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Crisis care: tackling the climate and ecological emergency
- Cate Bailey, Norman A. Poole, Adrian James
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- Journal:
- BJPsych Bulletin / Volume 45 / Issue 4 / August 2021
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- 28 July 2021, pp. 201-204
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- August 2021
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The climate crisis is a health crisis; it demands the urgent attention and action of healthcare professionals and organisations. In this issue of the BJPsych Bulletin, we consider what the destructive effects of the climate and ecological crisis entail for the mental health of populations, and what the response of psychiatrists, both individual and collective, must be. We also highlight the opportunities and benefits a more sustainable and preventative approach could offer individuals, communities and the planet.
Groove in Cuban Son and Salsa Performance
- ADRIAN POOLE
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- Journal:
- Journal of the Royal Musical Association / Volume 146 / Issue 1 / May 2021
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- 17 June 2021, pp. 117-145
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- May 2021
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Using a combination of ethnography, empirical measures of microtiming between rhythm-section musicians and ethno/musicological analyses, this article examines and measures groove in three real-world performances of the popular dance tradition of Cuban son and salsa. The findings paint a complex picture of groove that is shaped by rhythmic-harmonic structure, shared concepts of timing, individual preferences, group dynamics and rhythmic interactions between musicians as they work together to negotiate a groove with the ‘correct’ feel. Microtiming analyses produce a snapshot of how rhythmic timing relationships are ‘played out’ between musicians in live performances and provide quantitative measures of the level of synchrony and separation within the rhythm section. They also suggest that microtiming is influenced by certain metric locations within the rhythmic-harmonic structure, particularly those locations that anticipate harmonic changes and mark the beginning of repeated rhythmic-harmonic sequences.
Book Fourth
- Henry James
- Edited by Adrian Poole, University of Cambridge
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- The Princess Casamassima
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- 11 April 2021
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- 19 March 2020, pp -
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Textual Introduction
- Henry James
- Edited by Adrian Poole, University of Cambridge
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- The Princess Casamassima
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- 11 April 2021
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- 19 March 2020, pp xcvi-civ
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Summary
The choice of copy text for this edition is the first edition published in London in three volumes on 22 October 1886 by Macmillan, in a printing run of 750 copies. That same month Macmillan printed a one-volume edition of 3,000 copies, published in New York on 2 November 1886 (the first Macmillan office in the US had been opened by George Edward Brett in 1869), and in London the following August 1887 (E&L 75–6). For a detailed explanation of the genesis and publication history of the novel, see the opening pages of the Introduction (pp. xxv–xxxix).
The Princess Casamassima is one of James's few fictions for which a holograph manuscript is known to have survived (hereafter MS: see Figure 1 for its opening page). The others are Confidence, The Europeans, and a number of tales (for details see Supino 390–3). A substantial proportion of the manuscript James produced for serialization in the AM was presented to Harvard by the T. B. Aldrich Memorial Trustees and is lodged along with other papers of Aldrich's in the Houghton Library, Harvard (MS Am 1237.5.1). Chapters 1–36 and 39–40 are contained in five bound volumes. The MS of Chapter 38 (74 ‘slips’) is housed in a separate box folder; it was presented to the Providence Public Library, RI, by Daniel Berkeley Updike, and later acquired by the Houghton Library. Chapter 37 is missing, as are the final seven Chapters 41–47.
In principle James sought to number the slips consecutively. The contents of the Houghton volumes are as follows:
Vol. I (Chs. 1–9), slips 1–334
Vol. II (Chs. 10–15), slips 335–633
Vol. III (Chs. 16–23), slips 634–1102
Vol. IV (Chs. 24–32), slips 1103–1207 and 1–147
Vol. V (Chs. 33–40), slips 1–409, less Ch. 37 (missing, slips 153–208). Ch. 38 (slips 209–81) is contained in a separate box-folder.
XI
- Henry James
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- The Princess Casamassima
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- 19 March 2020, pp 100-110
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She desired at last to raise their common experience to a loftier level, to enjoy what she called a high-class treat. Their conversation was condemned, for the most part, to go forward in the streets, the wintry, dusky, foggy streets, which looked bigger and more numerous in their perpetual obscurity, and in which everything was covered with damp, gritty smut, an odour extremely agreeable to Miss Henning. Happily she shared Hyacinth's relish of vague perambulation, and was still more addicted than he to looking into the windows of shops, before which, in long, contemplative halts, she picked out freely the articles she shouldn't mind calling her own. Hyacinth always pronounced the objects of her selection hideous, and made no scruple to tell her that she had the worst taste of any girl in the place. Nothing that he could say to her affronted her so much, as her pretensions in the way of a cultivated judgment were boundless. Had not, indeed, her natural aptitude been fortified, in the neighbourhood of Buckingham Palace (there was scarcely anything they didn't sell in the great shop of which she was an ornament), by daily contact with the freshest products of modern industry? Hyacinth laughed this establishment to scorn, and told her there was nothing in it, from top to bottom, that a real artist would look at. She inquired, with answering derision, if this were a description of his own few inches; but in reality she was fascinated, as much as she was provoked, by his air of being difficult to please, of seeing indescribable differences among things. She had given herself out, originally, as very knowing, but he could make her feel stupid. When once in a while he pointed out a commodity that he condescended to like (this didn't happen often, because the only shops in which there was a chance of his making such a discovery were closed at nightfall), she stared, bruised him more or less with her elbow, and declared that if any one should give her such a piece of rubbish she would sell it for fourpence.
XLVI
- Henry James
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- The Princess Casamassima
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- 11 April 2021
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- 19 March 2020, pp 469-475
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“I have received a letter from your husband,” Paul Muniment said to the Princess, the next evening, as soon as he came into the room. He announced this fact with a kind of bald promptitude and with a familiarity of manner which showed that his visit was one of a closely-connected series. The Princess was evidently not a little surprised by it, and immediately asked how in the world the Prince could know his address. “Couldn't it have been by your old lady?” Muniment inquired. “He must have met her in Paris. It is from Paris that he writes.”
“What an incorrigible cad!” the Princess exclaimed.
“I don't see that — for writing to me. I have his letter in my pocket, and I will show it to you if you like.”
“Thank you, nothing would induce me to touch anything he has touched,” the Princess replied.
“You touch his money, my dear lady,” Muniment remarked, with the quiet smile of a man who sees things as they are.
The Princess hesitated a little. “Yes, I make an exception for that, because it hurts him, it makes him suffer.”
“I should think, on the contrary, it would gratify him by showing you in a condition of weakness and dependence.”
“Not when he knows I don't use it for myself. What exasperates him is that it is devoted to ends which he hates almost as much as he hates me and yet which he can't call selfish.”
“He doesn't hate you,” said Muniment, with that tone of pleasant reasonableness that he used when he was most imperturbable. “His letter satisfies me of that.” The Princess stared, at this, and asked him what he was coming to — whether he were leading up to advising her to go back and live with her husband. “I don't know that I would go so far as to advise,” he replied; “when I have so much benefit from seeing you here, on your present footing, that wouldn't sound well. But I’ll just make bold to prophesy that you will go before very long.”
“And on what does that extraordinary prediction rest?”
Textual Variants I: Substantive Variants up to Copy Text
- Henry James
- Edited by Adrian Poole, University of Cambridge
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- The Princess Casamassima
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XXII
- Henry James
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- The Princess Casamassima
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Hyacinth got up early — an operation attended with very little effort, as he had scarcely closed his eyes all night. What he saw from his window made him dress as rapidly as a young man could do who desired more than ever that his appearance should not give strange ideas about him: an old garden, with parterres in curious figures, and little intervals of lawn which appeared to our hero's cockney vision fantastically green. At one end of the garden was a parapet of mossy brick, which looked down on the other side into a canal, or moat, or quaint old pond; and from the same standpoint there was also a view of a considerable part of the main body of the house (Hyacinth's room appeared to be in a wing commanding the extensive, irregular back), which was richly gray wherever it was not green with ivy and other dense creepers, and everywhere infinitely like a picture, with a high-piled, ancient, russet roof, broken by huge chimneys and queer peep-holes and all manner of odd gables and windows on different lines and antique patches and protrusions, and a particularly fascinating architectural excrescence in which a wonderful clockface was lodged — a clock-face covered with gilding and blazonry but showing many traces of the years and the weather. Hyacinth had never in his life been in the country — the real country, as he called it, the country which was not the mere raveled fringe of London — and there entered through his open casement the breath of a world enchantingly new and, after his recent feverish hours, inexpressibly refreshing to him; a sense of sweet, sunny air and mingled odours, all strangely pure and agreeable, and a kind of musical silence, the greater part of which seemed to consist of the voices of birds. There were tall, quiet trees near by, and afar off, and everywhere; and the group of objects which greeted Hyacinth's eyes evidently formed only a corner of larger spaces and a more complicated scene. There was a world to be revealed to him: it lay waiting, with the dew upon it, under his windows, and he must go down and take his first steps in it.
XLII
- Henry James
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- The Princess Casamassima
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He had no intention of going in the evening to Madeira Crescent, and that is why he asked his companion, before they separated, if he might not see her again, after tea. The evenings were bitter to him now, and he feared them in advance. The darkness had become a haunted element; it had visions for him that passed even before his closed eyes — sharp doubts and fears and suspicions, suggestions of evil, revelations of suffering. He wanted company, to light up his gloom, and this had driven him back to Millicent, in a manner not altogether consistent with the respect which it was still his theory that he owed to his nobler part. He felt no longer free to drop in at the Crescent, and tried to persuade himself, in case his mistrust should be overdone, that his reasons were reasons of magnanimity. If Paul Muniment were seriously occupied with the Princess, if they had work in hand for which their most earnest attention was required (and Sunday was very likely to be the day they would take: they had spent so much of the previous Sunday together), it would be delicate on his part to stay away, to leave his friend a clear field. There was something inexpressibly representative to him in the way that friend had abruptly decided to re-enter the house, after pausing outside with its mistress, at the moment he himself stood peering through the fog with the Prince. The movement repeated itself innumerable times, to his moral perception, suggesting to him things that he couldn't bear to learn. Hyacinth was afraid of being jealous, even after he had become so, and to prove to himself that he was not he had gone to see the Princess one evening in the middle of the week. Hadn't he wanted Paul to know her, months and months before, and now was he to entertain a vile feeling at the first manifestation of an intimacy which rested, in each party to it, upon aspirations that he respected?
XV
- Henry James
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- The Princess Casamassima
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- 19 March 2020, pp 146-160
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“I’m sure there's nothing I should like to part with,” Pinnie returned; and while she surveyed the scene Lady Aurora, with delicacy, to lighten Amanda's responsibility, got up and turned to the window, which was open to the summer-evening and admitted still the last rays of the long day. Hyacinth, after a moment, placed himself beside her, looking out with her at the dusky multitude of chimney-pots and the small black houses, roofed with grimy tiles. The thick, warm air of a London July floated beneath them, suffused with the everlasting uproar of the town, which appeared to have sunk into quietness but again became a mighty voice as soon as one listened for it; here and there, in poor windows, glimmered a turbid light, and high above, in a clearer, smokeless zone, a sky still fair and luminous, a faint silver star looked down. The sky was the same that, far away in the country, bent over golden fields and purple hills and gardens where nightingales sang; but from this point of view everything that covered the earth was ugly and sordid, and seemed to express, or to represent, the weariness of toil. In an instant, to Hyacinth's surprise, Lady Aurora said to him, “You never came, after all, to get the books.”
“Those you kindly offered to lend me? I didn't know it was an understanding.”
Lady Aurora gave an uneasy laugh. “I have picked them out; they are quite ready.”
“It's very kind of you,” the young man rejoined. “I will come and get them some day, with pleasure.” He was not very sure that he would; but it was the least he could say.
“She’ll tell you where I live, you know,” Lady Aurora went on, with a movement of her head in the direction of the bed, as if she were too shy to mention it herself.
“Oh, I have no doubt she knows the way — she could tell me every street and every turn!” Hyacinth exclaimed.
“She has made me describe to her, very often, how I come and go. I think that few people know more about London than she. She never forgets anything.”
“She's a wonderful little witch — she terrifies me!” said Hyacinth.
Contents
- Henry James
- Edited by Adrian Poole, University of Cambridge
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- The Princess Casamassima
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- 11 April 2021
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- 19 March 2020, pp vii-vii
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XLV
- Henry James
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- The Princess Casamassima
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- 11 April 2021
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- 19 March 2020, pp 460-468
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“And Madame Grandoni, then?” asked Hyacinth, reluctant to turn away. He felt pretty sure that he should never knock at that door again, and the desire was strong in him to see once more, for the last time, the ancient, troubled suivante of the Princess, whom he had always liked. She had seemed to him ever to be in the slightly ridiculous position of a confidant of tragedy in whom the heroine should have ceased to confide.
“E andata via, caro signorino,” said Assunta, smiling at him as she stood there holding the door open.
“She has gone away? Bless me, when did she go?”
“It is now five days, dear young sir. She has returned to our country.”
“Is it possible?” exclaimed Hyacinth, disappointedly.
“E possibilissimo!” said Assunta. Then she added, “There were many times when she almost went; but this time — capisce—— “ And without finishing her sentence the Princess's Roman tirewoman indulged in a subtle, suggestive, indefinable play of expression, to which her hands and shoulders contributed, as well as her lips and eyebrows.
Hyacinth looked at her long enough to catch any meaning that she might have wished to convey, but gave no sign of apprehending it. He only remarked, gravely, “In short she is here no more.”
“And the worst is that she will probably never come back. She didn't go for a long time, but when she decided herself it was finished,” Assunta declared. “Peccato!” she added, with a sigh.
“I should have liked to see her again — I should have liked to bid her goodbye.” Hyacinth lingered there in strange, melancholy vagueness; since he had been told the Princess was not at home he had no reason for remaining, save the possibility that she might return before he turned away. This possibility, however, was small, for it was only nine o’clock, the middle of the evening — too early an hour for her to reappear, if, as Assunta said, she had gone out after tea. He looked up and down the Crescent, gently swinging his stick, and became conscious in a moment that Assunta was regarding him with tender interest.
XXI
- Henry James
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- The Princess Casamassima
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Paul Muniment had fits of silence, while the others were talking; but on this occasion he had not opened his lips for half an hour. When he talked Hyacinth listened, almost holding his breath; and when he said nothing Hyacinth watched him fixedly, listening to the others only through the medium of his candid countenance. At the “Sun and Moon” Muniment paid very little attention to his young friend, doing nothing that should cause it to be perceived they were particular pals; and Hyacinth even thought, at moments, that he was bored or irritated by the serious manner in which the bookbinder could not conceal from the world that he regarded him. He wondered whether this were a system, a calculated prudence, on Muniment's part, or only a manifestation of that superior brutality, latent in his composition, which never had an intention of unkindness but was naturally intolerant of palaver. There was plenty of palaver at the “Sun and Moon”; there were nights when a blast of imbecility seemed to blow over the place, and one felt ashamed to be associated with so much insistent ignorance and flat-faced vanity. Then every one, with two or three exceptions, made an ass of himself, thumping the table and repeating over some inane phrase which appeared for the hour to constitute the whole furniture of his mind. There were men who kept saying, “Them was my words in the month of February last, and what I say I stick to — what I say I stick to;” and others who perpetually inquired of the company, “And what the plague am I to do with seventeen shillings — with seventeen shillings? What am I to do with them — will ye tell me that?” an interrogation which, in truth, usually ended by eliciting a ribald reply. There were still others who remarked, to satiety, that if it was not done to-day it would have to be done to-morrow, and several who constantly proclaimed their opinion that the only way was to pull up the Park rails again — just to pluck them straight up.
XXXIII
- Henry James
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- The Princess Casamassima
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- 11 April 2021
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- 19 March 2020, pp 327-335
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The house in Madeira Crescent was a low, stucco-fronted edifice, in a shabby, shallow semicircle, and Hyacinth could see, as they approached it, that the window-place in the parlour (which was on a level with the street-door), was ornamented by a glass case containing stuffed birds and surmounted by an alabaster Cupid. He was sufficiently versed in his London to know that the descent in the scale of the gentility was almost immeasurable for a person who should have moved into that quarter from the neighbourhood of Park Lane. The street was not squalid, and it was strictly residential; but it was mean and meagre and fourth-rate, and had in the highest degree that paltry, parochial air, that absence of style and elevation, which is the stamp of whole districts of London and which Hyacinth had already more than once mentally compared with the high-piled, important look of the Parisian perspective. It possessed in combination every quality which should have made it detestable to the Princess; it was almost as bad as Lomax Place. As they stopped before the narrow, ill-painted door, on which the number of the house was marked with a piece of common porcelain, cut in a fanciful shape, it appeared to Hyacinth that he had felt, in their long walk, the touch of the passion which led his companion to divest herself of her superfluities, but that it would take the romantic out of one's heroism to settle one's self in such a mesquin, Philistine row. However, if the Princess had wished to mortify the flesh she had chosen an effective means of doing so, and of mortifying the spirit as well. The long light of the gray summer evening was still in the air, and Madeira Crescent wore a soiled, dusty expression. A hand-organ droned in front of a neighbouring house, and the cart of the local washerwoman, to which a donkey was harnessed, was drawn up opposite. The local children, as well, were dancing on the pavement, to the music of the organ, and the scene was surveyed, from one of the windows, by a gentleman in a dirty dressing-gown, smoking a pipe, who made Hyacinth think of Mr. Micawber.
XXXIX
- Henry James
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- The Princess Casamassima
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- 11 April 2021
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- 19 March 2020, pp 391-405
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On Saturday afternoons Paul Muniment was able to leave his work at four o’clock, and on one of these occasions, some time after his visit to Madeira Crescent, he came into Rosy's room at about five, carefully dressed and brushed, and ruddy with the freshness of an abundant washing. He stood at the foot of her sofa, with a conscious smile, knowing how she chaffed him when his necktie was new; and after a moment, during which she ceased singing to herself as she twisted the strands of her long black hair together and let her eyes travel over his whole person, inspecting every detail, she said to him, “My dear Mr. Muniment, you are going to see the Princess.”
“Well, have you anything to say against it?” Mr. Muniment asked.
“Not a word; you know I like princesses. But you have.”
“Well, my girl, I’ll not speak it to you,” the young man rejoined. “There's something to be said against everything, if you’ll give yourself trouble enough.”
“I should be very sorry if ever anything was said against you.”
“The man's a sneak who is only and always praised,” Muniment remarked.
“If you didn't hope to be finely abused, where would be the encouragement?”
“Ay, but not with reason,” said Rosy, who always brightened to an argument.
“The better the reason, the greater the incentive to expose one's self. However, you won't hear it, if people do heave bricks at me.”
“I won't hear it? Pray, don't I hear everything? I should like any one to keep anything from me!” And Miss Muniment gave a toss of her recumbent head.
“There's a good deal I keep from you, my dear,” said Paul, rather dryly.
“You mean there are things I don't want, I don't take any trouble, to know. Indeed and indeed there are: things that I wouldn't know for the world — that no amount of persuasion would induce me, not if you was to go down on your knees. But if I did — if I did, I promise you that just as I lie here I should have them all in my pocket. Now there are others,” the young woman went on — “there are others that you will just be so good as to tell me.
XLVII
- Henry James
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- The Princess Casamassima
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That the Princess had done with him, done with him for ever, remained the most vivid impression that Hyacinth had carried away from Madeira Crescent the night before. He went home, and he flung himself on his narrow bed, where the consolation of sleep again descended upon him. But he woke up with the earliest dawn, and the beginning of a new day was a quick revival of pain. He was over-past, he had become vague, he was extinct. The things that Sholto had said to him came back to him, and the compassion of foreknowledge that Madame Grandoni had shown him from the first. Of Paul Muniment he only thought to wonder whether he knew. An insurmountable desire to do justice to him, for the very reason that there might be a temptation to oblique thoughts, forbade him to challenge his friend even in imagination. He vaguely wondered whether he would ever be superseded; but this possibility faded away in a stronger light — a kind of dazzling vision of some great tribuneship, which swept before him now and again and in which the figure of the Princess herself seemed merged and extinguished. When full morning came at last, and he got up, it brought with it, in the restlessness which made it impossible to him to remain in his room, a return of that beginning of an answerless question, “After all — after all——?” which the Princess had planted there the night before when she spoke so bravely in the name of the Revolution. “After all — after all, since nothing else was tried, or would, apparently, ever be tried——” He had a sense of his mind, which had been made up, falling to pieces again; but that sense in turn lost itself in a shudder which was already familiar — the horror of the public reappearance, on his part, of the imbrued hands of his mother. This loathing of the idea of a repetition had not been sharp, strangely enough, till his summons came; in all his previous meditations the growth of his reluctance to act for the “party of action” had not been the fear of a personal stain, but the simple extension of his observation. Yet now the idea of the personal stain made him horribly sick; it seemed by itself to make service impossible.
XXXVIII
- Henry James
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Hyacinth found, this winter, considerable occupation for his odd hours, his evenings and holidays and scraps of leisure, in putting in hand the books which he had promised himself, at Medley, to inclose in covers worthy of the high station and splendour of the lady of his life (these brilliant attributes had not then been shuffled out of sight), and of the confidence and generosity she showed him. He had determined she should receive from him something of value, and took pleasure in thinking that after he was gone they would be passed from hand to hand as specimens of rare work, while connoisseurs bent their heads over them, smiling and murmuring, handling them delicately. His invention stirred itself, and he had a hundred admirable ideas, many of which he sat up late at night to execute. He used all his skill, and by this time his skill was of a very high order. Old Crookenden recognised it by raising the rates at which he was paid; and though it was not among the traditions of the proprietor of the establishment in Soho, who to the end wore the apron with his workmen, to scatter sweet speeches, Hyacinth learned accidentally that several books that he had given him to do had been carried off and placed on a shelf of treasures at the villa, where they were exhibited to the members of the Crookenden circle who came to tea on Sundays. Hyacinth himself, indeed, was included in this company on a great occasion — invited to a musical party where he made the acquaintance of half a dozen Miss Crookendens, an acquaintance which consisted in his standing in a corner, behind several broad-backed old ladies, and watching the rotation, at the piano and the harp, of three or four of his master's thick-fingered daughters. “You know it's a tremendously musical house,” said one of the old ladies to another (she called it “’ouse”); but the principal impression made upon him by the performance of the Miss Crookendens was that it was wonderfully different from the Princess's playing.
VI
- Henry James
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- The Princess Casamassima
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One day, shortly after this, at the bindery, his friend Poupin was absent, and sent no explanation, as was customary in case of illness or domestic accident. There were two or three men employed in the place whose non-appearance, usually following close upon pay-day, was better unexplained, and was an implication of moral feebleness; but as a general thing Mr. Crookenden's establishment was a haunt of punctuality and sobriety. Least of all had Eustache Poupin been in the habit of asking for a margin. Hyacinth knew how little indulgence he had ever craved, and this was part of his admiration for the extraordinary Frenchman, an ardent stoic, a cold conspirator and an exquisite artist, who was by far the most interesting person in the ranks of his acquaintance and whose conversation, in the workshop, helped him sometimes to forget the smell of leather and glue. His conversation! Hyacinth had had plenty of that, and had endeared himself to the passionate refugee — Poupin had come to England after the Commune of 1871, to escape the reprisals of the government of M. Thiers, and had remained there in spite of amnesties and rehabilitations — by the solemnity and candour of his attention. He was a Republican of the old-fashioned sort, of the note of 1848, humanitary and idealistic, infinitely addicted to fraternity and equality, and inexhaustibly surprised and exasperated at finding so little enthusiasm for them in the land of his exile. Poupin had a high claim upon Hyacinth's esteem and gratitude, for he had been his godfather, his protector at the bindery. When Anastasius Vetch found something for Miss Pynsent's protégé to do, it was through the Frenchman, with whom he had accidentally formed an acquaintance, that he found it.
When the boy was about fifteen years of age Mr. Vetch made him a present of the essays of Lord Bacon, and the purchase of this volume had important consequences for Hyacinth. Anastasius Vetch was a poor man, and the luxury of giving was for the most part denied him; but when once in a way he tasted it he liked the sensation to be pure.
IV
- Henry James
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- The Princess Casamassima
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Summary
“Well, you’ll have to guess my name before I’ll tell you,” the girl said, with a free laugh, pushing her way into the narrow hall and leaning against the tattered wall-paper, which, representing blocks of marble with beveled edges, in streaks and speckles of black and gray, had not been renewed for years and came back to her out of the past. As Miss Pynsent closed the door, seeing her visitor was so resolute, the light filtered in from the street, through the narrow, dusty glass above it, and then the very smell and sense of the place returned to Millicent; a kind of musty dimness, with the vision of a small, steep staircase at the end, covered with a strip of oilcloth which she recognised, and made a little less dark by a window in the bend (you could see it from the hall), from which you could almost bump your head against the house behind. Nothing was changed except Miss Pynsent, and of course the girl herself. She had noticed, outside, that the sign between the windows had not even been touched up; there was still the same preposterous announcement of “fashionable bonnets” — as if the poor little dressmaker had the slightest acquaintance with that style of head-dress, of which Miss Henning's own knowledge was now so complete. She could see Miss Pynsent was looking at her hat, which was a wonderful composition of flowers and ribbons; her eyes had travelled up and down Millicent's whole person, but they rested in fascination on this ornament. The girl had forgotten how small the dressmaker was; she barely came up to her shoulder. She had lost her hair, and wore a cap, which Millicent noticed in return, wondering if that were a specimen of what she thought the fashion. Miss Pynsent stared up at her as if she had been six feet high; but she was used to that sort of surprised admiration, being perfectly conscious that she was a magnificent young woman.
“Won't you take me into your shop?” she asked. “I don't want to order anything; I only want to inquire after your ‘ealth; and isn't this rather an awkward place to talk?” She made her way further in, without waiting for permission, seeing that her startled hostess had not yet guessed.
XIV
- Henry James
- Edited by Adrian Poole, University of Cambridge
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- Book:
- The Princess Casamassima
- Published online:
- 11 April 2021
- Print publication:
- 19 March 2020, pp 136-145
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- Chapter
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Summary
Hyacinth did not mention to Pinnie or Mr. Vetch that he had been taken up by a great lady; but he mentioned it to Paul Muniment, to whom he now confided a great many things. He had, at first, been in considerable fear of his straight, loud, north-country friend, who showed signs of cultivating logic and criticism to a degree that was hostile to free conversation; but he discovered later that he was a man to whom one could say anything in the world, if one didn't think it of more importance to be sympathised with than to be understood. For a revolutionist, he was strangely good-natured. The sight of all the things he wanted to change had seemingly no power to irritate him, and if he joked about questions that lay very near his heart his pleasantry was not bitter nor invidious; the fault that Hyacinth sometimes found with it, rather, was that it was innocent to puerility. Our hero envied his power of combining a care for the wide misery of mankind with the apparent state of mind of the cheerful and virtuous young workman who, on Sunday morning, has put on a clean shirt, and, not having taken the gilt off his wages the night before, weighs against each other, for a happy day, the respective attractions of Epping Forest and Gravesend. He was never sarcastic about his personal lot and his daily life; it had not seemed to occur to him, for instance, that “society” was really responsible for the condition of his sister's spinal column, though Eustache Poupin and his wife (who practically, however, were as patient as he), did everything they could to make him say so, believing, evidently, that it would relieve him. Apparently he cared nothing for women, talked of them rarely, and always decently, and had never a sign of a sweetheart, unless Lady Aurora Langrish might pass for one. He never drank a drop of beer nor touched a pipe; he always had a clear tone, a fresh cheek and a smiling eye, and once excited on Hyacinth's part a kind of elder-brotherly indulgence by the open-mouthed glee and credulity with which, when the pair were present, in the sixpenny gallery, at Astley’s, at an equestrian pantomime, he followed the tawdry spectacle.