St. James's Square

“ Pall Mall is a modern spelling of paille maille, the title of a French game at ball, somewhat similar to our croquet, first played in this thoroughfare—then open to St. James’s Park—about the year 1621. Carlton House Terrace stands on the site of Carlton House, the palace of Frederick, Prince of Wales, the father of George III. King Street, St. James’s Street, and St. James’s Square were designated in honour of James I. Bury Street is properly “Berry Street,” after the name of its builder. ”

“ James's and St. Anne's parishes, and a great part of St. Martin's and St. Giles's. I have met with several old persons in my younger days who remembered that there was but a single house, a cake-house, between the Mews-gate at Charing Cross and St. James's Palace Gate, where now stand the stately piles of St. James's Square, Pall Mall, and other fine streets. They also remembered the west side of St. Martin's Lane to have been a quickset hedge; yet High Holborn and Drury Lane were filled with noblemen's and gentlemen's houses and gardens almost a hundred and fifty years ago. ”

“ The ideal of quiet and of genteel retirement, in 1835, was found in Washington Square, where the Doctor built himself a handsome, modern, wide-fronted house, with a big balcony before the drawing-room windows, and a flight of marble steps ascending to a portal which was also faced with white marble. This structure, and many of its neighbours, which it exactly resembled, were supposed, forty years ago, to embody the last results of architectural science, and they remain to this day very solid and honourable dwellings. ”

“ It seemed in fact fairly to deepen for them as they stayed their course again; the splendid Square, which had so notoriously, in all the years, witnessed more of the joy of life than any equal area in Europe, furnished them, in their remoteness from earshot, with solitude and security. ”

“ Below Twenty-third street, and especially below Union Square, Broadway is built up magnificently. Marble, brown stone, and iron warehouses, extend in long rows on each side of the street. There are some old shanties still standing on the great thoroughfare, but they are rapidly disappearing, and in a few years will be entirely gone. The view from any point below Fourteenth street, ranges from Union Square to the Bowling Green, and is grand and exhilarating beyond description. The windows of the stores are filled with the gayest and most showy goods. ”

“ What arrested me on the spot—and with a shock much greater than any vision had allowed for—was the sense that my imagination had, in a flash, turned real. He did stand there!—but high up, beyond the lawn and at the very top of the tower to which, on that first morning, little Flora had conducted me. This tower was one of a pair—square, incongruous, crenelated structures—that were distinguished, for some reason, though I could see little difference, as the new and the old. ”

“ James’s Square and before her final apotheosis in Kensington Gore. The white-painted semi-circular front of her former residence at the corner of Pitt’s Head Mews, may still be seen; and it will not take a great stretch of the imagination to picture that beautiful and talented woman surrounded by all that extravagance and luxury could suggest, sitting upon its balcony, and penning those short stories, or editing those wonderful “books of beauty,” which formed the fashionable literary pabulum of early Victorian days. ”

“ In front of them was the Square, containing a considerable quantity of inexpensive vegetation, enclosed by a wooden paling, which increased its rural and accessible appearance; and round the corner was the more august precinct of the Fifth Avenue, taking its origin at this point with a spacious and confident air which already marked it for high destinies. I know not whether it is owing to the tenderness of early associations, but this portion of New York appears to many persons the most delectable. ”

“ Then as if to escape a little from her friend's deeper sounding, or as impatient for the carriage, not yet in sight, her eyes, turning away, took in the great stale square. As its staleness, however, was but that of London fairly fatigued, the late hot London with its dance all danced and its story all told, the air seemed a thing of blurred pictures and mixed echoes, and an impression met the sense—an impression that broke, the next moment, through the girl's tightened lips. "Oh, it's a beautiful big world, and everyone, yes, everyone⸻!" ”

“ There passed across her vision ten times a day the gleam of a bare blade, and at this it was that she most shut her eyes, most knew the impulse to cheat herself with motion and sound. She had merely driven, on a certain Wednesday, to Portland Place, instead of remaining in Eaton Square, and she privately repeated it again and again—there had appeared beforehand no reason why she should have seen the mantle of history flung, by a single sharp sweep, over so commonplace a deed. ”

“ TRANSITION WASHINGTON SQUARE (1881) , Mr James' first important work that does not deal with the international situation, is a work of great genius. Into the small mould of the story of how a plain and stupid girl was jilted by a fortune-hunter when he discovered that she would be disinherited by her contemptuous father on her marriage, Mr James concentrated all the sense which he had absorbed throughout his childhood of the simple, provincial life which went on behind the brown stone of old New York. ”

“ To haunt Eaton Square in fine would be to show that he hadn't, like his brilliant associate, a sufficiency of work in the world. It was just his having that sufficiency, it was just their having it together, that, so strangely and so blessedly, made, as they put it to each other, everything possible. What further propped up the case moreover was that the "world," by still another beautiful perversity of their chance, included Portland Place without including to anything like the same extent Eaton Square. ”

“ James's Street is much more remarkable for the natural advantages and beauty of the ground, than from any addition it has received from art," so says Ralph ("Critical Review of Public Buildings," 1783 edition) . In the very [Pg 55] earliest maps of the parish a road is marked on this site, leading northward from the palace. The street was built about 1670, and was first known as Long Street. In the time of the Stuarts it shared the aristocratic tendency of the square, and had a list of noble occupiers. ”

“ Stuyvesant Square lies to the east of Union Square, and is bisected by the line of the Second avenue. Its upper and lower boundaries are Fifteenth and Seventeenth streets. It consists of two beautiful parks of equal size, surrounded by a handsome iron railing, and filled with choice flowers and shrubbery. ”

“ Winthrop Square, as I had occasion to note a couple of years since, is a forgotten name, and the disappearance of my lodging spares me doubtless a reminder, possibly ironic, of the debility of those few constructional and pictorial elements that, mustering a wondrous good-will, I had invited myself to rejoice in as "colonial." The house was indeed very old, as antiquity in Cambridge went, with everything in it slanting and gaping and creaking, but with humble antique "points" and a dignity in its decay ”

“ This masterly use of technical resource to unfold an idea whose beauty would to a lesser artist have seemed hopelessly sheathed in obscurity, makes Washington Square the perfect termination to Mr James' first period of genius. ”

“ It was their type of house that was accepted for the neighbourhood as the first streets began to open to the right and left of Fifth Avenue. That northern stretch of the Square, first invaded in fiction by Henry James, has ever been a favourite background of the story-spinners, who never tire of contrasting its tone of well-bred aristocracy with the squalor, half-Bohemian and half-proletarian, that faces it from across the Park. In fiction one does not necessarily have to be of an old New York family in order to inhabit one of those north-side dwellings. ”

“ If one was so made one had certainly no business, on any terms, at Matcham; whereas if one wasn't one had no business there on the particular terms—terms of conformity with the principles of Eaton Square—under which one had been so absurdly dedicated. Deep at the heart of that resurgent unrest in our young man which we have had to content ourselves with calling his irritation—deep in the bosom of this falsity of position glowed the red spark of his inextinguishable sense of a higher and braver propriety. ”

“ And some men have formed a Saint James’s Square school of thought, but it was in Berkeley Square that the poet, critic, and commentator, who was sober, distinctly heard the song of the nightingale, on a night in the heart of the drought of the year 1921.
In the drawing-room of a house midway on the entailed side of the square sat a lady and a gentleman silently. Or rather, the lady lay, while the gentleman sat, and the sofa on which she lay was far from the arm-chair in which he sat. ”

“ Henry James (in "Washington Square") .
here is little in our busy, modern, progressive city to suggest Father Knickerbocker, with his three-cornered hat and knee-breeches, and his old-world air so homely and so picturesque. Our great streets, hemmed by stone and marble and glittering plate glass, crowded with kaleidoscopic cosmopolitan traffic, ceaselessly resonant with twentieth century activity, do not seem a happy setting for our old-fashioned and beloved presiding shade. ”

“ James's Square—is the region occupied by the palaces and mansions of some of the higher nobility of England. These residences are built in a very open manner, standing, many of them, apart from each other, and being in the midst of parks, gardens, terraces, and pleasure grounds, which give to the views that are presented to the eye of the stranger in walking among them a most enchanting variety. As Mr. George and Rollo passed along the streets among these residences, they soon began to observe other marks of excitement besides the illuminations. ”

“ It was no more than decently civil, of course, that after having dined in Washington Square, Morris should call there again; and it was no more than natural that, having been kindly received on this occasion, he should continue to present himself. He had had plenty of leisure on his hands; and thirty years ago, in New York, a young man of leisure had reason to be thankful for aids to self-oblivion. Catherine said nothing to her father about these visits, though they had rapidly become the most important, the most absorbing thing in her life. The girl was very happy. ”

“ An indefinite envy rose in Paul Overt’s heart as he took his way on foot alone; a feeling addressed alike strangely enough, to each of the occupants of the hansom. How much he should like to rattle about London with such a girl! How much he should like to go and look at “types” with St. George!
The next Sunday at four o’clock he called in Manchester Square, where his secret wish was gratified by his finding Miss Fancourt alone. ”

“ He made the grand tour of Europe, travelled in considerable splendour, and (as was to have been expected in a man of his high cultivation) found so much in art and antiquity to interest him, that he remained abroad, not for six months, but for twelve. Mrs. Penniman, in Washington Square, accommodated herself to his absence. She enjoyed her uncontested dominion in the empty house, and flattered herself that she made it more attractive to their friends than when her brother was at home. To Morris Townsend, at least, it would have appeared that she made it singularly attractive. ”

“ James’s Square, must not delay us, or we shall never get along, but we may remember that from 1673, when it was formed, to 1830, it was not a street proper at all, but merely one of those exiguous courts, of which Crown Court, in Pall Mall, is a survivor. There is one private house of interest in King Street, for at No. 1c, as a memorial tablet commemorates, Napoleon III., while yet only Prince Louis Napoleon, resided for two years, 1838-40, after he had been expelled from Switzerland. ”

“ The mind is like a voracious fish: it would like to eat up all the experiences and characteristics of a city or a nation, but this, fortunately, is not possible. My own mind was busy pounding at the gates of fact, but during all the while I was there I got only a little way. I remember being struck with the nature of St. James’s Park, which was near my hotel, the great column to the Duke of Marlborough, at the end of the street, the whirl of life in Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly Circus, which were both very near. ”

“ A few great men still retained their hereditary hotels in the Strand. The stately dwellings on the south and west of Lincoln's Inn Fields, the Piazza of Covent Garden, Southampton Square, which is now called Bloomsbury Square, and King's Square in Soho Fields, which is now called Soho Square, were among the favourite spots. Foreign princes were carried to see Bloomsbury Square, as one of the wonders of England. [88] Soho Square, which had just been built, was to our ancestors a subject of pride with which their posterity will hardly sympathise. ”

“ It has a kind of established repose which is not of frequent occurrence in other quarters of the long, shrill city; it has a riper, richer, more honourable look than any of the upper ramifications of the great longitudinal thoroughfare—the look of having had something of a social history. It was here, as you might have been informed on good authority, that you had come into a world which appeared to offer a variety of sources of interest ”