Henry James

“ Even Waterville felt a touch of the unexpected, though not indeed an excess of it, to belong to his conception of the woman who should have an ideal repose. Of course there were two kinds of surprises, and only one of them thoroughly pleasant, though Mrs. Headway dealt impartially in both. She had the sudden delights, the odd exclamations, the queer curiosities of a person who has grown up in a country where everything is new and many things ugly, and who, with a natural turn for the arts and amenities of life, makes a tardy acquaintance with some of the finer usages, the higher pleasures. ”

“ I’ve never seen anything of your country life; when I’m in Europe I’m always on the Continent. But I’ve heard a great deal about it; I know that when you’re among yourselves in the country you have the most beautiful time. Of course we’ve nothing of that sort, we’ve nothing on that scale. I don’t apologise, Lord Lambeth; some Americans are always apologising; you must have noticed that. We’ve the reputation of always boasting and ‘blowing’ and waving the American flag; but I must say that what strikes me is that we’re perpetually making excuses and trying to smooth things over. ”

“ On the other hand it’s impossible to take an American by surprise; he’s ashamed to confess he hasn’t the wit to do a thing another man has had the wit to think of. Besides being as good as his neighbour he must therefore be as clever—which is an affliction only to people who are afraid he may be cleverer. If this general efficiency and spontaneity of the people—the union of the sense of freedom with the love of knowledge—isn’t the very essence of a high civilisation I don’t know what a high civilisation is. ”

“ What would youth be without its Sturm and Drang? Aurora says to herself—all at her ease—that she would be happier in their dreadful New York, in their dreary Boston, in their desperate Philadelphia, than in one of the charming old cities in which our lot is cast. But she knows not what she babbles of—that’s all. We must allow our children their yearning to make mistakes, mustn’t we? But we must keep the mistakes down to as few as possible. ”

“ Jackson Lemon himself could have explained the anomaly better than any one else, but this was an explanation one could scarcely ask for. There were other things: his cool acceptance of certain situations; his general indisposition to make comprehension easy, let alone to guess it, with all his guessing, so much hindered; his way of taking refuge in jokes which at times had not even the merit of being American; his way too of appearing to be a suitor without being an aspirant. Lady Beauchemin, however, was, like her puzzling friend himself, prepared to run a certain risk. ”

“ There are at all events no brilliant types—the most important people seem to lack dignity. They’re very bourgeois; they make little jokes; on occasion they make puns; they’ve no form; they’re too good-natured. The men have no style; the women, who are fidgety and talk too much, have it only in their tournures, where they have it superabundantly.
Well, I console myself—since consolation is needed—with the greater bonhomie. Have you ever arrived at an English country-house in the dusk of a winter’s day? Have you ever made a call in London when you knew nobody but the hostess? ”

“ She asked herself whether she was then to spend her life in the Fifth Avenue with alternations of a city of villas—she detested villas—and wondered if that was all the great American country had to offer her. There were times when she believed she should like the backwoods and that the Far West might be a resource; for she had analysed her feelings just deep enough to discover that when she had—hesitating a good deal—turned over the question of marrying Jackson Lemon it was not in the least of American barbarism she was afraid; her dread had been all of American civilisation. ”

“ There was something simple and robust in her beauty; it had the quietness of an old Greek statue, without the vulgarity of the modern simper or of contemporary prettiness. Her head was antique, and though her conversation was quite of the present period Jackson told himself that some primitive sincerity of soul couldn’t but match with the cast of her brow, of her bosom, of the back of her neck, and with the high carriage of her head, which was at once so noble and so easy. ”

“ Waterville bethought himself. “Don’t count too much on George Littlemore,” he said gravely.
“You men have no pity,” she grimly sighed.
“Why should we pity you? How can Mrs. Headway hurt such a person as you?” he asked.
Lady Demesne cast about. “It hurts me to hear her voice.”
“Her voice is very liquid.” He liked his word.
“Possibly. But she’s horrible!”
This was too much, it seemed to Waterville; Nancy Beck was open to criticism, and he himself had declared she was a barbarian. Yet she wasn’t horrible. “It’s for your son to pity you. If he doesn’t how can you expect it of others?” ”

“ New York, Waterville said to himself with a glow of civic pride, was quite capable of taking a higher stand in such a matter than London. They went some distance without speaking; at last he said, expressing honestly the thought at that moment uppermost in his mind: “I hate that phrase, ‘getting into society.’ I don’t think one ought to attribute to one’s self that sort of ambition. One ought to assume that one’s in the confounded thing—that one is society—and to hold that if one has good manners one has, from the social point of view, achieved the great thing. ”

“ Yes, poor little Boston, what nonsense is talked in thy name! But this New England maiden is in her way a rare white flower; she’s travelling all over Europe alone—“to see it,” she says, “for herself.” For herself! What can that strangely serene self of hers do with such sights, such depths! She looks at everything, goes everywhere, passes her way with her clear quiet eyes wide open; skirting the edge of obscene abysses without suspecting them ”

“ She was a fair neat woman, who had once been pretty, with a small thin voice, a finished manner and a perfect knowledge of what it was proper to do on every occasion in life. She always did it, and her conception of it was so definite that failure would have left her without excuse. She was usually not taken for an American, but she made a point of being one, because she flattered herself that she was of a type which under that banner borrowed distinction from rarity. She was by nature a great conservative and had ended by figuring as a better Tory than her husband ”

“ Headway made prompt answer. “You told me once—at San Pablo—that she was the nicest woman you knew. I made a note of that, you see. And you told me she was just my age. So that makes it rather inglorious for you if you won’t introduce me!” With which she gave a laugh that perhaps a little heralded danger. “I’m not in the least afraid of her being dull. It’s all right, it’s just refined and nice, to be dull. I’m ever so much too exciting.”
“You are indeed, ever so much! But nothing is more easy than to know my sister,” said Littlemore, who knew perfectly that what he said was untrue. ”

“ Lady Canterville seemed to wish their aspirant to come forward more, to give certain assurances and pledges. He felt he was ready to say or do anything that was a matter of proper form, but he couldn’t take the tone of trying to purchase her ladyship’s assent, penetrated as he was with the conviction that such a man as he could be trusted to care for his wife rather more than an impecunious British peer and his wife could be supposed—with the lights he had acquired on English society—to care even for the handsomest of a dozen children. ”

“ FROM LOUIS LEVERETT IN PARIS TO HARVARD TREMONT IN BOSTON September 25.
My dear Harvard,
I’ve carried out my plan, of which I gave you a hint in my last, and I only regret I shouldn’t have done it before. It’s human nature, after all, that’s the most interesting thing in the world, and it only reveals itself to the truly earnest seeker. There’s a want of earnestness in that life of hotels and railroad-trains which so many of our countrymen are content to lead in this strange rich elder world, and I was distressed to find how far I myself had been led along the dusty beaten track. ”

“ Here our young men enjoyed, as they supposed, a glimpse of American society, which was distributed over the measureless expanse in a variety of sedentary attitudes and appeared to consist largely of pretty young girls, dressed as for a fête champêtre, swaying to and fro in rocking-chairs, fanning themselves with large straw fans and enjoying an enviable exemption from social cares. Lord Lambeth had a theory, which it might be interesting to trace to its origin, that it would be not only agreeable, but easily possible, to enter into relations with one of these young ladies ”

“ I don’t consider that in Boston there’s any real sympathy with the artistic temperament; we tend to make everything a matter of right and wrong. And in Boston one can’t live—on ne peut pas vivre, as they say here. I don’t mean one can’t reside—for a great many people manage that; but one can’t live esthetically—I almost venture to say one can’t live sensuously. This is why I’ve always been so much drawn to the French, who are so esthetic, so sensuous, so entirely living. ”

“ Littlemore had suddenly ceased to be bored, but a variety of feelings had taken the place of that one. It was impossible not to be touched; she really meant what she said. People don’t change their nature, but they change their desires, their ideal, their effort. This incoherent passionate plea was an assurance that she was literally panting to be respectable. But the poor woman, whatever she did, was condemned, as he had said of old, in Paris, to Waterville, to be only half right. The colour rose to her visitor’s face as he listened to her outpouring of anxiety and egotism ”

“ There had been a good many things in her life in New York that cost her an effort, but sending her love to her mother-in-law was not one of these. She liked Mrs. Lemon better than any one she had seen in America; she was the only person who seemed to Lady Barb really simple, as she herself understood that quality. Many people had struck her as homely and rustic and many others as pretentious and vulgar; but in Jackson’s mother she had found the golden mean of a discretion, of a native felicity and modesty and decency, which, as she would have said, were really nice. ”

“ At the same moment a gentleman in the Walk engaged his attention, so that he advanced to the barrier which protects the pedestrians and halted there, bending a little from his saddle and talking with his friend, who leaned against the rail. Lord Canterville was indeed perfect, as his American admirer had said. Upwards of sixty and of great stature and great presence, he was a thoroughly splendid apparition. In capital preservation he had the freshness of middle life—he would have been young indeed to the eye if his large harmonious spread hadn’t spoken of the lapse of years. ”

“ Mrs. Lemon promised to be very careful as soon as her son had begun to warn her; and this time she had a certain understanding of what she promised. She thought people ought to make the matches they liked; she had given proof of this in her late behaviour to Jackson, whose own union was, to her sense, marked with all the arbitrariness of pure love. Nevertheless she could see that Herman Longstraw would probably be thought rough in England; and it wasn’t simply that he was so inferior to Jackson, for, after all, certain things were not to be expected. ”

“ She’s very shy.”
“Oh indeed?” said Percy Beaumont with evident wonder. And then as if to alternate with a certain grace the note of scepticism: “I guess your shyness, in that case, is different from ours.”
“Everything of ours is different from yours,” Mrs. Westgate instantly returned. “But my poor sister’s given over, I hold, to a fine Boston gaucherie that has rubbed off on her by being there so much. She’s a dear good girl, however; she’s a charming type of girl. She is not in the least a flirt; that isn’t at all her line; she doesn’t know the alphabet of any such vulgarity. ”

“ Just now Beaumont’s clear eyes had a rather troubled light, which, after glancing at Bessie Alden while she spoke, he turned with some intensity on Lord Lambeth. Mrs. Westgate’s beautiful radiance of interest and dissent fell meanwhile impartially everywhere.
“You had better wait till the time comes,” she said to her sister. “Perhaps next May you won’t care so much for London. Mr. Beaumont and I,” she went on, smiling at her companion, “have had a tremendous discussion. We don’t agree about anything. It’s perfectly delightful.” ”

“ If she wants me to see as much as possible of America it’s much better I should be here than always with Barb—it’s much less like one’s own country. I mean it’s much nicer—for a girl,” said Lady Agatha affectionately to Mrs. Lemon, who began also to look at Jackson under the influence of this uttered sweetness which was like some quaint little old air, she thought, played upon a faded spinet with two girlish fingers. ”

“ This sounds as if life proceeded but in a makeshift fashion at the Pension Beaurepas—as if we suffered from a sordid tone. But such was not at all the case. We were simply very bourgeois; we practised the good old Genevese principle of not sacrificing to appearances. Nothing can be better than that principle when the rich real underlies it. We had the rich real at the Pension Beaurepas: we had it in the shape of soft short beds equipped with fluffy duvets; of admirable coffee, served to us in the morning by Célestine in person as we lay recumbent on these downy couches ”

“ Four years ago—in 1874—two young Englishmen had occasion to go to the United States. They crossed the ocean at midsummer and, arriving in New York on the first day of August, were much struck with the high, the torrid temperature. Disembarking upon the wharf they climbed into one of the huge high-hung coaches that convey passengers to the hotels, and with a great deal of bouncing and bumping they took their course through Broadway. The midsummer aspect of New York is doubtless not the most engaging, though nothing perhaps could well more solicit an alarmed attention. ”

“ Yet alas what one sees on a Newport piazza isn’t America; it’s only the back of Europe. I don’t mean to say I haven’t noticed any dangers since my return; there are two or three that seem to me very serious, but they aren’t those Mr. Antrobus apprehends. One, for instance, is that we shall cease to speak the English language, which I prefer so to any other. It’s less and less spoken; American’s crowding it out. All the children speak American, which as a child’s language is dreadfully rough. It’s exclusively in use in the schools; all the magazines and newspapers are in American. ”

“ If you betray us, chère Madame, we’re lost; and why, after all, should any one know of these things in Geneva? Aurora pretends she has been able to persuade herself that she doesn’t care who knows them; but there’s a strange expression in her face which proves that her conscience isn’t at rest. I watch her, I let her go, but I sit with my hands clasped. There’s a peculiar custom in this country—I shouldn’t know how to express it in Genevese: it’s called “being attentive,” and young girls are the object of the futile process. ”