The Princess Casamassima Read online

  Such is the deep, inner pattern of The Princess Casamassima which can easily be related to the intrinsic fable or myth of many of James’s other stories, large and small. Its evocation is the ultimate source of the power, as of the ambiguity, of the book. The sensitive exploration of the dilemma enhances our appreciation of it. It is, after all, part of the lives of most of us, and by rendering it in such a variety of circumstance James reveals a part of ourselves to ourselves with a sensitivity and a beauty that makes its recognition an act both of sympathy and encouragement which strengthens our own sensitivities and courage.

  VII

  Many elements went to the making of The Princess Casamassima. The inner fable and the general sense of London life have been mentioned. There were also literary sources, and information which must have been gleaned from newspapers, reinforcing the mixture of imagination and fact that makes up the novel.

  The prime literary source seems to be the novel Virgin Soil by Turgenev, which James reviewed in its French version Les Terres vierges for the periodical the Nation in 1877. The hero of Virgin Soil, Nezhdanov, is the illegitimate son of a nobleman who becomes involved with revolutionaries, falls in love with an aristocratic lady, loses her to a comrade, becomes disillusioned with socialism, and finally commits suicide in bitterness of heart and despair of all values. The resemblance is sufficient to allow us to suppose that it influenced James, consciously or unconsciously. Yet there are many things in The Princess Casamassima which do not appear in Virgin Soil and many differences of emphasis and interest.

  Another supporting influence of a different kind, especially in the earlier pages of The Princess Casamassima, comes from Dickens. The characterization of Paul Muniment’s crippled sister, Rose, whom he devotedly looks after, owes something to that of the crippled dolls’ dressmaker Jenny Wren in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend. The unselfpitying sharpness of tongue and observation of a home-bound crippled woman, and something of the turn of phrase, are common to both. One can see why James needed to create such a character. Paul Muniment needs to be given some domestic background, partly to fill out our picture of a human being, partly to show his real unaffected personal goodness, partly to create a common ground on which Hyacinth may meet him. The domestic background of Paul Muniment as a low-paid solitary bachelor in lodgings would not offer much in the way of psychological observation nor variety of interest. For him to be married would change the conception of a ruthlessly single-minded man determined on revolution. He needs to be shown with some warmth of feeling, which his support for his crippled sister reveals.

  The situation of Rose allows the introduction of another, different character, Lady Aurora Langrish. She is genuine English gentry, shy and ungainly in person; she occupies her time in works of personal help to the poor, as did a number of ladies of her time. She does not indulge in the pleasures of her rich family and provides another version of possible response to poverty and deprivation. Though not strictly a ‘Dickensian’ figure it is by the creation of the Dickensian Rose Muniment that Lady Aurora can be brought to meet Paul, whom she comes to love hopelessly, and to be contrasted with the Princess.

  We meet another ‘Dickensian’ character briefly in the opening pages of the novel. The formidable Mrs Bowerbank, wardress of the prison, recalls no specific Dickensian character, but her function, her masterful masculinity, her style of talk, and the touch of patronizing amusement with which her manners on her visit to Miss Pynsent’s little parlour are described, all recall Dickens. So do the grim Millbank prison and the dying prisoner to which Miss Pynsent is eventually persuaded to bring the child. Here the Dickensian influence leads to a non-Dickensian realism without Dickensian grotesquerie. James did actually visit Millbank prison to learn what it was like. Whatever faint echoes of Dickensian prison scenes may be aroused, his description, atmospheric, with only brief detail, deeply humane, is fully Jamesian.

  VIII

  After the prison visit, the novel jumps some eight years and we find that Hyacinth is an apprentice bookbinder. James makes his surrogate hero into a fine craftsman with a deep aesthetic sense. He is as near to being an artist, whether of words or materials, like James, as could plausibly be arranged for one so poor. James’s genius led him to choose a trade which both lent itself to his personal fable and to the kind of social action and interest which are the general concern of the novel. Many of the revolutionaries of the time were skilled artisans. Such persons, of superior quality, with some education, acutely conscious of the terrible poverty just beneath their own status, able to assess the disparity of such suffering with the vast wealth of the privileged few, were naturally attracted to the radical and revolutionary ideas which were proliferating throughout Europe, where other regimes were more oppressive than in England.

  Educated readers, of the kind to whom James hoped to appeal, were aware both of the European social situation, and also of the increasing acts of terrorism that resulted from them. Most people, including James himself, did not believe that England herself was on the brink of revolution. The British working-man was thought to be too sensible, and James himself notes ‘the desire which one finds in the Englishman, in proportion as he rises in the world, to approximate to the figure of the gentleman’.* Both J. M. Dent in real life and Hyacinth in the novel illustrate the young Englishman’s desire and capacity to achieve ‘the figure of the gentleman’. But the state of England was nonetheless alarming and James himself was struck, as so many observers have been before and since, with the spectacle of England’s decline. In January 1885, when he had already contracted to write The Princess Casamassima, he wrote in a letter to Grace Norton, in words which still find an echo today:

  There is very little ‘going on’ – the country is gloomy, anxious, and London reflects its gloom. Westminster Hall and the Tower were half blown up two days ago by Irish Dynamiters, there is a catastrophe to the little British force in the Soudan in the air… and a general sense of rocks ahead in the foreign relations of the country – combined with an exceeding want of confidence – indeed a deep disgust – with the present ministry in regard to such relations. I find such a situation as this extremely interesting, and it makes me feel how much I am attached to this country and, on the whole, to its sometimes exasperating people. The possible malheurs – reverses, dangers, embarrassments, the ‘decline’, in a word, of old England, go to my heart, and I can imagine no spectacle more touching, more thrilling and even dramatic, than to see this great precarious, artificial empire, on behalf of which, nevertheless, so much of the strongest and finest stuff of the greatest race (for such they are) has been expended, struggling with forces which perhaps, in the long run, will prove too many for it.

  ‘Deep popular discontent’ was noted in the Saturday Review in March 1882. A letter to The Times of 2 March 1885 commented that a recent demonstration by the unemployed ‘ought surely to arouse all thinking men to a sense of the gravity of the dangers which threaten this country if the Government intend to take no steps to relieve the miseries of these starving thousands’.

  IX

  The crisis was by no means confined to England. All the countries of Europe shared in the general discontent. In France in 1871 occurred the brief revolution of the Commune which was still vividly remembered. In the novel, its ideals are cherished by M. Poupin. In other countries, especially in Russia, where autocracy and misery were much greater, there was an ever-increasing urgency for radical revolution, to remove the corrupt rich who governed. Who should replace them, and how, admitted of many answers. There was a great variety of radical thought, a confusion in the minds of most between socialism, communism, nihilism. What was certain was the series of terrorist bomb attacks and assassinations in Europe and England. The Times reported a series of attacks in Russia in 1879 and 1880, culminating in the assassination of the Tsar in 1881; but 1884 and 1885, when The Princess Casamassima was in James’s mind, were also reported as being much troubled. Readers of The Times in 1884 and 1885 were informed of many
European terrorist attempts.

  Britain was not free from such events. The most shocking was the murder in May 1882 of Lord Frederick Cavendish, Chief Secretary for Ireland, and of the Undersecretary Thomas Burke, in Phoenix Park in Dublin by the Fenians. In March 1883 the Local Government Board Offices in London were blown up and at the same time there was an unsuccessful attempt to blow up the offices of The Times itself. In October 1883 two underground railways in London were dynamited in order to catch the crowds coming from an exhibition. In February 1884 part of Victoria Station was blown up; in May Scotland Yard (the London police headquarters), houses in St James’s Square, and Nelson’s Column were all attacked; and there was an attempt in December to blow up London Bridge. During the next few months successful and damaging attempts were made to bomb the House of Commons, Westminster Hall and the Tower of London.

  X

  Many of these attacks were due to the Irish question and many were bombings. In detail they were only indirectly stimulating to James. Bombing was too indiscriminate, and he lacked knowledge of Ireland. But they contributed strongly to the general sense in England of insecurity, and to the general English fear of international conspiracy and terrorism which he uses in the novel.

  James knew and was interested especially in the English, of whom his view was characteristically ambivalent. While he preferred to live in ‘our dear old stupid, satisfactory London’, that ‘grimy Babylon by the Thames’, he saw England’s decline; he saw the corruption of the rich and the suffering of the poor. London incorporated so much that helped to feed international terrorism: poverty, despair, exclusion from the surrounding wealth. Internationally organized terrorism offered practical examples of mysterious threats to life and order. There was a general suspicion amongst the English educated classes that some internationally organized group existed which was dedicated to overturning society in its present form. This international secret organization of terrorism therefore affected his imagination all the more in that it reinforced his personal fairy-tale anxieties.

  XI

  There were many English men and women, Londoners born and bred, who were working either for philanthropy or reform. But the middle- or upper-class philanthropists or reformers could not suit James’s imaginative needs and purposes. Nor even could actual working-class Englishmen.

  The curious fact emerges that for all the ferment of radical ideas there were to hand no suitable Londoners to act as models for a revolutionary hero. The only Londoner who might have been a possibility was the now forgotten Marxist H. M. Hyndman, whom James himself observed did not seem likely to lead a revolution. That only those who are not English are likely to foment revolution in England is indicated by James in the novel. The discontented and justly resentful English working-men who meet at the ‘Sun and Moon’ are ‘unpractical’, the sternest word of condemnation he uses, but sufficient to dismiss them as a threat. They are kept in almost complete ignorance of the serious purposes of real international terrorism. Those in the novel who are in the secret are M. Poupin, the German Schinkel and perhaps, ultimately, the Princess herself, who is half American and half Italian. The only revolutionary natives in the novel are Hyacinth and Paul Muniment. But Hyacinth is partly French and his non-British character is commented on, for example by the Princess (p. 248). It is a splendid irony that his fundamentally English incapacity for violent revolution turns out to be his true nature and eventually destroys him, through his English capacity to become ‘a gentleman’. Paul Muniment is a more complex instance. His friendship for Hyacinth causes him to put Hyacinth up for the task of self-sacrificing assassination, and even Hyacinth wonders at the friendship which can so calmly immolate him. But at the end, though Muniment continues with conspiracy, even Muniment is not trusted by the foreign leaders of revolution to hand over the fateful sealed instructions to Hyacinth. That task is left to the not unfriendly Schinkel, and it is made clear that if Schinkel had failed to perform it he would have been made to pay, that is, presumably, be murdered. James’s realism is again faultless.

  The models for Hyacinth and for Muniment, in so far as those characters did not grow out of James’s own imaginative needs and resources, were provided by the instances of international terrorists reported by The Times for British readers in the early 1880s. There were for example two Irishmen, Thomas Gallagher, who claimed to be a worker in a chemical factory as Muniment is, and Joseph Brady, leader of the group who murdered Lord Cavendish. They were cool, able, educated, yet fanatical men who may well have supplied suggestions for the character of Paul Muniment.

  Both Gallagher and Brady had young companions who seem to have regarded them much as Hyacinth does Muniment. Gallagher’s principal confederate was a young man of twenty-five, short, dark, intelligent-looking, with small, sharp-cut features, piercing eyes and ‘lines of decision about his mouth’. Brady’s companion was twenty-one, with a boyish face.

  The reports of terrorists in Europe furnish several further possible models for Hyacinth himself. They were mostly young artisans used as tools by more dominant characters. They were also, for the most part, pathetically incompetent or reluctant to do the deed. Thus there was the young saddler Rupsch, chosen to assassinate the Emperor. Rupsch met those who used him at the house of a shoemaker who introduced him to the more senior conspirators, as does Hyacinth’s retired revolutionary friend Poupin. The name of the chief revolutionary was kept from Rupsch, much as Hyacinth is kept in ignorance of the conspiratorial network. Rupsch deliberately bungled his assassination attempt, claiming at his trial that he only went as far as he did for fear of retribution. Hyacinth too knows that he will be killed if he does not carry out his own assignation.

  There is therefore plenty of material to support James’s suggestion – and questions, through the Princess’s remarks especially – about an international conspiracy of terrorism into which Hyacinth is drawn, and from which he cannot escape with his life. The most striking evidence of this in the novel is the mysterious figure of Hoffendahl, who appears only as reported by Hyacinth to the Princess, but who manages the network, and under the inspiration of whose eloquence Hyacinth takes his fatal vow. Readers of The Times could have known about a similar figure in actual life, a German called Reinsdorf.

  Reinsdorf was known to the police, and like Hoffendahl spent some time in prison. He was an anarchist who was accused of causing explosions to assassinate outstanding political figures, the most important of whom was the Emperor of Germany. His trial was reported in The Times during December 1884 when James was gathering material for The Princess Casamassima. He was an educated, daring man who conducted himself bravely at his trial. He claimed to be getting money from the anarchists in London and America. Reinsdorf chose Rupsch to carry out the assassination, and Rupsch was given his task through intermediaries much as Hyacinth is. At his trial Reinsdorf took all the blame and did his best to screen his accomplices, just as we are told in the novel that Hoffendahl had done. (The fat stupid Englishman at the ‘Sun and Moon’ who knows about dogs reckons that the accomplices who did not stand by Hoffendahl were ‘bloody sneaks’. Muniment, on the other hand, thinks it the foremost duty of a revolutionary ‘not to get collared’ himself (p. 289).)

  XII

  It is thus clear that the revolutionary background hinted at by James and reflected mainly through the sensibility of Hyacinth had a real basis in what was ordinarily known or suspected, and in an obscure way did genuinely exist, in the 1880s. James evokes it with exquisite tact and suggestiveness. It is the essential penumbra round the bright light of his focus on the joys, sorrows and dilemmas of Hyacinth himself. The realism of the novel is to be relied upon because objects are half glimpsed through such misty uncertainties as are found in real life. Yet we are also justified, in conclusion, without undermining that realism, to bring it back into relation to James’s personal fable. Why should Hyacinth, who like all other characters in the novel shows no sense of religion (except Mr Vetch, who explicitly repudiates it), regard
his vow as so ‘sacred’ that the great change of intellectual conviction and deep feeling that he undergoes cannot affect it?

  If we pursue his faithfulness to his vow a little further into the recesses of the deep psychological structure of the inner fable it may not be unreasonable to see it as the sense of deep obligation to the father-figures Hyacinth never knew but only imagined. These remote father-figures are like gods, or the Hardyesque ‘grim, invisible fates’ (p. 367), which according to James, play chess with our lives. It is in the nature of tragedy that the destruction of the hero is brought about by parent-figures, and the shadowy Hoffendahl may legitimately be thought of as one. He sends his dominating message indirectly but irresistibly. Hyacinth’s actual father, the Lord Frederick he never knew, murdered by his mother, also in part engages and dominates the hero’s imaginings. He gives him, as a gentleman, some sense of noblesse oblige. There is yet another father-figure, quite explicitly invoked by Henry James during Hyacinth’s ecstatic visit to Paris. It is well-known that psychologically speaking grandfathers are father-figures at one remove, and we are told how Hyacinth’s imagination of his revolutionary grandfather, his mother’s father, accompanies him throughout his visit, as a companion, almost as a guide. It is a most strange and beautiful passage of great suggestiveness. Hyacinth’s deep obligation is to the two contrasted father-figures, the English aristocrat and the revolutionary Parisian watchmaker, who have strange resemblances in character, and who exert a dual, incompatible, destructive, yet enriching compulsion upon the hero to fulfil his fate. Of the unknown grandfather (whom the New York Edition qualifies as ‘this mystic ancestor’), Hyacinth