Revolution for the rich: James's Princess Casamassima.

Falcoff, Mark

Henry James is most often thought--quite rightly--as a novelist of manners, typically taking for his subject the clash of sensibilities between his American subjects and their European counterparts. His world--the one in which he moved personally, felt most at home, and which occupied the largest space in his work--was evidently that of the wellborn and well-traveled, the cultivated, and (to use a current pejorative) the privileged. It is impossible to imagine a fictional milieu farther removed from today's American literary concerns. Jamesland is a place where aristocrats and heiresses, expatriate artists and poets, titled continentals and landed gentry meet and mingle in English country houses or Venetian palaces or Swiss mountain resorts.

Yet James was not so limited by the rarefied atmosphere in which he lived to ignore that, just beneath the glittering surface of late-Victorian London, flushed with the prosperity of empire, there swirled some distinctly unlovely currents. In his masterly biography of James, Leon Edel makes clear that the novelist was fully aware of the social pathologies of poverty in the great metropolis--the malnutrition, the substandard housing, the excessive alcoholism, in short, the brutal living conditions of the working poor. Nor was he blind to the gathering force of political radicalism with its potential for acts of revolutionary violence. The proof lies in one of his lesser known masterpieces, The Princess Casamassima, published in 1886. What makes this book particularly remarkable is the way it manages to combine a compassionate portrayal of those at the near-bottom of Britain's social scale with a decidedly mordant critique of radical politics and its practitioners. In that sense The Princess is not merely James's great political novel, but his great conservative political novel.

The central figure of the book is not, perhaps surprisingly, the Princess who lends her name to the rifle, but rather an obscure young man by the name of Hyacinth Robinson. An orphan brought up by a spinster seamstress named Miss Pysent, at first a mystery hovers over his origins. By the time he has reached adulthood he has learned the sensational circumstances surrounding his birth and abandonment. His mother, a French seamstress (and a colleague of Pysent), had been seduced and betrayed by a high-born English aristocrat; she murdered him in revenge and was sentenced to a long prison term. She gave birth to Hyacinth in prison.

When the book opens Miss Pysent has been summoned by the prison authorities to take the ten-year-old boy to bid farewell to his natural mother, who is close to death. The scene at Milbank prison is horrifying, worthy of Zola at his most lugubrious--the woman, nearly delirious, has lapsed into her native French, a language the boy does not understand. Nor does he realize who the woman is or why Miss Pysent has taken him to see her. This scene is James's donnee--the precipitant of the rest of the book, since it sets the stage, once Hyacinth has learned the whole truth--for his extended argument between the two sides of his nature--the orphan son of a pauper and the illegitimate but nonetheless indisputably biological offspring of "one of the highest of the land."

The action shifts forward ten years. By then Hyacinth has taken up a skilled trade as a bookbinder. At his workplace he has fallen under the influence of an expatriate French craftsman. M. Poupin is a former communard; like many refugees from failed revolutions, he dwells, as James puts it, in a state of "chronic spiritual inflammation." As their friendship grows, Poupin decides to take Hyacinth to a pub where radicals, revolutionaries, and exiles are wont to gather. In time the young man is drawn into a conspiracy to commit a dramatic political crime--he is to insinuate himself into a grand reception and assassinate a British grandee (in other words, to replicate his mother's crime), and, in so doing, both take revenge upon the class to which he has been excluded by his illegitimacy and strike a blow for the larger conspiracy of equality.

Before he can commit this act, however, Hyacinth is drawn somewhat unexpectedly into aristocratic circles. There are two crucial encounters. The first occurs as the result of a friendship with a young chemist, Paul Muniment, whom he meets at the revolutionary meetings. Muniment takes Hyacinth home to meet his sister Rose, a hopeless invalid. As it happens, Rose receives regular visits and small gifts from a certain Lady Aurora, the daughter of the Earl of Inglefield. The other encounter takes place at a theater where, during intermission, Hyacinth is introduced to the Princess Casamassima through the good offices of Captain Geoffrey Sholto, a retired officer of the British army who is a regular at the pub where the revolutionaries gather.

Lady Aurora and the Princess are both intoxicated with the "social question;' but from very different perspectives. Lady Aurora is "so ashamed of being rich that she wondered the lower classes didn't break into Inglefield and take possession of all [its] treasures." She attempts to purge her feelings of guilt with acts of charity to the poor. But she is also driven by fear. "If there were to be a great disturbance in this country--and of course one hopes there won't" she remarks to the Muniments and to Hyacinth, "it would be my impression that the people would behave in a different way altogether." By "the people" she means her own aristocratic class, which, unlike the French nobles, would stay and fight--"very hard." When Hyacinth asks her if they would be beaten in the end, Lady Aurora admits that they would.

"But," she concludes, "of course one hopes it won't happen."

"No use trying to buy yourself off," Paul Muniment counsels her. "You can't do enough, your sacrifices don't count.... Enjoy your privileges while they last; it may not be for long."

The Princess is another kettle of fish altogether. Readers of James have already encountered her in his early novel Roderick Hudson (1875), much of which takes place in Rome. There she appears as Christina Light, a young woman whose American mother is anxiously seeking to marry her off to a European title. By the time we meet her again in The Princess, Christina has indeed found a husband--a Sicilian nobleman--from whom, however, she has since separated. She has taken up residence in England under conditions of some splendor, since her estranged spouse feels that as long as she bears his name she must not diminish its social prestige; thus, even under conditions of disunion, she receives a handsome allowance.

With time and money on her hands, the Princess is bored. She needs amusement and excitement. On this score Captain Sholto--obviously in love with her--is only too happy to oblige. He throws himself wholeheartedly into whatever takes her fancy. First it is illuminated Roman missals, then horrible ghost smiles. "Then one day," Sholto tells Hyacinth, "I saw she was turning her attention to the rising democracy. I began to collect little democrats. That's how I collected you."

After the meeting at the theater the Princess invites Hyacinth to call on her at a splendid rented house in Mayfair. This leads to an extended visit to her country estate, where she takes evident pleasure in introducing Hyacinth to her aristocratic neighbors. For a time, at least, the Princess has found her little democrat. But for Hyacinth the experience is deeply unsettling. As he tells his neighbor Mr. Vetch, "You should see the place--you should see what she wears, what she eats and drinks." To which Vetch replies, "Ah, you mean that she is inconsistent with her theories. My boy, she would be a droll woman if she were not. At any rate, I'm glad of it." Hyacinth defends her thus: "Well, when the day comes for my friend to give up--you'll see." But Hyacinth is no longer so sure about himself. He has seen another world and he is not so certain that he is anxious to see it end. These feelings are deepened by a gift of money from Mr. Vetch which allows the young man to travel to France and Italy.

Hyacinth's impressions of continental Europe are represented in the book as letters to the Princess herself. "What has struck me," he writes her, "is the great achievements of which man has been capable in spite of the injustices on which they are based ... the splendid accumulations of the happy few ... the monuments and treasures and art, the great palaces and properties, the conquests of learning and taste, the general fabric of civilization as we know it," which, in spite of the cruelties and injustices on which they are based, make the world "more tolerable."

Such thoughts lead Hyacinth down unaccustomed paths. For one thing, he tries to imagine what the leader of the revolutionary cenacle to which he belongs would make of it all.</p> <pre> He wouldn't have the least feeling for this incomparable, abominable old Venice. He would cut up the ceilings of the Veronese into strips, so that everyone might have a little piece. </pre> <p>And then, far more dangerously, he continues:</p> <pre> I don't want everyone to have a little piece of anything, and I have a great horror of that kind of invidious jealousy which is at the bottom of the idea of redistribution. </pre> <p>When he returns to London he pays a call on the Muniments. Also in attendance are the Princess and Lady Aurora. There occurs what can only be regarded as the crucial scene of the book. The Princess waves aside Hyacinths enthusiasm for high European civilization. "When thousands and tens of thousands haven't bread to put in their mouths, I can dispense with tapestry and old china." Even Lady Aurora objects. "But don't you think we ought to make the world more beautiful?" The Princess replies, "The world will be beautiful enough when it becomes good." To which Hyacinth responds, "I think there can't be too many pictures and statues and works of art. The more the better, whether people are hungry or not."

The change in Hyacinth's outlook leads to an unraveling of the plot. The Princess, offended by his apostasy, drops him for Paul Muniment, just as she had abandoned her previous interests for "rising democracy." Meanwhile, however, Prince Casamassima, on one of his periodic visits to England, has caught wind of the fact that his wife is frittering his money away on revolutionary groups. She is ordered to return to him or to face the consequences--an end to her annuity, forcing her to live the way she claims to want everyone to live after the coming revolutionary upheaval. James hints strongly that in the end she will return to her husband. As for Hyacinth himself, torn between his new outlook on life and his prior commitment to his revolutionary comrades, he finds only one way out-suicide, which he commits in the final pages of the book.

As a writer James's peculiar strength lies not so much in plot as in texture and characterization. The Princess is extraordinarily rich in both. But in this novel he also displays a remarkable grasp of political sociology. There are, first of all, the revolutionaries--an eccentric lot of foreign exiles, discontented workmen, declasse intellectuals, all of whom gather at the pub where Hyacinth is drawn into their cause. Even the most sympathetic of the lot, M. Poupin, an exiled communard, is depicted tongue-in-cheek, as "a socialist," "a constructive democrat ... a theorist and an optimist and a visionary," in spite of himself a French chauvinist through-and-through who believed that</p> <pre>

some day boundaries and armies and customs houses would be abolished--people of all nations would embrace on both cheeks and cover the globe with boulevards radiating from Paris, where the human family would sit, in groups, at little tables ... drinking coffee (not tea, par exemple) and listening to the music of the spheres. </pre> <p>When Hyacinth raises common sense objections to Poupin's revolutionary theories, the Frenchman's defense is disarmingly simple: "everything is yet to be tried ... it will be one of those experiments that constitute a proof." When Hyacinth returns from Paris, intoxicated with its grandeur, Poupin is both pleased and skeptical. "Ah yes, it's very fine, no doubt," he remarks. And then he adds, "But it will be finer still when it's ours!" Even Mr. Vetch, who is represented early in the book as a kind of old-fashioned English radical, pokes fun at Poupin: "He wants folks to be equal, heaven help him; and when he has made them so I suppose he's going to start a society for making the stars in the sky all of the same size." The most credible of James's revolutionaries--actually, the only one-is Paul Muniment. His realism is like a refreshing cold shower. "A fine stiff conservative is a thing I perfectly understand," he tells the Princess, "If I were on top, I'd stick there"

In Reading Henry James, Louis Auchincloss complained that the description of these would-be world-changers amounted to grotesque caricature. He was right up to a point; the kind of violent anarchists that abounded in late nineteenth-century France, Spain, Italy, and Russia were largely absent from Victorian England, where magnicide or "the propaganda of the deed" were all but unknown. However, what might be called the revolutionary sensibility is found everywhere. Moreover, Auchincloss was writing in the United States more than two academic generations back; how very different do James's revolutionaries sound from what one might hear today in off-campus bars in any American university town? Or even from some "distinguished professor" of this or that, holder of a handsomely endowed chair?

James also confronts head-on the British obsession with class. In a book of this sort, how could he avoid doing so? But he is careful to note the peculiar contradictions that beset the phenomenon. The downtrodden whom the revolutionaries would rescue from their misery are more often than not half in love with the system that supposedly oppresses them. Rose Muniment's view is that that the rich "have a right to [their] pleasures under all circumstances, no matter how badly off the poor may be" As for herself, "if everyone was equal, where would be the gratification I feel in getting a visit from a grandee? ... No equality while I am about the place!" For her part, Miss Pysent regards left-wing politics as a dangerous distraction for the poor, who already have enough problems. (She also frankly thrills at the prospect that her adoptive son is actually the issue of Lord Frederick Purvis.) By the end of the book even Hyacinth is worried that the coming democracy "wouldn't care for perfect bindings or for the finest sort of conversation." Indeed, James suggests, it probably would not.

As for the Princess, although Captain Sholto describes her as the most extraordinary, the most fascinating woman in Europe, she is a type well known to our own therapy-afflicted contemporary society. She claims to be rebelling against "the selfishness, the corruption, the iniquity, the cruelty, the imbecility of the people all over Europe who have the upper hand." In fact, her grievances are purely personal. She has been married off in a loveless match by a socially ambitious mother; her husband's relations and neighbors bore her stiff. Her problems are only related to the broader social system in a very diffuse and indirect way, and it is by no means clear how revolutionary change would resolve them.

When she speaks of the "rising democracy" it is clear that she is thinking of something far more radical than suffrage reform or the eight-hour day. Yet at the same time it is by no means clear that she would welcome a massive social upheaval, since her own capacity for sacrifice is shown to be somewhat limited. As a grand gesture she gives up her house in Mayfair and moves to more modest accommodations, but her combination of plain living and high thinking does not impress her new revolutionary friends. AS Paul Muniment dryly observes, "You have a great deal left, for a person who has given everything away.... I would give my nose for a place like this. At any rate, you are not yet reduced to poverty." (In fact, the Princess has not "given everything away" at all; she has simply put most of her grander possessions in storage.) Her cynical German lady-in-waiting, Madame Grondoni, adds, "This is not poverty, and not even a good imitation of it, as she would like it to be." The best response the Princess can offer to these observations is to offer Muniment more money for his cause. Even so, he warns her that she "is not trusted by headquarters." And then the brutal coda: "In giving [us] your money--or rather, your husband's ... you gave the most valuable thing you had to contribute."

In fact, the most interesting person in the novel might well be Madame Grondoni, whose voice (one suspects) comes closest to that of James himself. When the Princess tells Hyacinth at their first meeting that "we take a great interest in the people" her lady-in-waiting interrupts to say that her employer should speak for herself. "I take no interest in the people; I don't understand them and I know nothing about them." She continues: "An honorable nature of any class, I always respect it; but I will not pretend to a passion for the ignorant masses, because I have it not."

When Hyacinth appears at the Princess's Mayfair townhouse for the first time, the Princess tries to convince him that her interest in revolutionary movements is not merely voyeuristic. "I am convinced that we are living in a fool's paradise, that the ground is heaving under our feet," she tells him. Madame Grondoni interjects, "It is not the ground, my dear; it's you that are naming somersaults." And then she adds for Hyacinths benefit, "She wishes to throw herself into the revolution, to guide it, to enlighten it." But the Princess's greatest desire is to find out whether "we are on the eve of great changes, or are we not? I want to know a quoi m'en tenir [where I stand]. Do you think anything will happen soon?" While at first reading the remark suggests impatience, on closer examination it reveals the Princess's dirty secret--she has no intention of actually remaining around to experience the inconveniences of a genuine revolutionary upheaval. Why else, indeed, would she be so continually obsessed with knowing when the great event is to take place?

The real key to the novel is the single fact of Hyacinth's profession. His work as a bookbinder, James explains, constitutes a kind of "education of the taste, [training] him in the finest discriminations, in the perception of beauty and the hatred of ugliness." This hatred of ugliness inevitably has social connotations. At one point he confesses to Lady Aurora that he considers people of his own class "very stupid--what [one] should call third-rate minds." He asks her directly, "How can you leave all those beautiful things, to come and breathe this ghastly air, surround yourself with hideous images, and associate with people whose smallest fault is that they are ignorant, brutal and dirty?" Whereas his half-aristocratic origins might well produce the kind of resentment that would drive him to the left, his love of beauty, of craftsmanship, of refinement and artistic achievement eventually pull him over to the right. James seems here to be asserting--an unspeakable heresy nowadays--that without inequality there can be no beauty in the world.

In some curious and perhaps unexpected ways The Princess Casamassima is as relevant to the current scene as it was when it appeared more than a hundred years ago. The eponymous heroine is a literary precursor to today's left-wing millionaire, or rather, billionaire. To find her contemporary representation one need go no farther than the wife of a recent presidential candidate, with her exotic foreign background, her five houses, her private jets, and her legions of servants. The antagonistic relationship between beauty and equality likewise finds its expression in the valuations placed on present-day architecture and art. Who, viewing recent recipients of government and foundation grants, can doubt that crudeness, vulgarity, and even obscenity have come into their own? Or that hatred of the achievements of high culture, particularly European high culture, is the sine qua non for acceptance in the fashionable avant-garde? Or that the adulation heaped, for example, upon Frank Gehry's hideous constructions are intended to assure that future generations of architects will never attempt to replicate the achievements of Adam and Wren, Lebrun and Bernini?

In one respect, to be sure, times have changed. At the time, Poupin's revolutionary theories ("experiments that constitute a proof") had not yet been tried. More than a century and millions upon millions of unnecessary deaths and disappearances later, we know that attempts to force people to be happy through regimented equality in the end lead neither to happiness nor indeed even to equality. James's princess thinks that the world will be beautiful when it is good; by the end of the novel Hyacinth Robinson has come to know better. That is his tragedy. It affirms, however, that in addition to being a first-class novelist, James was a social and political prophet of no mean qualities. Could that be the reason The Princess Casamassima remains the master's most neglected major work?