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The Princess Casamassima: A Critical Reappraisal
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
In his Preface to The Princess Casamassima James tells us that “the simplest account” of the origin of this novel is that it “proceeded quite directly … from the habit and interest of walking the streets.” He goes on to tell how his perambulations suggested to him the creation of “some individual sensitive nature or fine mind,” a product of those streets yet capable of profiting from all of the civilization that London afforded—all the “freedom and ease, knowledge and power, money, opportunity and satiety, … but … with every door of approach shut in his face.” In sum, “I arrived so at the history of little Hyacinth Robinson—he sprang up for me out of the London pavement.”
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1956
References
1 The Art of the Novel, ed. R. P. Blackmur (New York, 1934), pp. 59–61. The order of quotation is mine.
2 “ … Henry James borrowed wholesale, in plot, story, and characters.”—“The Influence of Turgenev on Henry James,” Slavonic and East European Rev., xx (Dec. 1941), 46–51. Lerner quotes in the passages here given from James's review of Virgin Soil, Nation, xxiv (26 April 1877), 252–254. I take great satisfaction in Lerner's article, for it was the product of a suggestion of mine (carried out beyond my happiest expectation), made in a graduate seminar, that some student investigate the relations of The Princess to Virgin Soil. Because of its place of publication, Lerner's article has been neglected by Jamesian scholars; in fact, I know of only one citation of it—-Clarence Gohdes in The Literature of the American People, ed. A. H. Quinn (New York, 1951), p. 691, n. 7, who calls it “the best treatment of the subject.”
3 Turgenev, Virgin Soil (London, 1911), p. 168 (Lemer's note).
4 F. W. Dupee, Henry James (New York, 1951), p. 153; Stephen Spender, The Destructive Element (Philadelphia, 1953), p. 44; Carl Van Doren, The American Novel (New York, 1921), p. 204; etc.
5 James to Perry, 18 Apr. 1887. Virginia Harlow, Thomas Sergeant Perry (Durham, N. C., 1950), p. 48; see also Harlow, pp. 293,294, 296. For the Turgenev letter to which James refers, see Jean Seznec, “Lettres de Tourguéneff à Henry James,” CL, i (Summer 1949), 202. Perry's translation was in the Leisure Hour Series (Boston, 1877).
6 The Novels of Turgenev, vi and vii, Virgin Soil, tr. Constance Garnett, 2 vols. (New York, 1920).
7 If he had intended to borrow from the start as much as he eventually did, he would hardly have confided to his notebook, “I have never yet become engaged in a novel in which, after I had begun to write and send off my MS., the details had remained so vague.” The Notebooks of Henry James, ed. F. O. Matthiessen and K.B. Murdock (New York, 1947), p. 68.
8 At this period James's admiration for Zola was high: “ … Il n'y a que Zola! I admire him more than you, & mean to write an article for John Morley about him. … Zola's naturalism is ugly & dirty, but he seems to me to be doing something— which surely (in the imaginative line) no one in England & the U. S. is, & no one else here” (James to Perry, 2 Nov. 1879, Harlow, p. 304); “I don't think you did him [Zola] justice in the International. … Zola has his faults and merits; & it doesn't seem to me important to talk of the faults. The merits are rare, valuable, extremely solid” (James to Perry, 16 Feb. 1881, Harlow, p. 309); “I thought you would be interested in Zola's article—though he appears to interest you less than with all his views—his vanity, stupidity, fetidity &c, he does me” (James to Perry, 24 Jan. 1886, Harlow, p. 320).
9 Harlow, p. 319.
10 The Letters of William James, ed. by his son Henry James (Boston, 1920), i, 250; Letters to His Family and Friends, ed. Sidney Colvin (New York, 1918), i, 435.
11 James to Perry, 24 Jan. 1886, Harlow, p. 320. I have often wondered if James's original intention was not to write on the Irish affair.
12 Century Magazine, (Dec. 1888), 219–239.
13 F. O. Matthiessen (Henry James: The Major Phase, New York, 1944, p. 4) cites his habit of morning walks in Venice “looking at pictures, street life, &c, till noon.” There is reason to suppose that he continued the habit in London. As early as 2 March 1878 he proclaimed himself a thorough “cockney.” “I am thoroughly fond of London & in this respect I don't fear comparison with the late Dr. J[ohnson].” Later, he added, “Sir, I leave Dr. J. nowhere”; he asked Perry to come “& be the Bozzy to this passionate Picadillian” (Harlow, pp. 298, 300).
14 Clinton Oliver, “Henry James as a Social Critic,” Antioch Rev., vii (Summer 1947), 251. “There are few books excepting Bleak House which so fully render the feeling of London streets at night.” Alexander Cowie, The Rise of the American Novel (New York, 1948), p. 716. The total rendering of the city provides the “tone” of the book, which James thought “panoramic” and “processional” (The Art of the Novel, p. 90).
15 Henry James, p. 153.
16 The Great Tradition (New York, 1950), p. 172. Messrs. Matthiessen and Murdock (The Notebooks, p. 69), lumping The Princess with The Bostonians, write, “These two novels constitute James's attempt to handle the Dickensian type of social novel.” Spender, p. 44: “a book in the broad English tradition of Dickens and Thackeray.” Elisabeth L. Cary (The Novels of Henry James, New York, 1905, p. 104) speaks of “a momentary inclination toward the art of Dickens.”
17 “A Henry James Jubilee, i,” Cornhill, No. 969 (Winter 1946), 189. The quotation is from a letter to H. G. Wells, 19 Nov. 1905. The Letters of Henry James, ed. Percy Lubbock (New York, 1920), ii, 40.
18 Ibid., p. 193. Putt cites Ch. xiii of A Small Boy and Others.
19 “Charles Dickens and Henry James: Two Approaches to the Art of Fiction,” NCF, v (Sept. 1950), 154.
20 American Fiction (New York, 1936), p. 290. Quinn speaks of “Hyacinth's suicide or murder”l To me, Hyacinth's experience seems much more real, say, than that of Granville Hicks, as reported in the early chapters of Where We Came Out (New York, 1954).
21 Maule's Curse (Norfolk, Conn., 1938), p. 205. “James … invented a cock-and-bull yam about a vast, malignant, ramifying, secret society” (Van Doren, pp. 203–204). See Carr, n. 23 below.
22 “Henry James and the Almighty Dollar,” Hound & Horn, vii (April–June 1934), 434–443. A reference to Hyndman as not quite the Attila to come up through and lead the masses in revolution shows that James knew enough about radicalism to gauge leadership accurately.
22 John Rae, Contemporary Socialism (New York, 1884), p. 271; for what were generally accepted as Bakunin's views at this time, see pp. 271–300. For Bakunin's relations with Turgenev in 1840–42, see also E. H. Carr, Michael Bakunin (London, 1937), pp. 93–104.
24 Turgenev met Kropotkin in Paris in 1878, the year after James took up residence in London. See P. Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist (Boston, 1899), pp. 203–209. But James saw and corresponded with Turgenev after that (Seznec, pp. 203–209).
25 Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez, The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson (New York, 1920), p. 121. I owe this citation to Professor Leon Edel. That James continued to have some association with Kropotkin is an inference that can be drawn from his acquaintance with Edward and Constance Garnett (the latter, the translator of Turgenev) and their Russian circle. See David Garnett, The Golden Echo (New York, 1954), passim.
28 A Little Tour (Boston, 1885), p. 237. Probably too little has been made, in relation to The Princess, of James's trip to this area of social ferment that later produced Felix Gras's The Reds of the Midi (1896). Kropotkin was imprisoned at this time in Lyons.
27 Ibid., pp. 238–239. At Carcassonne, James met a voluble “fierce little Jacobin” and commented in this fashion: “Such a personage helps one to understand the red radicalism of France, the revolutions, the barricades, the sinister passion for theories. … it is yet untouched by the desire which one finds in the Englishman, in proportion as he rises in the world, to approximate the figure of a gentleman” (p. 151). This last certainly has a bearing on Hyacinth's change of view. The “militant democracy” is, of course, the anarchist movement.
28 I owe this information also to Professor Edel. If it is possible to establish as much reading in radicalism as is shown in this essay, after a passage of time and the loss of records, why should one not suppose wider reading? James seems definitely to have “worked up” his subject.
29 See H. M. Hyndman, The Record of an Adventurous Life (New York, 1911), pp. 206–207, 228–230. See also n. 22, above. James's attitude towards Hyndman (a Marxist) might have been determined, of course, by his connections with Bakunin and Kropotkin.
30 “ … her socialist sympathies were an attack upon all present political arrangements” (Henry James, French Poets and Novelists, London, 1878, p. 221).
31 Harlow, p. 304. Not Voltes (an error in transcription), but Jules Vallès, whose 3-part novel, L'Enfant, le Bachelier, L'Insurge (Paris, 1923–24), originally published in 1879,1881, and 1886, is closely autobiographical, being based on the author's long revolutionary career, beginning with the revolution of 1848 and culminating in the Commune.
32 “Introduction,” The Princess Casamassima (New York, 1948), i, xviii–xxv.
33 George Woodcock, in “Henry James and the Conspirators”—Sewanee Rev., lx (Spring 1952), 219–229—properly denying that The Princess is evidence of “an authentic radicalism” on James's part, attacks the anarchist case as stated by Trilling and contends that “the international organization of conspirators in The Princess Casamassima, with its highly rigid form, in fact resembles that of such more or less authoritarian groups as the Italian Carbonari or the Blanquists of France.” This is very dogmatic, because the anarchist organization was secret and its admitted policies differed from its practice. It should be noted, however, that the sole compulsion exerted on Hyacinth is his own honor. There is always a question if he may not back out, and the experienced Poussin tries to dissuade him. Rae's treatment of anarchism (cited in n. 23 above) shows that James's understanding of it was the contemporary understanding. Woodcock would surely not maintain that the radical organization in Virgin Soil was anything but anarchist, yet it closely resembles that in James's novel.
34 On 25 Nov. 1883, James noted, “I have just sent about 100 vols. (mostly French) to the binders” (Harlow, p. 314). Edel, who called my attention to this, points out that this visit occurred just two months before James wrote his first letter to Aldrich offering The Princess as a serial for 1885. If James carried his books to or from the printers, he may have got well acquainted with the persons in Hyacinth's craft.
35 A notable exception is Granville Hicks: “[His] thesis forced him to deal not only with ideas he did not grasp but also with types of character he did not understand” (The Great Tradition, New York, 1935, p. 114). We must remember, however, that when Hicks made this judgment he was an avowed Communist and not likely to have been pleased with the portraits.
36 The Destructive Element, p. 44. Elizabeth Stevenson goes further (The Crooked Corridor, p. 18): “one of the most effective revolutionary figures in English literature.”
37 The Three Jameses: A Family of Minds (New York, 1925), pp. 269–271; so, too, does S. Garley Putt, “A Henry James Jubilee, I,” Cornhill, No. 969 (Winter 1946), 196.
38 The Pilgrimage of Henry James, p. 101; “James as a Revolutionary Theme,” Nation, cxliv (23 April 1938), 472. Miss Bogan surmises that James may have seen Muniment's counterpart among Fourier's followers in his childhood. This is dubious; Muniment is much more modem and “harder” than any Yankee Fourieristes.
39 Cornhill, No. 969, p. 196.
40 Henry James, Man and Author (New York, 1927), p. 283. It is an amusing touch when Mme. Grandoni calls her “Lydia Languish” immediately after Hyacinth has given her correct name. James wished this absurd comparison. The Princess, ii,
41 Edgar, p. 272.
42 Cary, p. 136.
43 The Princess, i, 55.
44 Henry James, p. 159. Michael Swan is more effective because more vague in his epitome: “Captain Sholto does not move in a society so different from the one he was born into from any political interest; he is an adventurer in the widest sense of the term, … a fellow traveler in the thing for some fun” (Henry James, London, 1952, p. 69).
45 Putt, p. 197. Trilling (p. xliii) has a most illuminating passage on Miss Muniment: “Rosy is in many ways similar to Jennie Wren, the doll's dressmaker of Our Mutual Friend; both are crippled, courageous, quaint, sharp-tongued and dominating and both are admired by the characters among whom they have their existence. Dickens unconsciously recognizes the cruelty that lies hidden in Jennie, but consciously he makes nothing more than a brusque joke of her habit of threatening people's eyes with her needle. He allows himself to be deceived and is willing to deceive us. But James manipulates our feelings about Rosy into a perfect ambivalence. He forces us to admire her courage, pride, and intellect and seems to forbid us to take account of her cruelty because she directs it against able bodied or aristocratic people. Only in the end does he permit us the release of our ambivalence—the revelation that Hyacinth doesn't like Rosy and we don't have to is an emotional release and a moral enlightenment.”
46 Bogan, p. 474. Dupee, p. 159: “Divided between her affection for the Princess and her obligations to the Prince, Mme. Grandoni … is a touching case of mental suffering and the most tragic figure in the book.”
47 The Princess, ii, 9.
48 The Art of the Novel, p. 73.
49 He had evidently been fired by the idea of doing something better with the role that Mme. Sipyagina plays in Virgin Soil.
50 The Art of the Novel, p. 74.
51 Bogan, pp. 473–474.
52 The Princess, ii, 369.
53 Hyacinth is really serviceable to the Princess only finally—it is beyond the book that his influence most counts; her disillusionment with radicalism is contributed to partially by Muniment, we must remember. On the score of her vanity, which James stresses in his Preface (The Art of the Novel, p. 74), Paul “helps,” of course, more than Hyacinth.
54 After speculating in his Preface on “the obscure law” by which certain characters “revive” for the novelist to haunt “his house of art,” James asks, “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?” (The Art of the Novel, p. 73). How can one go along with Professor Baker (History of the English Novel, 10 vols., London, 1938, ix, 257): “seen through the eyes of the disillusioned plotter Hyacinth Robinson … she remains to the last a beautiful mystery”? Or, with H. S. Canby (Turn East, Turn West, Boston, 1951, p. 181): “She will go back to her infatuated husband. … She is again disponible”? She may go back, but she is no longer disponible in Mr. Canby's sense.
55 The Art of the Novel, p. 75.
56 Ibid., pp. 60–51, 69–73.
57 The Pilgrimage of Henry James, pp. 82–83. Brooks, of course, maintains the motivation is James's and falsely assigned to Hyacinth. But why should the little bookbinder have no portion of the sensibility of his creator? Henry James was, after all, the grandson of an Irish immigrant, a thing too often overlooked.
58 Granville Hicks's idea (p. 114) that James made Hyacinth plausible by making him special is sound, though it does not follow that James “defeated his fundamental intention.” It depends, doesn't it, on what one regards as his intention?
59 Henry James, Man and Author, pp. 277–278.
60 The Destructive Element, p. 44.
61 Bogan, p. 474. Clinton Oliver (pp. 252–256) bears down even harder on the autobiographical character of Hyacinth's perceptivity: “as the pattern of the novel emerges, the book appears more and more an elaborate experiment in autobiography. … James in his conflicting inclinations towards the rising democracy, as he perceived it exemplified in America, and towards an aristocratic tradition, as exemplified in the saturated cultures of Europe, experienced through his own life what he called the ‘perpetual laceration of the rebound.‘ Treating the problem imaginatively here, he could resolve it only in the death of his hero.” This seems to me to read too much into The Princess, and it ignores, furthermore, the muddled condition of Hyacinth's thinking (see James's Preface), which led James to observe later in the Preface to What Maisie Knew: “He collapses, poor Hyacinth, like a thief in the night, overcharged with treasures of reflection and spoils of passion of which he can give, in his poverty and obscurity, no honest account.” Putt (pp. 187–199) makes a very good point that Hyacinth's actions are more influenced by the effect that the other characters have on him than by overt attitudes.
62 The Crooked Corridor (New York, 1949), p. 67.
63 Introd., pp. ix–xv. Exemplars of the type include Julien Sorel of The Red and the Black, James Gatz of The Great Gatsby, Rastignac of Père Goriot, etc. This sort of generalized connection seems to me less fruitful than the general resemblance which Edmund Wilson notices between Hyacinth and Frédéiric Moreau of L'Education sentimental, “The Ambiguity of Henry James,” Hound & Horn, vii (April–June 1934), 399–401. Wilson excoriates James for not being critical of Hyacinth, but see the Preface to What Maisie Knew, cited above, n. 61.
64 The Art of Fiction, p. 62.
65 Henry James, p. 157.
66 A Sportsman's Sketches, tr. Constance Garnett (London, 1916), ii, 106–145; Hamlet and Don Quixote: An Essay, tr. Robert Nichols (London, 1930), 31 pp.
67 Ideals and Realities in Russian Literature (New York, 1905), pp. 105–107.
68 Memoirs of a Revolutionist (Boston, 1899), pp. 411–414.
69 See above, p. 98.
70 The Art of the Novel, p. 90.
71 Was it not natural that he should think of getting aid from Shakespeare since, as Lerner and I have shown, he had made use of another great dramatist, Sophocles, in The Bostonians? See “Henry James at the Grecian Urn,” PMLA, lxvi (June 1951), 316–331.
72 “We find no fault with Mr. Henry James's The Princess Casamassima; it is a great novel. … the drama works simply and naturally; the cause and effects are logically related; the theme is made literature without ceasing to be life.” W. D. Howells, “Editor's Study,” Harper's, lxxiv (April 1887), 829. Italics ours. (Called to my attention by Professor William Gibson.) Contrast: “one of the worst books [no reasons given] by a good writer that I have ever read,” Frank Swinnerton, The Georgian Scene (New York, 1934), p. 28.
73 Winters, pp. 175–177.
74 I doubt if more artistic ideas were ever exploited in a novel; Mr. Dupee seems to mean “assigned opinions.” Howells, contrasting The Princess with W. H. Mallock's The Old Order Changes, in the admirable review cited in note 72, takes Mallock to task for this very thing: “His people are apparently real people till he gets them into his book, and then they turn to stalking horses for his opinions.” Is this what Mr. Dupee desires?