James Goes Slumming

THE PRINCESS CASAMASSIMA (703 pp.) --Henry James--Macmillan ($6).

When Novelist Henry James was 46 and a target for hostile English and American critics, he wrote to Fellow Novelist William Dean Ho wells: "Some day all my buried prose will kick off its various tombstones at once." Were James alive today (he died in 1916), he could hardly fail to be gratified by the many exhumations which have been carried on in his literary graveyard in the past ten years. The latest tombstone to be lifted has been pried up by the publishing house of Macmillan, which once spurned his writing as "honest scribble work and no more." The Princess Casamassima is a long novel which James wrote in 1886 and which critics of the day buried on the spot.

The Princess will startle readers who think of James, the expatriate, as the man who was saddened because his own U.S. had "no sovereign, no court, no aristocracy . . . nor manors, nor thatched cottages, nor ivied ruins." It is a novel of explicit social significance, about London's anarchist workers and their starry-eyed aristocratic sympathizers. Columbia Professor Lionel Trilling, in a 15,000-word introduction to The Princess, credits James with "a first-rate rendering of literal social reality." But the reader will probably feel that for all James's intentions, his poor are specimens under-glass, people he merely glimpsed during his endless London strolls. They are the aristocrats of the poor, never in want and constantly being taken up by genuine aristocrats who have come to regard their own inheritance as a badge of shame.

Great New Deal. The opening chapters read like dehydrated Dickens. Hyacinth, the young hero, is the son of a French prostitute and an English lord; the lord has been murdered and the prostitute imprisoned for life for the crime. The boy meets a group of anarchists and through them some socially conscious aristocrats.

One of them is the Princess Casamassima, who no longer lives with the Italian prince she married. Taking her do-gooding more seriously than her fellow aristocrats, she moves to a shabby little London house, gives the prince's money away to the poor and even offers to assassinate a duke for the anarchists. But not before she has given Hyacinth a taste of princely living and watched him fall in love with her. Says the princess: "I'm convinced that we're living in a fool's paradise, that the ground's heaving under our feet . . . I'm one of those who believe that a great new deal is destined to take place . . ."

Hyacinth, who has secretly sworn to carry out the assassination of the duke, begins to have his doubts about the wisdom of destroying the social order. It is this change of mind that becomes the central development of the novel. Ironically, it is the princess who has given him a taste for the culture that revolution would destroy. In the end, he sees the princess give herself to his best anarchist friend. Overwhelmed by the ironies that smother him, Hyacinth commits suicide with the bullet that was meant for the duke.

Dense & Gracious. What saves this colossal structure of melodrama and coincidence from toppling is largely James's style, at once dense and gracious, his fine sense of theater whenever his characters enter a room or open a conversation. The women in this novel are as unsuccessful as Joseph Conrad's, yet as symbols they are impressive. James had the kind of imagination that gives an electric-shock quality to subtle disclosures of the clash of personality and the unfolding of character.

These great talents make The Princess Casamassima a real literary experience even, or especially, for those who find him a feeble sociologist.

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