The Princess Casamassima

by Henry James

  All of which furthers my remarking how much I have been interested, on reading The Princess Casamassima over, to recognise my sense, sharp from far back, that clearness and concreteness constantly depend, for any pictorial whole, on some concentrated individual notation of them. That notation goes forward here in the mind of little Hyacinth, immensely quickened by the fact of its so mattering to his very life what he does make of things: which passion of intelligence is, as I have already hinted, precisely his highest value for our curiosity and our sympathy. Yet if his highest it is not at all his only one, since the truth for ‘a young man in a book’ by no means entirely resides in his being either exquisitely sensitive or shiningly clever. It resides in some such measure of these things as may consort with the fine measure of other things too – with that of the other faces of his situation and character. If he’s too sensitive and too clever for them, if he knows more than is likely or natural – for him – it’s as if he weren’t at all, as if he were false and impossible. Extreme and attaching always the difficulty of fixing at a hundred points the place where one’s impelled bonhomme4 may feel enough and ‘know’ enough – or be in the way of learning enough – for his maximum dramatic value without feeling and knowing too much for his minimum verisimilitude, his proper fusion with the fable. This is the charming, the tormenting, the eternal little matter to be made right, in all the weaving of silver threads and tapping on golden nails; and I should take perhaps too fantastic a comfort – I mean were not the comforts of the artist just of the raw essence of fantasy – in any glimpse of such achieved rightnesses, whether in my own work or that of others. In no work whatever, doubtless, are they the felicities the most frequent; but they have so inherent a price that even the traceable attempt at them, wherever met, sheds, I think, a fine influence about.

  I have for example a weakness of sympathy with that constant effort of George Eliot’s which plays through Adam Bede and Felix Holt and Tito Melema, through Daniel Deronda and through Lydgate in Middlemarch, through Maggie Tulliver, through Romola, through Dorothea Brooke and Gwendolen Harleth; the effort to show their adventures and their history – the author’s subject-matter all – as determined by their feelings and the nature of their minds. Their emotions, their stirred intelligence, their moral consciousness, become thus, by sufficiently charmed perusal, our own very adventure. The creator of Deronda and of Romola is charged, I know, with having on occasion – as in dealing with those very celebrities themselves – left the figure, the concrete man and woman, too abstract by reason of the quantity of soul employed; but such mischances, where imagination and humour still keep them company, often have an interest that is wanting to agitations of the mere surface or to those that may be only taken for granted. I should even like to give myself the pleasure of retracing from one of my own productions to another the play of a like instinctive disposition, of catching in the fact, at one point after another, from Roderick Hudson to The Golden Bowl, that provision for interest which consists in placing advantageously, placing right in the middle of the light, the most polished of possible mirrors of the subject. Rowland Mallet, in Roderick Hudson, is exactly such a mirror, not a bit autobiographic or formally ‘first person’ though he be, and I might exemplify the case through a long list, through the nature of such a ‘mind’ even as the all-objective Newman in The American, through the thickly-peopled imagination of Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady (her imagination positively the deepest depth of her imbroglio) down to such unmistakeable examples as that of Merton Densher in The Wings of the Dove, that of Lambert Strether in The Ambassadors (he a mirror verily of miraculous silver and quite pre-eminent, I think, for the connexion) and that of the Prince in the first half and that of the Princess in the second half of The Golden Bowl. I should note the extent to which these persons are, so far as their other passions permit, intense perceivers, all, of their respective predicaments, and I should go on from them to fifty other examples; even to the divided Vanderbank of The Awkward Age, the extreme pinch of whose romance is the vivacity in him, to his positive sorrow and loss, of the state of being aware; even to scanted Fleda Vetch in The Spoils of Poynton, through whose own delicate vision of everything so little of the human value of her situation is wasted for us; even to the small recording governess confronted with the horrors of The Turn of the Screw and to the innocent child patching together all ineffectually those of What Maisie Knew; even in short, since I may name so few cases, to the disaffected guardian of an overgrown legend in ‘The Birthplace’, to the luckless fine artist of ‘The Next Time’, trying to despoil himself, for a ‘hit’ and bread and butter, of his fatal fineness, to blunt the tips of his intellectual fingers, and to the hapless butler Brooksmith, ruined by good talk, disqualified for common domestic service by the beautiful growth of his habit of quiet attention, his faculty of appreciation. But though this demonstration of a rooted vice – since a vice it would appear mainly accounted – might yield amusement, the examples referred to must await their turn.

  I had had for a long time well before me, at any rate, my small obscure but ardent observer of the ‘London world’, saw him roam and wonder and yearn, saw all the unanswered questions and baffled passions that might ferment in him – once he should be made both sufficiently thoughtful and sufficiently ‘disinherited’; but this image, however interesting, was of course not by itself a progression, an action, didn’t by itself make a drama. I got my action however – failing which one has nothing – under the prompt sense that the state of feeling I was concerned with might develop and beget another state, might return at a given moment, and with the greatest vivacity, on itself. To see this was really to feel one’s subject swim into one’s ken, especially after a certain other ingenious connexion had been made for it. I find myself again recalling, and with the possible ‘fun’ of it reviving too, how I recognised, as revealed and prescribed, the particular complexion, profession and other conditions of my little presumptuous adventurer, with his combination of intrinsic fineness and fortuitous adversity, his small cluster of ‘dingy’ London associations and the swelling spirit in him which was to be the field of his strange experience. Accessible through his imagination, as I have hinted, to a thousand provocations and intimations, he would become most acquainted with destiny in the form of a lively inward revolution. His being jealous of all the ease of life of which he tastes so little, and, bitten, under this exasperation, with an aggressive, vindictive, destructive social faith, his turning to ‘treasons, stratagems and spoils’ might be as vivid a picture as one chose, but would move to pity and terror only by the aid of some deeper complication, some imposed and formidable issue.

  The complication most interesting then would be that he should fall in love with the beauty of the world, actual order and all, at the moment of his most feeling and most hating the famous ‘iniquity of its social arrangements’; so that his position as an irreconcileable pledged enemy to it, thus rendered false by something more personal than his opinions and his vows, becomes the sharpest of his torments. To make it a torment that really matters, however, he must have got practically involved, specifically committed to the stand he has, under the pressure of more knowledge, found impossible; out of which has come for him the deep dilemma of the disillusioned and repentant conspirator. He has thrown himself into the more than ‘shady’ underworld of militant socialism, he has undertaken to play a part – a part that with the drop of his exasperation and the growth, simply expressed, of his taste, is out of all tune with his passion, at any cost, for life itself, the life, whatever it be, that surrounds him. Dabbling deeply in revolutionary politics of a hole-and-corner sort, he would be ‘in’ up to his neck, and with that precarious part of him particularly involved, so that his tergiversation is the climax of his adventure. What was essential with this was that he should have a social – not less than a socialist – connexion, find a door somehow open to him into the appeased and civilised state, into that warmer glow of things he is precisely to help to
undermine. To look for this necessary connexion was for me to meet it suddenly in the form of that extremely disponible5 figure of Christina Light whom I had ten years before found left on my hands at the conclusion of Roderick Hudson. She had for so long, in the vague limbo of those ghosts we have conjured but not exorcised, been looking for a situation, awaiting a niche and a function.

  I shall not pretend to trace the steps and stages by which the imputability of a future to that young woman – which was like the act of clothing her chilled and patient nakedness – had for its prime effect to plant her in my little bookbinder’s path. Nothing would doubtless beckon us on further, with a large leisure, than such a chance to study the obscure law under which certain of a novelist’s characters, more or less honourably buried, revive for him by a force or a whim of their own and ‘walk’ round his house of art like haunting ghosts, feeling for the old doors they knew, fumbling at stiff latches and pressing their pale faces, in the outer dark, to lighted windows. I mistrust them, I confess, in general; my sense of a really expressed character is that it shall have originally so tasted of the ordeal of service as to feel no disposition to yield again to the strain. Why should the Princess of the climax of Roderick Hudson still have made her desire felt, unless in fact to testify that she had not been – for what she was – completely recorded? To continue in evidence, that had struck me from far back as her natural passion; in evidence at any price, not consenting to be laid away with folded hands in the pasteboard tomb, the doll’s box, to which we usually relegate the spent puppet after the fashion of a recumbent worthy on the slab of a sepulchral monument. I was to see this, after all, in the event, as the fruit of a restless vanity: Christina had felt herself, known herself, striking, in the earlier connexion, and couldn’t resign herself not to strike again. Her pressure then was not to be resisted – sharply as the question might come up of why she should pretend to strike just there. I shall not attempt to answer it with reasons (one can never tell everything); it was enough that I could recognise her claim to have travelled far – far from where I had last left her: that, one felt, was in character – that was what she naturally would have done. Her prime note had been an aversion to the banal, and nothing could be of an effect less banal, I judged, than her intervention in the life of a dingy little London bookbinder whose sensibility, whose flow of opinions on ‘public questions’ in especial, should have been poisoned at the source.

  She would be world-weary – that was another of her notes; and the extravagance of her attitude in these new relations would have its root and its apparent logic in her need to feel freshly about something or other – it might scarce matter what. She can, or she believes she can, feel freshly about the ‘people’ and their wrongs and their sorrows and their perpetual smothered ferment; for these things are furthest removed from those others among which she has hitherto tried to make her life. That was to a certainty where I was to have looked for her – quite off and away (once granted the wisdom of listening to her anew at all) : therefore Hyacinth’s encounter with her could pass for natural, and it was fortunately to be noted that she was to serve for his experience in quite another and a more ‘leading’ sense than any in which he was to serve for hers. I confess I was not averse – such are the possible weaknesses of the artist in face of high difficulties – to feeling that if his appearance of consistency were obtained I might at least try to remain comparatively at my ease about hers. I may add moreover that the resuscitation of Christina (and, on the minor scale, of the Prince and of Madame Grandoni) put in a strong light for me the whole question, for the romancer, of ‘going on with a character’: as Balzac first of all systematically went on, as Thackeray, as Trollope, as Zola all more or less ingeniously went on. I was to find no small savour in the reflexions so precipitated; though I may treat myself here only to this remark about them – that the revivalist impulse on the fond writer’s part strikes me as one thing, a charmingly conceivable thing, but the effect of a free indulgence in it (effect, that is, on the nerves of the reader) as, for twenty rather ineffable reasons, quite another.

  I remember at any rate feeling myself all in possession of little Hyacinth’s consistency, as I have called it, down at Dover during certain weeks that were none too remotely precedent to the autumn of 1885 and the appearance, in the Atlantic Monthly again, of the first chapters of the story. There were certain sunny, breezy balconied rooms at the quieter end of the Esplanade of that cheerful castle-crested little town – now infinitely perturbed by gigantic ‘harbour works’, but then only faded and over-soldiered and all pleasantly and humbly submissive to the law that snubs in due course the presumption of flourishing resorts – to which I had already more than once had recourse in hours of quickened industry and which, though much else has been swept away, still archaically exist. To have lately noted this again from the old benched and asphalted walk by the sea, the twinkling Channel beyond which on occasion the opposite coast of France used to gleam as an incident of the charming tendency of the whole prospect (immediate picture and fond design alike) amusingly to shine, was somehow to taste afresh, and with a certain surprise, the odd quality of that original confidence that the parts of my plan would somehow hang together. I may wonder at my confidence now – given the extreme, the very particular truth and ‘authority’ required at so many points; but to wonder is to live back gratefully into the finer reasons of things, with all the detail of harsh application and friction (that there must have been) quite happily blurred and dim. The finest of reasons – I mean for the sublime confidence I speak of – was that I felt in full personal possession of my matter; this really seemed the fruit of direct experience. My scheme called for the suggested nearness (to all our apparently ordered life) of some sinister anarchic underworld, heaving in its pain, its power and its hate; a presentation not of sharp particulars, but of loose appearances, vague motions and sounds and symptoms, just perceptible presences and general looming possibilities. To have adopted the scheme was to have had to meet the question of one’s ‘notes’, over the whole ground, the question of what, in such directions, one had ‘gone into’ and how far one had gone; and to have answered that question – to one’s own satisfaction at least – was truly to see one’s way.

  My notes then, on the much-mixed world of my hero’s both overt and covert consciousness, were exactly my gathered impressions and stirred perceptions, the deposit in my working imagination of all my visual and all my constructive sense of London. The very plan of my book had in fact directly confronted me with the rich principle of the Note, and was to do much to clear up, once for all, my practical view of it. If one was to undertake to tell tales and to report with truth on the human scene, it could be but because ‘notes’ had been from the cradle the ineluctable consequence of one’s greatest inward energy: to take them was as natural as to look, to think, to feel, to recognise, to remember, as to perform any act of understanding. The play of the energy had been continuous and couldn’t change; what changed was only the objects and situations pressing the spring of it. Notes had been in other words the things one couldn’t not take, and the prime result of all fresh experience was to remind one of that. I have endeavoured to characterise the peremptory fashion in which my fresh experience of London – the London of the habitual observer, the preoccupied painter, the pedestrian prowler – reminded me; an admonition that represented, I think, the sum of my investigations. I recall pulling no wires, knocking at no closed doors, applying for no ‘authentic’ information; but I recall also on the other hand the practice of never missing an opportunity to add a drop, however small, to the bucket of my impressions or to renew my sense of being able to dip into it. To haunt the great city and by this habit to penetrate it, imaginatively, in as many places as possible – that was to be informed, that was to pull wires, that was to open doors, that positively was to groan at times under the weight of one’s accumulations.