  The Princess

  Casamassima

  Edited with an introduction by

  Derek Brewer

  Notes by Patricia Crick

  Penguin Books

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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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

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  A Note on the Text

  Preface to the New York Edition of 1909

  THE PRINCESS CASAMASSIMA

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  I

  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).

  II

  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.

  III

  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 tak
es 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.