Henry James, The Princess Casamassima
James, Henry. The Princess Casamassima. New York: Library of America, 1989 (1886).
James closes his "The Art of Fiction" (1884) with a note on Zola, of all people:
The later plot is driven by a nebulous oath of revolutionary loyalty which Hyacinth has taken, providing a fine ambiguity - the oath is inexorable but carries not a featherweight of compulsion; it may never fall due at all. James clearly enjoys the paradox (it's a kind of precursor to Milly Theale's illness in The Wings of the Dove) and thus it's a disappointment when the trap actually does spring shut; the body of the book so clearly broadcasts the difference between James's method and Zola's that the conclusion suggests an author throwing up his hands and letting the genre do the work for him. It's a surprise in retrospect, then, how long he does manage to ride the genre without it throwing him.
James closes his "The Art of Fiction" (1884) with a note on Zola, of all people:
Zola gets precisely one oblique reference in The Princess Casamassima - there are "certain members of an intensely modern school, advanced and scientific realists, of whom Hyacinth had heard and on whom he had long desired to put his hand; but, evidently, none of them had ever stumbled into Lady Aurora's candid collection." Hyacinth never gets to read his Zola, but that doesn't really matter insofar as he's living a skewed Jamesian version of a Zola novel - an attempt by the author, it would seem, to do urban naturalism with both light and energy. The results are weird and mostly gratifying. There is indeed a princess, who's a properly stunning femme fatale, as well as a ragtag bunch of socialists whom James is mostly content to treat with irony. Indeed James seems to be smiling through his beard at the very deterministic tropes he's appropriated - does he really want us to think that Hyacinth has aristocratic manners and facility in French just because he's the illegitimate son of a lord and a Frenchwoman? Or is this Hyacinth's own misguided take?In France to-day we see a prodigious effort (that of Emile Zola, to whose solid and serious work no explorer of the capacity of the novel can allude without respect), we see an extraordinary effort vitiated by a spirit of pessimism on a narrow basis. M. Zola is magnificent, but he strikes an English reader as ignorant; he has an air of working in the dark; if he had as much light as energy, his results would be of the highest value.
The later plot is driven by a nebulous oath of revolutionary loyalty which Hyacinth has taken, providing a fine ambiguity - the oath is inexorable but carries not a featherweight of compulsion; it may never fall due at all. James clearly enjoys the paradox (it's a kind of precursor to Milly Theale's illness in The Wings of the Dove) and thus it's a disappointment when the trap actually does spring shut; the body of the book so clearly broadcasts the difference between James's method and Zola's that the conclusion suggests an author throwing up his hands and letting the genre do the work for him. It's a surprise in retrospect, then, how long he does manage to ride the genre without it throwing him.
