Princess Casamassima

“ Hyacinth’s glance had gone straight, and though with four persons in it Rosy’s little apartment looked crowded he saw no one but the object of his quick preconception—no one but the Princess Casamassima seated beside the low sofa, the grand feature introduced during his absence from London, on which, arrayed in the famous pink dressing-gown, Miss Muniment now received her visitors. ”

“ The Princess Casamassima had a clear faculty of completely ignoring things of which she wished to take no account; it was not in the least the air of contempt, but thoughtful, tranquil, convenient absence, after which she came back to the point where she wished to be. She made no protest against her companion’s speech, but said to Hyacinth, as if vaguely conscious she had been committing herself in some 187 absurd way: “She lives with me; she’s everything to me; she’s the best woman in the world.” ”

“ All of which furthers my remarking how much I have been interested, on reading The Princess Casamassima over, to recognise my sense, sharp from far back, that clearness and concreteness constantly depend, for any pictorial whole, on some concentrated individual notation of them. That notation goes forward here in the mind of little Hyacinth, immensely quickened by the fact of its xviii so mattering to his very life what he does make of things: which passion of intelligence is, as I have already hinted, precisely his highest value for our curiosity and our sympathy. ”

“ Dear lady,” the Princess pursued, “I fear I must confess to you that my heart’s not in bibelots. When thousands and tens of thousands haven’t bread to put in their mouths I can dispense with tapestry and old china.” And her fair face, bent charmingly, conciliatingly, on Lady Aurora, appeared to argue that if she was narrow at least she was honest.
Hyacinth wondered, rather vulgarly, what strange turn she had taken and whether this singular picture of her denuded personality were not one of her famous caprices, a whimsical joke, a nervous perversity. ”

“ That she was a very different woman from Christina Light did not at all prove that she was less a woman, and if the Princess Casamassima had gone up into a high place to publish her disrelish of a man who lacked the virile will, it was very certain that Mary Garland was not a person to put up, at any point, with what might be called the princess’s leavings. ”

“ That’s the word of cowards.”
“Do you mean her ladyship’s a coward?”
“Yes, in not having the courage of her opinions, of her conclusions. The way the English can go half-way to a thing and then stick in the middle!” the Princess exclaimed impatiently.
“That’s not your fault, certainly!” said Hyacinth. “But it seems to me Lady Aurora, for herself, goes pretty far.”
“We’re all afraid of some things and brave about others,” his friend pursued.
“The thing Lady Aurora’s most afraid of is the Princess Casamassima,” Hyacinth returned. ”

“ Lady Aurora looked more than ever dishevelled with interest and wonder; the long strands of her silky hair floated like gossamer while, 146 in her extraordinary, religious attention, with her hands raised and clasped to her bosom as if she were praying, her respiration rose and fell. She had never seen any one like the Princess; but Hyacinth’s apprehension of some months before had been groundless—she evidently didn’t think her “flashy.” She thought her divine and a revelation of beauty and benignity; and the illuminated, amplified room could contain no dissentient opinion. ”

“ Hyacinth interposed, his perplexity escaping in a harmless manner through this graceful hyperbole. He had observed that though the lady in question could dispense with old china and tapestry she couldn’t dispense with a pair of immaculate gloves which fitted her to a charm.
“My people have a mass of things, you know, but I’ve really nothing myself,” said Lady Aurora, as if she owed this assurance to such a representative of suffering humanity.
“The world will be beautiful enough when it becomes good enough,” the Princess resumed. ”

“ With the Princess is involved the pathetic Hyacinth Robinson, unacknowledged son of a lord and yet a book-binder by trade, who falls first into the vicious coils of the militant socialists, then into the kindly, though as it turns out no less fatal, coils of the Princess Casamassima, learns to admire the aristocracy, and comes to a tragic end. ”

“ I have related the whole of this conversation because it supplies a highly important chapter of Hyacinth’s history, but we may not take time to trace all the stages and reproduce all the passages through which the friendship of the Princess Casamassima with the young man she had constituted her bookbinder was confirmed. By the end of a week the standard of fitness she had set up in the place of exploded proprieties appeared the model of justice and convenience; and during this period, a season of strange revelations for our young man, many other things happened. ”

“ I recognise at the same time, and in planning The Princess Casamassima felt it highly important to recognise, the danger of filling too full any supposed and above all any obviously limited vessel of consciousness. If persons either tragically or comically embroiled with life allow us the comic or tragic value of their embroilment in proportion xi as their struggle is a measured and directed one, it is strangely true, none the less, that beyond a certain point they are spoiled for us by this carrying of a due light. ”

“ He suspended, so to say, his small sensibility in the midst of it, to quiver there with joy and hope and ambition as well as with the effort of renunciation. The Princess’s quiet fireside glowed with deeper assurances, with associations of intimacy, through the dusk and the immensity; the thought of it was with him always, and his relations with its mistress were more organised than they had been in his first vision of her. Whether or no it was better for the cause she cherished that she should have been reduced to her present simplicity, it was better at least for poor Mr. Robinson. ”

“ You don’t pretend she’s a decent woman, I suppose?” Millicent’s laughter rang through the quiet neighbourhood.
“My dear fellow, you know you have been to her,” Captain Sholto wonderfully smiled.
Hyacinth turned on him staring and at once provoked and baffled by his ambiguous part in an 297 incident it was doubtless possible to magnify but not possible to treat as perfectly simple. “Certainly I’ve been to the Princess Casamassima, thanks to you. When you came and pressed me to go, when you dragged me, do you make it a reproach? Who the devil are you, anyway, and what do you want of me?” ”

“ Lady Aurora looked a little frightened, but at the same time gratified, and after a moment responded: “I believe a great many artists live in Saint John’s Wood.”
“I don’t care about the artists!” said the Princess, shaking her head slowly and with the sad smile that sometimes made her beauty so inexpressibly touching.
“Not when they’ve painted you such beautiful pictures?” Rosy demanded. “We know about your pictures—we’ve admired them so much. Mr. Hyacinth has described to us your precious possessions.” ”

“ The Princess appeared and they mounted into a great square barouche, an old-fashioned, high-hung vehicle with a green body, a faded hammer-cloth and a rumble where the footman sat (their hostess mentioned that it had been let with the house) , which 25 rolled ponderously and smoothly along the winding avenue and through the gilded park-gates that were surmounted with an immense escutcheon. The progress of this apparently mismatched trio had a high respectability, and that is one of the reasons why Hyacinth felt the occasion intensely memorable. ”

“ The Princess stared. “Do you mean that you are giving up——?”
“A fine, stiff conservative’s a thing I perfectly understand,” said Paul Muniment. “If I were on the top I’d stick.”
“I see, you’re not narrow,” she breathed appreciatively.
“I beg your pardon, I am. I don’t call that wide. One must be narrow to penetrate.”
“Whatever you are you’ll succeed,” said the Princess. “Hyacinth won’t, but you will.”
“It depends upon what you call success!” the young man returned. And in a moment, before she could take it up, he added as he looked about the room: “You’ve got a lovely home.” ”

“ Rose Muniment exclaimed with eagerness. “What do you say to mine, lying here between two members of the aristocracy and with Mr. Hyacinth thrown in?”
“You’re certainly lucky—with Lady Aurora Langrish. I wish she would come and see me,” the Princess genially sighed as she rose.
“Do go, my lady, and tell me if it’s so poor!” Rosy went on gaily.
“I think there can’t be too many pictures and statues and works of art,” Hyacinth broke out. “The more the better, whether people are hungry or not. In the way of ameliorating influences are not those the most definite?” ”

“ Madame Grandoni risked the truth. “He was the Princess’s bookbinder.”
“Her bookbinder? Do you mean one of her lovers?”
“Prince, how can you dream she’ll ever live with you again?” the old lady asked in reply to this.
“Why then does she have him in her drawing-room—announced like an ambassador, carrying a hat in his hand like mine? Where were his books, his bindings? I shouldn’t say this to her,” he added as if the declaration justified him.
“I told you the other day that she’s making studies of the people—the lower orders. The young man you saw is a study.” ”

“ You should have seen me before.”
“I should have liked that,” he quite shamelessly smiled. “I like to see solid wealth.”
“Ah you’re as bad as Hyacinth. I’m the only consistent one!” the Princess sighed.
“You’ve a great deal left, for a person who has given everything away.”
“These are not mine—these abominations—or I would give them too!” Paul’s hostess returned artlessly.
He got up from his chair, still looking over the scene. “I’d give my nose for such a place as this. At any rate, you’re not yet reduced to poverty.” ”

“ She treated him as if she liked him for having got in with the swells; she had an appreciation of success which would lead her to handle him more tenderly now that he was really successful. She tried to make him describe the style of life that was led in a house where people were invited to stay like that without having to pay, and she surprised almost as much as she gratified him by not indulging in any of her former digs at the Princess. She was lavish of ejaculations when he answered certain of her questions—ejaculations that savoured of Pimlico, “Oh I say!” ”

“ The Princess reflected that her visitor was not a gentleman, like Hyacinth; but this made no difference in her present attitude. The expectation that he would be a gentleman had had nothing to do with her interest in him; that had in fact rested largely on his probably finding felicity in a deep indifference to the character. “I don’t know that there’s any one in the world I envy so much,” she observed; a statement that her visitor received in silence. ”

“ The talk in the firelight, while our youth laboured rather recklessly (for the spirit of the occasion on his hostess’s part was passing into his own blood) with his muffin-eating beauty—the conversation, accompanied with the light click of delicate tea-cups, was as well-bred as could be consistent with an odd evident parti-pris of the Princess’s to put poor Lady Marchant, as the phrase might be, 28 through her paces. With great urbanity of manner she appealed for the explanation of everything, and especially of her ladyship’s own thin remarks and of the sense in which they had been meant ”

“ This speculation of the Princess’s was by no means new to Hyacinth, and he had not thought it heroic, after all, that their high-strung associate should feel herself capable of sacrificing her family, her name, and the few habits of gentility that survived in her life, of making herself a scandal, a fable and a nine days’ wonder, for Muniment’s sake: the young chemical expert being, to his mind, as we know, exactly the type of man who produced convulsions, made ruptures and renunciations easy. ”

“ His relations with the Princess had long since ceased to appear to him to belong to the world of fable; they were as natural as anything else—everything in life was queer enough; he had by this time assimilated them, as it were, and they were an indispensable part of the happiness of each. “Of each”—Hyacinth risked that, for there was no particular vanity now involved in his perceiving that the most remarkable woman in Europe was simply quite fond of him. ”

“ But if he said that he was in one of his bad days,” the Princess replied. “He changes constantly and his impressions change. The misery of the people is by no means always on his heart. You tell me what he has told you; well, he has told me that the people may perish over and over rather than the conquests of civilisation shall be sacrificed to them. He declares at such moments that they’ll be sacrificed—sacrificed utterly—if the ignorant masses get the upper hand.” ”

“ I must tell you I don’t care if she is!”
“We’re all quite crazy, I think,” said Madame Grandoni; “but the Princess no more than the rest of us. No, she must try everything; at present she’s trying democracy, she’s going all lengths in radicalism.”
“Santo Dio!” murmured the young man. “And what do they say here when they see the bookbinder?”
“They haven’t seen him and perhaps they won’t. But if they do it won’t matter, because here everything’s forgiven. That a person should be extraordinary in some way of his own—and a woman as much as a man—is all they want. ”

“ They’ve heavy minds,” the Prince declared. Then he pursued, drawing a little closer to his hostess: “But what were they doing there? Why did she go with him?”
“They think they’re conspiring. Ecco!” said Madame Grandoni.
“You mean they’ve joined a secret society, a band of revolutionists and murderers? Capisco bene—that’s not new to me. But perhaps they only pretend it’s for that,” added the Prince.
“Only pretend? Why should they pretend? That’s not Christina’s way.” ”