social duty-these are among the themes which make the pattern of
1883, the first year of his long residence in England, James was in
The Princess Casamassima. It is a novel which has at its very center
the habit of prowling the streets, and they yielded him the image
the assumption that Europe has reached the full of its ripeness and
"of some individual sensitive nature or fine mind, some small ob-
-
-
--
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60
THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION
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The Princess Casamassima
6r
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scure creature whose education should have been almost wholly
Man be introduced into great houses and involved with large affairs
derived from them, capable of profiting by all the civilization, all
is essential to his story, which must not be confused with the cogthe accumu�tion to which they testify, yet condemned to see things nate story of the Sensitive Young Man. The provincial hero must
only from outside-in mere quickened consideration, mere wistful.
indeed be sensitive, and in proportion to the brassiness of the world;
ness and envy and despair."
he may even be an artist; but it is not his part merely to be puzzled
Thus equipped with poverty, pride, and intelligence, the Young
and hurt; he is not the hero of The Way of All Flesh or Of Human
Man from the Provinces stands outside life and seeks to enter. This
Bondage or Mooncalf. Unlike the merely sensitive hero, he is conmodern hero is connected with the tales of the folk. Usually his cerned to know how the political and social worlds are run and enmotive is the legendary one of setting out to seek his fortune, which joyed; he wants a share of �o�er and �leasure and in
.
_
�onsequence
is what the folktale says when it means that the hero is seeking
he takes real risks, often of his life. The swarmmg facts that James
himself. He is really the third and youngest son of the woodcutter,
tells us Hyacinth is to confront are "freedom and ease, knowledge
the one to whom all our sympathies go, the gentle and misunderand power, money, opportunity, and satiety."
stood one, the bravest of all. He is likely to be in some doubt about
The story of the Young Man from the Provinces is thus a strange
his parentage; his father the woodcutter is not really his father.
one, for it has its roots both in legend and in the very heart of the
Our hero has, whether he says so or not, the common belief of
modern actuality. From it we have learned most of what we know
children that there is some mystery about his birth; his real parents,
about modern society, about class and its strange rituals, about
if the truth .;rere known, are of great and even royal estate. Julien
power and influence and about money, the hard fluent fact in which
Sorel of The Red and the Black is the third and youngest son of an
modern society has its being. Yet through the massed social fact
actual woodcutter, but he is the spiritual son of Napoleon. In our
there runs the thread of legendary romance, even of downright
day the hero of The Great Gatsby is not really the son of Mr. Gatz;
magic. We note, for example, that it seems necessary for the novelist
he is said to have sprung "from his Platonic conception of himto deal in transformation. Some great and powerful hand must self," to be, indeed, "the son of God." And James's Hyacinth Robreach down into the world of seemingly chanceless routine and pick inson, although fostered by a poor dressmaker and a shabby fiddler,
up the hero and set him down in his complex and dangerous fate.
has an English lord for his real father.
Pip meets Magwitch on the marsh, a felon-godfather; Pierre Bezu
It is the fate of the Young Man to move from an obscure position
hov unexpectedly inherits the fortune that permits this uncouth
into one of considerable eminence in Paris or London or St. Petersyoung man to make his tour of Russian society; powerful unseen burg, to touch the life of the rulers of the earth. His situation is as
forces play around the proud head of Julien Sorel to make possible
chancy as that of any questing knight of medieval romance. He is
his astonishing upward career; Rastignac, simply by being one of
confronted by situations whose meanings are dark to him, in which
the boarders at the Maison Vauquer which also shelters the great
his choice seems always decisive. He understands everything to be
Vautrin, moves to the very center of Parisian intrigue; James Gatz
a "test." Parsifal at the castle of the Fisher King is not more unrows out to a millionaire's yacht, a boy in dungarees, and becomes certain about the right thing to do than the Young Man from the
Jay Gatsby, an Oxford man, a military hero.
Provinces picking his perilous way through the irrationalities of
Such transformations represent, with only slight exaggeration, the
the society into which he has been transported. That the Young
literal fact that was to be observed every day. From the late years
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THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION
The Princess Casamassima
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-·-·-··-··-·-··-··-·--·-·-··-·-·-··-·-··-·-··-··-•-11•-·-·-··
of the eighteenth century through the early years of the twentieth,
to be made that the special job of literature is, as Marianne Moore
the social structure of the West was peculiarly fitted-one might
puts it, the creation of "imaginary gardens with real toads in them."
say designed-for changes in fortune that were magical and roman
The reader who detects that the garden is imaginary should not be
tic. The upper-class ethos was strong enough to make it remarkable
Jed by his discovery to a wrong view of the reality of the toads. In
that a young man should cross the borders, yet weak enough to
settling questions of reality and truth in fiction, it must be remempermit the crossing in exceptional cases. A shiftless boy from bered that, although the novel in certain of its forms resembles the
Geneva, a starveiing and a lackey, becomes the admiration of the
accumulative and classificatory sciences, which are the sciences most
French aristocracy and is permitted by Europe to manipulate its
people are most at home with, in certain other of its forms the novel
assumptions in every department of life: Jean Jacques Rousseau is
approximates the sciences of experiment. And an experiment is
the father of all the Young Men from the Provinces, including the
very like an imaginary garden which is laid out for the express
one from Corsica.
purpose of supporting a real toad of fact. The apparatus of the re
The Young Man's story represents an actuality, yet we may be
searcher's bench is not nature itself but an artificial and extravagant
sure that James took special delight in its ineluctable legendary
contrivance, much like a novelist's plot, which is devised to force
element. James w
as certainly the least primitive of artists, yet he
or foster a fact into being. This seems to have been James's own
was always aware of his connection with the primitive. He set great
view of the part that is played in his novels by what he calls "rostore by the illusion of probability and verisimilitude, but he knew mance." He seems to have had an analogy with experiment very
that he dealt always with illusion; he was proud of the devices of
clearly in mind when he tells us that romance is "experience liberhis magic. Like any primitive storyteller, he wished to hold the ated, so to speak; experience disengaged, disembroiled, disencumreader against his will, to enchant, as we say. He loved what he bered, exempt from the conditions that usually attach to it." Again
called "the story as story"; he delighted to work, by means of the
and again he speaks of the contrivance of a novel in ways which
unusual, the extravagant, the melodramatic, and the supernatural,
will make it seem like illegitimate flummery to the reader who is
upon what he called "the blessed faculty of wonder"; and he undercommitted only to the premises of the naturalistic novel, but which stood primitive story to be the root of the modern novelist's art.
the intelligent scientist will understand perfectly.
F. 0. Matthiessen speaks of the fairytale quality of The Wings of
Certainly The Princess Casamassima would seem to need some
the Dove; so sophisticated a work as The Ambassadors can be read
such defense as this, for it takes us, we are likely to feel, very far
as one of those tales in which the hero finds that nothing is what it
along the road to romance, some will think to the very point of
seems and that the only guide through the world must be the goodimpossibility. It asks us to accept a poor young man whose birth is ness of his heart.
darkly secret, his father being a dissipated but authentic English
Like any great artist of story, like Shakespeare or Balzac or Dicklord, his mother a French courtesan-seamstress who murders the ens or Dostoevski, James crowds probability rather closer than we
father; a beautiful American-Italian princess who descends in the
nowadays like. It is not that he gives us unlikely events but that he
social scale to help "the people"; a general mingling of the very poor
sometimes thickens the number of interesting events beyond our
with persons of exalted birth; and then a dim mysterious leader of
ordinary expectation. If this, in James or in any storyteller, leads to
revolution, never seen by the reader, the machinations of an undera straining of our sense of verisimilitude, there is always the defense ground group of conspirators, an oath taken to carry out an assas-
THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION
The Princess Casamassima
..-.•-·-··-··-··-··-··-·•-11•-•·-··-··-·-··-··-··-··-··-··-··-··-··-·-··
•-•11-.. -••-•-••-H-11-111-11-,11-••-•-••-••-••-11•-••-••-••-n-111-•-••-"
sination at some unspecified future day, the day arriving, the hour
to the novel he told us that he made no research into Hyacinth's
of the killing set, the instructions and the pistol given.
subterrane�n politics. He justified this by saying that "the value I
Confronted by paraphernalia like this, even those who admire the
wished most to render and the effect I wished most to produce were
book are likely to agree with Rebecca West when, in her exuberant
precisely those of our not knowing, of society's not knowing, but
little study of James, she tells us that it is "able" and "meticulous"
only guessing and suspecting and trying to ignore, what 'goes on'
but at the same time "distraught" and "wild," that the "loveliness"
irreconcilably, subversively, beneath the vast smug surface." And he
in it comes from a transmutation of its "perversities"; she speaks of
concludes the preface with the most beautifully arrogant and truest
it as a "mad dream" and teases its vast unlikelihood, finding it one
thing a novelist ever said about his craft: "What it all came back
of the big jokes in literature that it was James, who so prided himto was, no doubt, something like this wisdom-that if you haven't, self on his lack of na'ivete, who should have brought back to fiction
for fiction, the root of the matter in you, haven't the sense of life
the high implausibility of the old novels which relied for their
and the penetrating imagination, you are a fool in the very presence
effects on dark and stormy nights, Hindu servants, mysterious
of the revealed and assured; but that if you m·e so armed, you are
strangers, and bloody swords wiped on richly embroidered handkernot really helpless, not without your resource, even before mysteries chiefs.
abysmal." If, to learn about the radical movement of his time, James
Miss West was writing in 1916, when the English naturalistic
really did no more than consult his penetrating imagination-which
novel, with its low view of possibility, was in full pride. Our notion
no doubt was nourished like any other on conversation and the
of political possibility was still to be changed by a small group of
daily newspaper-then we must say that in no other novelist did
quarrelsome conspiratorial intellectuals taking over the control
the root of the matter go so deep and so wide. For the truth is that
of Russia. Even a loyal Fabian at that time could consider it one of
there is not a political event of The Princess Casamassima, not a
the perversities of The Princess Casamassima that two of its lowerdetail of oath or mystery or danger, which is not confirmed by class characters should say of a third that he had the potentiality of
becoming Prime Minister of England; today Paul Muniment sits in
the Cabinet and is on the way to Downing Street. In the thirties the
III
book was much admired by those who read it in the light of knowledge of our own radical movements; it then used to be said that We are inclined to flatter our own troubles with the belief that
although James had dreamed up an impossible revolutionary group
the late nineteenth century was a peaceful time. But James knew
he had nonetheless managed to derive from it some notable insights
its actual violence. England was, to be sure, rather less violent than
into the temper of radicalism; these admirers grasped the toad of
the Continent, but the history of England in the eighties was one
fact and felt that it was all the more remarkably there because the
of profound social unrest often intensified to disorder. In March of
garden is so patently imaginary.
1886, the year in which The Princess Casamassima appeared in
Yet an understanding of James's use of "romance"-and there is
book form, James wrote to his brother William of a riot in his
"romance" in Hyacinth's story-must not preclude our understandstreet, of ladies' carriages being stopped and the "occupants hustled, ing of the striking literary accuracy of The Princess Casamassima.
rifled, slapped, and kissed." He does not think that the rioters were
James himself helped to throw us off the scent when in his preface
unemployed workingmen, more likely that they were "the great
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THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION
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The Princess Casamassima
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army of roughs and thieves." But he says that there is "immense
acter of a police spy, and Kropotkin or the late Carlo Tresca, who
destitution" and that "everyone is getting poorer-from causes
were known for their personal sweetness; or to resolve the contrawhich, I fear, will continue." In the same year he wrote to Charles diction between the violence of its theory and action and the gentle
Eliot Norton that the state of the British upper class seems to be
world toward which these are directed. It will have to be enough
"in many ways very much the same rotten and collapsible one of
to say that anarchism holds that the natural goodness of man is
the French aristocracy before the revolution."
absolute and that society corrupts it, and that the guide to anarchist
James envisaged revolution, and not merely as a convenience for
action is the desire to destroy society in general and not merely a
his fiction. But he imagined a kind of revolution with which we
particular social form.
are no longer familiar. It was not a Marxian revolution. There is
When, therefore, Hyacinth Robinson is torn between his desire
no upsurge of an angry proletariat led by a disciplined party which
for social justice and his fear lest the civilization of Europe be
plans to head a new strong state. Such a revolution has its conservadestroyed, he is dealing reasonably with anarchist belief. "The untive aspect-it seeks to save certain elements of bourgeois culture chaining of what is today called the evil passions and the destruction
for its own use, for example, science and the means of production
of what is called public order" was the consummation of Bakunin's
and even some social agencies. The revolutionary theory of The
aim which he defended by saying that "the desire for destruction is
Princess Casamassima has little in common with this. There is no
at the same time a creative desire." It was not only the state but all
organized mass movement; there is no disciplined party but only a
social forms that were to be demolished according to the doctrine of