English Hours: A Portrait of a Country

Henry James (1843–1916) was an iconic figure of nineteenthcentury literature. Among his many masterpieces are The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians, The Europeans, The Golden Bowl and Washington Square. As well as fiction, James produced several works of travel literature and biography and was one of the great letter-writers of any age. A contemporary and friend of Robert Louis Stevenson, Edith Wharton and Joseph Conrad, James continues to exert a major influence on generations of novelists and writers.

‘Unmatched in travel literature... an incomparable record able to stand with his great novels.’ Elizabeth Hardwick

Tauris Parke Paperbacks is an imprint of I.B.Tauris. It is dedicated to publishing books in accessible paperback editions for the serious general reader within a wide range of categories, including biography, history, travel, art and the ancient world. The list includes select, critically acclaimed works of top quality writing by distinguished authors that continue to challenge, to inform and to inspire, These are books that possess those subtle but intrinsic elements that mark them out as something exceptional. The Colophon of Tauris Parke Paperbacks is a representation of the ancient Egyptian ibis, sacred to the god Thoth, who was himself often depicted in the form of this most elegant of birds. Thoth was credited in antiquity as the scribe of the ancient Egyptian gods and as the inventor of writing and was associated with many aspects of wisdom and learning.

ENGLISH HOURS Henry James

TPP TA U R I S PA R K E PA P E R B A C K S

New paperback edition published in 2011 by Tauris Parke Paperbacks An imprint of I.B.Tauris and Co Ltd 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com Distributed in the United States and Canada Exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 First published in 1905 in the USA by Houghton Mifflin & Co Copyright © the Estate of Henry James, 1905 Foreword copyright © Colm Tóibín, 2011 Introduction copyright © Leon Edel, 1981 Cover image: The Misses Vickers, 1884 (oil on canvas) by Sargent, John Singer (1856–1925), Sheffield Galleries and Museums Trust, UK / © Museums Sheffield / The Bridgeman Art Library The right of Henry James to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the Estate of Henry James in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. ISBN: 978 1 84885 485 7 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Cox & Wyman, Reading, RG1 8EX

Table of Contents

Foreword by Colm Tóibín

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Introduction by Leon Edel

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London

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Browning in Westminster Abbey

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Chester

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Lichfield and Warwick

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North Devon

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Wells and Salisbury

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An English Easter

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London at Midsummer

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Two Excursions

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In Warwickshire

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Abbeys and Castles

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English Vignettes

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An English New Year

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An English Winter Watering-place

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Winchelsea, Rye and ‘Denis Duval’

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Old Suffolk

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Index

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Foreword

In his book on Hawthorne, written in 1879 when he had established himself in London with a view to permanence, Henry James listed what was not available to Hawthorne as a novelist in the United States: ‘No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages, nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor public schools – no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class – no Epsom nor Ascot!’ This famous list, like all of James’s statements about fiction, has to be read for its ambiguities as much as for any obvious or clear meaning. On its own, it might seem like a call for American novelists to emigrate or give up and grow silent, or attempt to establish a society with all the ingredients listed by James and wait until they were in place before beginning again. However, once he had offered his list, James went on to say ‘The American knows that a good deal remains.’ James understood that the ‘good deal’ in question was perhaps more than enough for any novelist. In a letter to an American friend he further distanced himself from the view that America might not be the proper realm of the novelist when he suggested that American writers should resist what he called ‘the superstitious valuation of Europe’. There is also another way of looking at this list. It is not actually a celebration of an old and trusted European heritage from which any novelist could take inspiration, but of a very specific English heritage. Thus it can be read as an apology or a justification for what James himself, alone among American novelists, was doing. Once he left the United States in 1872 at the age of twenty-nine, he had lived in Rome and then in Paris. He could have remained all his life in either city. By coming to London in 1876, Henry James was renouncing certain pleasvii

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ures and freedoms available in Italy and France; he was renouncing two worlds in which the sensuous life was taken almost for granted. These locations in which neither Puritanism nor bad weather had ever taken hold would, from now on, become places he would merely visit. By the time he wrote his small book on Hawthorne he was aware of what he had lost as well as what he had gained by his decision to live in London. He took his London seriously. Like the Prince in The Golden Bowl he liked the city when it came to him. When a friend complained that he saw no reason why Americans should spend so much energy climbing the social ladder in London, James disagreed. ‘I think a position in society is a legitimate object of ambition,’ he said. He put his charm, his intelligence, his social tact and his growing fame at the disposal of the English. At the end of the century, when Justin McCarthy, who was a journalist and a member of parliament, wrote his memoirs, he said about James: ‘Henry James is an American who may be said to have thoroughly domesticated himself in London Society… No man is more popular in London dining-rooms and drawing-rooms than Henry James… Henry James, too, has an interest in political life, and dines with leading public men in the London clubs… He is a delightful talker, and in his talk can develop views and ideas about every passing subject which can clothe even the trivial topics of the day with intellectual grace and meaning.’ In his early years in London, James met the leading literary figures of the day, including Thackeray, Tennyson, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold and Leslie Stephen. He wrote to his family about his social adventures. To his sister Alice, for example, he described supper with Robert Browning: ‘His talk doesn’t strike me as very good. It is altogether gossip and personality and is not very beautifully worded. But evidently there are two Brownings – an esoteric and an exoteric.’ If Browning came in two guises, James himself came in several. He took a great interest in English social life and manners, in English personages, buildings and the English landscape, but his remarks on English power and politics display another aspect of his character. He wrote, for example, to his brother William in 1878 about England’s military power in a letter which displayed an almost uncanny sense of what would unfold over the next seventy years in his newly-adopted country: ‘She will push further and further her non-fighting and her keeping-out-ofviii

FOREWORD

scrapes policy, until contemptuous Europe, growing audacious with impunity, shall put upon her some supreme and unendurable affront. Then – too late – she will rise ferociously and plunge clumsily and unpreparedly into war. She will be worsted and laid on her back – and when she is laid on her back will exhibit – in her colossal wealth and pluck – an unprecedented power of resistance. But she will never really recover as a European power.’ What is notable about English Hours, the collection of travel pieces which Henry James assembled and published in 1903, is how much of himself, and what he knew, he left out of the book. This can be explained partly by his immense discretion and need to preserve his own privacy and that of others. ‘There is,’ Leon Edel has written, ‘a calculated art in the arrangement of the essays which are essentially painterly and documentary… He is a very polite and even cautious tourist, and, as he says, a “grateful alien” who at the same time allows himself to observe closely.’ In its way of observing closely landscape and weather, buildings and ruins, strangers and their habits, English Hours has much in common with John Millington Synge’s The Aran Islands, published two years later. Both books use a fragmentary form; in neither book does the author explain anything of his own personal background and circumstances; both authors make clear in tantalising asides that they have spent time on the European mainland where their tastes have been both developed and perhaps oversatisfied; in both books there is a great deal of solitary moving and solitary observing. The eye is alone; the reader can sense the loneliness of the watching all the more because the loneliness is implied and so much else is withheld. Also, there is a real intensity in the effort to move out of the self and learn to see, note and understand. It is clear from the tone that the self in question is complex and deeply intelligent, capable of making close distinctions, and has obscure if good reasons not to wish to display itself too much. Thus watching becomes a way of concealing and revealing, a game between the two. Both books are strange and shadowy autobiographies. They depend for their power on what is left out. In his novels written after his arrival in England, James managed to celebrate and dramatise the relationship between English landscape, English architecture and English manners. In the opening scenes of novels such as The Portrait of a Lady, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl, for example, there is a ix

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sense of England as what he called in English Hours ‘a country of tradition’, a place of ease in which much can enfold, with customs which can be both broken and observed by the foreigner and the native alike. In novels such as The Princess Casamassima and The Wings of the Dove, James allowed another London into his narrative, made it a place in which people are imprisoned for murder, or anarchists walk the streets, or his characters actually work for a living or have no money. In all of these five books, James worked on the idea of outsiders entering a stable world and, through treachery or misunderstanding, creating havoc or deep disorder in the lives of others. In other novels, however, such as The Tragic Muse, The Spoils of Poynton and The Other House, he dramatised English life itself, its theatres, its politics, its grand houses, its sense of material wealth belonging not only to individuals but to families, to be passed from one generation to the next thus to create further tradition and stability, what he called in the first essay in English Hours ‘the rigidities of custom’ and ‘the continuity of things’. In this first essay, James also offered a key to why he found London so attractive. It was not merely the social life it offered, or the sense of stability, but the dullness of the weather and length of the winter, which made him settle in the city. ‘It is not a small matter,’ he wrote, ‘to a man of letters’ that the London winter ‘is the best time for writing, and that during the lamplit days the white page he tries to blacken becomes, on his table, in the circle of the lamp, with the screen of the climate folding him in, more vivid and absorbent… The weather makes a kind of sedentary midnight and muffles the possible interruptions. It is bad for the eyesight, but excellent for the image.’ As a novelist in London, James was deeply alert to those who had come before him, figures such as Thackeray, Dickens and George Eliot ‘who had the happiness of growing up among, old, old things’, as he wrote in his essay on the city of Chester, which he made new and fresh in the opening chapter of The Ambassadors. He saw the work of these writers in the same way as he viewed the great English cathedrals, or the great London squares; it was an aspect of his fortunate fate to be able to gaze at them, or stroll in them. But they were also shadows which were cast over his white page, they were writers with whom he had to compete now that he had settled in England. x

FOREWORD

Part of the pleasure of remaining in England was that James could become like the English when it suited him, take from the English tradition of novel-writing what he needed for structure, plot-systems, character and tone, but also maintain the grandeur and the distance of the foreigner, the native of the James family. It would be hard to imagine Dickens or Eliot in Lichfield Cathedral having the nerve to write merely of its beauty: ‘The cathedral is of magnificent length, and the screen between nave and choir has been removed, so that from stern to stern, as one may say, of the great vessel of the church, it is all a mighty avenue of multitudinous slender columns, terminating in what seems a great screen of ruby and sapphire and topaz – one of the finest east windows in England.’ His status as outsider, and his uncertainty about the value of the Old World to someone from the great new continent, allowed him to be impressed and fascinated by the richness of what he found in England. Of Rochester Cathedral, for example, he wrote: ‘If we were so happy as to have this secondary pile within reach in America we should go barefoot to see it.’ Or of English company: ‘The stranger – the American at least – who finds himself in the company of a number of Englishmen assembled for a convivial purpose becomes conscious of an indefinable and delectable something which, for want of a better name, he is moved to call their superior richness of temperament.’ But James was also at times repelled by the very age of things in England and their aura of decay. When he visited Haddon Hall in the Derbyshire hills he found that ‘the charm of the spot is so much less of grandeur than that of melancholy, that it is rather deepened than diminished by this attitude of obvious survival and decay. And for that matter, when you have entered the steep little outer court through the long thickness of the low gateway, the present seems effectually walled out and the past walled in, like a dead man in a sepulchre.’ His status as a man from a place where, as a matter of pride, beauty was free for all to share allowed him to note ‘a frequent perception with the stranger in England that the beauty and interest of the country are private property and that to get access to them a key is always needed.’ In general in his fiction James was more interested in culture than nature, more given to describing gardens than fields, more interested in the view from windows onto parkland rather than offering a panorama of wild, untamed landscape. Thus in xi

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an essay written during an early sojourn in England in 1872 it is fascinating to watch him trying out his descriptive powers on mute nature, powers which would be later used to evoke a glance between two characters, or a moment of recognition, or a slow realisation: ‘On huge embankments of moss and turf, smothered in wild flowers and embroidered with the finest lacework of trailing ground-ivy, rise solid walls of flowering thorn and glistening holly and golden broom… They are oversown with lovely little flowers with names as delicate as their petals of gold and silver and azure – bird’s eye and king’s finger and wandering-sailor – and their soil, a superb dark red, turns in spots so nearly to crimson that you almost fancy it some fantastic compound purchased at the chemist’s and scattered there for ornament.’ There are also aspects of life described in English Hours, which do not easily make their way into James’s fiction. In an excursion in 1877, for example, this most sober of novelists found an excuse to describe drunkenness: ‘The whole party had been drinking deep, and one of the young men, a pretty lad of twenty, had in an indiscreet moment staggered down as best he could to the ground. Here his cups proved too many for him, and he collapsed and rolled over. In plain English he was beastly drunk.’ On the other hand, at the end of his essay on an English New Year, written in 1879, we see an aspect of James which lies at the very heart of his fiction – a tough, unsparing, pitiless effort to tell the truth. He goes with a rich friend to an orphanage with Oliver Twist in his mind. ‘I glanced through this little herd for an infant figure that should look as if it were cut out for romantic adventures. But they were all very prosaic little mortals. They were made of very common clay indeed, and a certain number of them were idiotic… The scene was a picture I shall not forget, with its curious mixture of poetry and sordid prose – the dying wintry light in the big, bare, stale room; the beautiful Lady Bountiful, standing in the twinkling glory of the Christmas-tree; the little multitude of staring and wondering, yet perfectly expressionless faces.’ In that same essay, he noted, as though he were the journalist Henrietta Stackpole whom he mocked mercilessly in The Portrait of a Lady, that ‘the possibility of distress among the lower classes has been minimised by gigantic poor-relief systems…there is, however, great distress in the North, and there is a general feeling of scant money to play with throughout the xii

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country.’ In his earlier essay on London, however, he can use a rather different tone to describe ‘the lower classes’ who congregate in Green Park: ‘There are few hours of the day when a thousand smutty children are not sprawling over it, and the unemployed lie thick on the ground and cover the benches with a brotherhood of greasy corduroys.’ The last two essays in English Hours, written when James was becoming a native of Rye in Sussex and leaving London, are of considerable biographical interest because they describe the landscape which attracted him towards further solitude, and where he wrote his late masterpieces. The world of the villages around Rye reminded him of Italy. ‘When the summer deepens,’ he wrote, ‘the shadows fall, and the mounted shepherds and their dogs pass before you in the grassy desert, you find in the mild English “marsh” a recall of Roman Campagna.’ He liked ‘the minor key’ in this new landscape. ‘A month of the place is a real education to the patient, the inner vision.’ He was fascinated by the coast near Dunwich which ‘up and down, for miles, has been for more centuries than I presume to count, gnawed away by the sea… Few things are so melancholy…as this long artificial straightness that the monster has impartially maintained.’ And close to Rye lay Romney Marsh where the opposite had happened, where marshy land had been reclaimed from a watery fate and became grazing land; the sea had, for once, been pushed out. In this place where Henry James spent some of his most productive years ‘the sea and the shore were never at peace together, and it was, most remarkably, not the sea that got the best of it’ in the vicinity of Rye. James’s England, as explored in English Hours is a place that fascinated him for its atmosphere, its variety, its ancientness. There is a strange moment in an essay from 1877 (An English Easter) when he describes English churchgoing. ‘We hear a good deal about the effect of the Prussian military system in consolidating the German people and making them available for a particular purpose; but I really think it not fanciful to say that the military punctuality which characterises the English observance of Sunday ought to be appreciated in the same fashion. A nation which has passed through such a mill will certainly have been stamped by it. And here, as in the German military service, it really is the whole nation.’ Within eleven years of the publication of English Hours, the whole nation would be at war with Germany. James understood, xiii

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as soon as the war broke out, that all that he held dear in England was now in danger, and, even if the war were to be won, much of what he loved about England would slowly disappear. He has little hesitation when he discovered that, despite his long exile in England, he was legally an alien, in applying for British citizenship. On 28 June 1915, eight months before he died, he made the formal application. A month later, he renounced his American citizenship. His formal letter to the Prime Minister explained and summed up his reasons why he wished to become a British citizen; they were ‘because of his having lived and worked in England for the best part of forty years, because of his attachment to the Country, and his sympathy with it and its people, because of the long friendships and associations and interests he has formed there these last including the acquisition of some property: all of which things have brought to a head his desire to throw his moral weight and personal allegiance, for whatever they may be worth, into the scale of the contending nation’s present and future fortune.’ In return, on New Year’s Day 1916 a message came from Buckingham Palace to the Prime Minister, Mr Asquith: ‘The King, acting upon your recommendation of the case, will be prepared to confer the Order of Merit upon Henry James.’ While James in his last years remained a native of his own unique talent, and carried the citizenship of his own imagination wherever he went, he had become, in as much as it was possible for someone whose identity was as protean and ambiguous as his, one of the great Englishmen of the age. Colm Tóibín

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