The Europeans by Henry James.
Title: The Europeans.
Author: Henry James.
Genre: Literature, fiction.
Country: U.K./U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1878.
Summary: In the hope of making a wealthy marriage, Eugenia, the Baroness Münster, and her younger brother, the artist Felix, descend on the Wentworths, in Boston. Installed in a nearby house, they become close friends with the younger Wentworths-Gertrude, Charlotte and Clifford. Eugenia's wit, guile and sophistication, and Felix's debonair vivacity form an uneasy alliance with the Puritan morality and the frugal, domestic virtues of the Americans. A rich and delicately balanced comedy of manners, the novel weighs the values of the established order against those of New England society, as the influence and romance Eugenia and Felix exert on their Bostonian cousins begins to take hold.
My rating: 7.5/10.
My review:
♥ She was not pretty; but even when it expressed perplexed irritation her face was most interesting and agreeable. Neither was she in her first youth; yet, though slender, with a great deal of extremely well-fashioned roundness of contour-a suggestion both of maturity and flexibility-she carried her three-and-thirty years as a light-wristed Hebe might ave carried a brimming wine-cup. Her complexion was fatigued, as the French say; her mouth was large, her lips too full, her teeth uneven, her chin rather commonly modelled; she had a thick nose, and when she smiled-she was constantly smiling-the lines beside it rose too high, toward her eyes. But these eyes were charming: gray in colour, brilliant, quickly glancing, gently resting, full of intelligence. Her forehead was very low-it was her only handsome feature; and she had a great abundance of crisp dark hair, finely frizzled, which was always braided in a manner that suggested some Southern or Eastern, some remotely foreign, woman. She had a large collection of ear-rings, and wore them in alternation; and they seemed to give a point to her Oriental or exotic aspect. A compliment had once been paid her which, being repeated to her, gave her greater pleasure than anything she had ever heard. "A pretty woman?" some one had said. "Why, her features are very bad." "I don't know about her features," a very discerning observer had answered; "but she carries her head like a pretty woman." You may imagine whether, after this, she carried her head less becomingly.
♥ "You are too good-natured, my dear," his companion declared.
The young man held out one of his drawings, with his head on one side. His tongue was gently moving along his underlip. "Good-natured-yes. Too good-natured-no."
"You are irritating," said the lady, looking at her slipper.
He began to retouch his sketch. "I think you mean simply that you are irritated."
♥ "There are no such things as mistakes," he affirmed.
"Very true-for those who are not clever enough to perceive them. Not to recognize one's mistakes-that would be happiness in life," the lady went on, still looking at her pretty foot.
♥ "If a woman were to ask you to marry her you would say, 'Certainly, my dear, with pleasure!' And you would marry her, and be ridiculously happy. Then at the end of three months you would say to her, 'You know that blissful day when I begged you to be mine!'"
The young man ad risen from the table, stretchering his arms a little; he walked to the window. "That is a description of a charming nature," he said.
♥ Though he bore a noticeable resemblance to his sister, he was a better-favoured person: fair-haired, clear-faced, witty-looking, with a delicate finish of feature and an expression at once urbane and not at all serious, a warm blue eye, an eyebrow finely drawn and excessively arched-an eyebrow which, if ladies wrote sonnets to those of their lovers, might have been made the subject of such a piece of verse-and a light moustache that flourished upwards as if blown that way by the breath of a constant smile. There was something in his physiognomy at once benevolent and picturesque. But, as I have hinted, it was not at all serious. The young man's face was, in this respect, singular; it was not at all serious, and yet it inspired the liveliest confidence.
♥ "They have made me happy!"
"That was the least they could do; they have made you nothing else. You have gone though life thanking fortune for such very small favours that she has never put herself to any trouble for you."
♥ The sunset was superb; they stopped to look at it; Felix declared that he had never seen such a gorgeous mixture of colours. The Baroness also thought it splendid; and she was perhaps the more easily pleased from the fact that while she stood there she was conscious of much admiring observation on the part of various nice-looking people who passed that way, and to whom a distinguished, strikingly dressed woman with a foreign air, exclaiming upon the beauties of nature on a Boston street-corner in the French tongue, could not be an object of indifference. Eugenia's spirits rose. She surrendered herself to a certain tranquil gaiety. If she had come to seek her fortune, it seemed to her that her fortune would be easy to find. There was a promise of it in the gorgeous purity of the western sky; there was an intimation in the mild, unimpertinent gaze of the passers of a certain natural facility in things.
♥ "You will never be anything but a child, dear brother."
"One would suppose that you, madam," answered Felix, laughing, "were a thousand years old."
"I am-sometimes," said the Baroness.
♥ "Well, some day you must do it for me. It doesn't matter now. Indeed I don't think it matters," she added, "how one looks behind."
"I should say it mattered more," said Gertrude. "Then you don't know who may be observing you. You are not on your guard. You can't try to look pretty."
Charlotte received this declaration with extreme gravity. "I don't think one should ever try to look pretty," she rejoined, earnestly.
Her companion was silent. Then she said, "Well, perhaps it's not of much use."
♥ To-day; apparently, the servants had also gone to church: there was never a figure at the open windows; behind the house there was no stout negress in a red turban, lowering the bucket into the great shingle-hooded well. And the front door of the big, unguarded home stood open, with the trustfulness of the golden age; or, what is more to the purpose, with that of New England's silvery prime.
♥ When she came in he turned and smiled at her, as if they had been old friends meeting after a separation. "You wait upon me yourself?" he asked. "I am served like the gods!" She had waited upon a great many people, but none of them had ever told her that. The observation added a certain lightness to the step with which she went to a little table where there were some curious red glasses-glasses covered with little gold sprigs, which Charlotte used to dust every morning with her own hands. Gertrude thought the glasses very handsome, and it was a pleasure to her to know that the wine was good; it was her father's famous madeira.
♥ "And have they nothing golden but their ton? Are there no symptoms of wealth?"
"I should say there was wealth without symptoms. A plain, homely way of life; nothing for show, and very little for-what shall I call it?-for the senses; but a great aisance, and a lot of money, out of sight, that comes forward very quietly for subscriptions to institutions, for repairing tenements, for paying doctor's bills; perhaps even for portioning daughters."
♥ "Well," she said, "I didn't think we should ever see you again."
"And pray what did you think would become of me?"
"I don't know. I thought you would melt away."
"That's a compliment to my solidity! I melt very often," said Felix, "but there is always something left of me."
♥ She looked at him, and for an instant, in his cold, still face, she seemed to see a far-away likeness to the vaguely remembered image of her mother. Eugenia was a woman of sudden emotions, and now, unexpectedly, she felt one rising in her heart. She kept looking round the circle; she knew that there was admiration in all the eyes that were fixed upon her. She smiled at them all.
"I came to look-to try-to ask," she said. "It seems to me I have done well. I am very tired; I want to rest." There were tears in her eyes. The luminous interior, the gentle, tranquil people, the simple, serious life-the sense of these things pressed upon her with an overmastering force, and she felt herself yielding to one of the most genuine emotions she had ever known. "I should like to stay here," she said. "Pray take me in."
♥ Mr. Wentworth was liberal, and he knew he was liberal. It gave him pleasure to know it, to feel it, to see it recorded; and this pleasure is the only palpable form of self-indulgence with which the narrator of these incidents will be able to charge him.
♥ Her declaration that she was looking for rest and retirement had been by no means wholly untrue; noting that the Baroness said was wholly untrue. It is but fair to add, perhaps, that nothing that she said was wholly true. She wrote to a friend in Germany that it was a return to nature; it was like drinking new milk, and she was very fond of new milk. She said to herself, of course, that it would be a little dull; but there can be no better proof of her good spirits than the fact that she thought she should not mind its being a little dull. It seemed to her, when from the piazza of her eleemosynary cottage she looked out over the soundless fields, the stony pastures, the clear-faced ponds, the rugged little orchards, that she had never been in the midst of so peculiarly intense a stillness; it was almost a delicate sensual pleasure. It was all very good, very innocent and safe, and out of it something good must come. Augustine, indeed, who had an unbounded faith in her mistress's wisdom and far-sightedness, was a great deal perplexed and depressed. She was always ready to take her cue when she understood it; but she liked to understand it, and on this occasion comprehension failed. What, indeed, was the Baroness doing dans cette galère? what fish did she expect to land out of these very stagnant waters? The game was evidently a deep one.
♥ Felix was positively amused at having a house of his own; for the little white cottage among the apple-trees-the chalet, as Madame Münster always called it-was much more sensibly his own than any domiciliary quatrième, looking upon a court, with the rent overdue. Felix had spent a good deal of his life in looking into courts, with a perhaps slightly tattered pair of elbows resting upon the ledge of a high-perched window, and the thin smoke of a cigarette rising into an atmosphere in which street-cries died away and the vibration of chimes from ancient belfries became sensible. He had never known anything so infinitely rural as these New England fields; and he took a great fancy to all their pastoral roughness. He had never had a greater sense of luxurious security; and at the risk of making him seem a rather sordid adventurer I must declare that he found an irresistible charm in the fact that he might dine every day at his uncle's. The charm was irresistible, however, because his fancy flung a rosy light over this homely privilege. He appreciated highly the fare that was set before him. There was a kind of fresh-looking abundance about it which made him think that people must have lived so in the mythological era, when they spread their tables upon the grass, replenished them from cornucopias, and had no particular need of kitchen stoves. But the great thing that Felix enjoyed was having found a family-sitting in the midst of gentle, generous people whom he might call by their first names. He had never known anything more charming than the attention they paid to what he said. It was like a large sheet of clean, fine-grained drawing-paper, all ready to be washed over with effective splashes of water-colour.
♥ "Well," said Gertrude, "you have seen people before that you have liked, have you not?"
"Indeed I have, thank Heaven!"
"And they have been very different from us," Gertrude went on.
"That only proves," said Felix, "that there are a thousand different ways of being good company."
♥ "To 'enjoy,'" she began at last, "to take life-not painfully, must one do something wrong?"
Felix gave his long, light laugh again. "Seriously, I think not. And for this reason, among others: you strike me as very capable of enjoying, if the chance were given you, and yet at the same time as incapable of wrong-doing."
"I am sure," said Gertrude, "that you are very wrong in telling a person that she is incapable of that. We are never nearer to evil than when we believe that."
"You are handsomer than ever," observed Felix, irrelevantly.
Gertrude had got used to hearing him say this. There was not so much excitement in it as at first. "What ought one to do?" she continued. "To give parties, to go to the theatre, to read novels, to keep late hours?"
"I don't think it's what one does or one doesn't do that promotes enjoyment," her companion answered. "It is the general way of looking at life."
"They look at it as a discipline-that is what they do here. I have often been told that."
"Well, that's very good. But there is another way," added Felix, smiling: "to look at it as an opportunity."
♥ Gertrude glanced at him; she saw that he was pale and that he looked excited. She had never seen Mr. Brand excited before, and she felt that the spectacle, if fully carried out, would be impressive, almost painful. "Absorbed in what?" she asked. The she looked away, at the illuminated sky. She felt guilty and uncomfortable, and yet she was vexed with herself for feeling so. But Mr. Brand, as he stood there looking at her with his small, kind, persistent eyes, represented an immense body of half-obliterated obligations that were rising again into a certain distinctness.
♥ He, on his side, gave a little laugh. "You certainly do avoid me-you see!"
"Avoid me, then," said the girl.
He looked at her again; and then, very gently, "No, I will not avoid you," he replied; "but I will leave you, for the present, to yourself. I think you will remember-after a while-some of the things you have forgotten. I think you will come back to me; I have great faith in that."
This time his voice was very touching; there was a strong reproachful force in what he said, and Gertrude could answer nothing. He turned away and stood there, leaning his elbows on the gate and looking at the beautiful sunset. Gertrude left him and took her way home again; but when she reached the middle of the next field she suddenly burst into tears. Her tears seemed to her to have been a long time gathering, and for some moments it was a kind of glee to shed them. But they presently passed away. There was something a little hard in Gertrude; and she never wept again.
♥ Madame Münster's uncle had the highest opinion of Robert Acton, who, indeed, in the family at large, was the object of a great deal of undemonstrative appreciation. They were all proud of him, in so far as the charge of being proud may be brought against people who were, habitually, distinctly guiltless of the misdemeanour known as "taking credit." They never boasted of Robert Acton, nor indulged in vainglorious reference to him; they never quoted the clever things he had said, nor mentioned the generous things he had done. But a sort of rigidly tender faith in his unlimited goodness was a part of their personal sense of right; and there can, perhaps, be no better proof of the high esteem in which he was held than the fact that no explicit judgement was ever passed upon his actions. He was no more praised than he was blamed; but he was tacitly felt to be an ornament to his circle. He was the man of the world of the family.
♥ If we are good when we are contented, Eugenia's virtues should now certainly have been uppermost; for she found a charm in the rapid movement through a wild country, and in a companion who from time to time made the vehicle dip, with a motion like a swallow's flight, over roads of primitive construction, and who, as she felt, would do a great many things that she might ask him. Sometimes, for a couple of hours together, there were almost no houses; there were nothing but woods and rivers and lakes and horizons adorned with bright-looking mountains. It seemed to the Baroness very wild, as I have said, and lovely; but the impression added something to that sense of the enlargement of opportunity which had been born of her arrival in the New World.
♥ "It seems to me," Madame Münster added, gently, "that-under the circumstances-I behaved very well."
Acton glanced at her, and made the observation-he had made it before-that a woman looks the prettier for having unfolded her wrongs or her sufferings.
♥ If there had been any one to say it to she would have declared that she was positively in love with her host; but she could hardly make this declaration-even in the strictest confidence-to Acton himself. It gave her, nevertheless, a pleasure that had some of the charm of unwontedness to feel, with that admirable keenness with which she was capable of feeling things, that he had a disposition without any edges; that even his humorous irony always expanded toward the point. One's impression of his honesty was almost like carrying a bunch of flowers; the perfume was most agreeable, but they were occasionally an inconvenience. One could trust him, at any rate, round all the corners of the world; and, withal, he was not absolutely simple, which would have been excess; he was only relatively simple, which was quite enough for the Baroness.
♥ "It's odd to hear you telling me how to be happy. I don't think you know yourself, dear uncle. Now, does that sound brutal?"
The old man was silent a moment, and then, with a dry dignity that suddenly touched his nephew, "We may sometimes point out a road we are unable to follow."
♥ "Well, I am rather afraid of that visit," said Clifford. "It seems to me it will be rather like going to school again."
The Baroness looked at him a moment. "My dear child," she said, "there is no agreeable man who has not, at some moment, been to school to a clever woman-probably a little older than himself. And you must be thankful when you get your instruction gratis. With me you would get it gratis."
♥ From the first she had been personally fascinating; but the fascination now had become intellectual as well. He was constantly pondering her words and motions; they were as interesting as the factors in an algebraic problem. This is saying a good deal; for Acton was extremely fond of mathematics. He asked himself whether it could be that he was in love with her, and then hoped he was not; hoped it not so much for his own sake as for that of the amatory passion itself. If this was love, love had been overrated. Love was a poetic impulse, and his own state of feeling with regard to the Baroness was largely characterized by that eminently prosaic sentiment-curiosity. It was true, as Acton with his quietly cogitative habit observed to himself, that curiosity, pushed to a given point, might become a romantic passion; and he certainly thought enough about this charming woman to make him restless and even a little melancholy. It puzzled and vexed him at times to feel that he was not more ardent. He was not in the least bent upon remaining a bachelor. In his younger years he had been-or he had tried to be-of the opinion that it would be a good deal "jollier" not to marry, and he had flattered himself that his single condition was something of a citadel. It was a citadel, at all events, of which he had long since levelled the outworks. He had removed the guns from the ramparts; he had lowered the drawbridge across the moat. The drawbridge had swayed lightly under Madame Münster's step; why should he not cause it to be raised again, so that she might be kept prisoner? He had an idea that she would become-in the least, and on learning the conveniences of the place for making a lady comfortable-a tolerably patient captive. But the drawbridge was never raised, and Acton's brilliant visitor was as free to depart as she had been to come. It was part of his curiosity to know why the deuce so susceptible a man was not in love with so charming a woman. If her various graces were, as I have said, the factors in an algebraic problem, the answer to this question was the indispensable unknown quantity. The pursuit of the unknown quantity was extremely absorbing; for the present it taxed all Acton's faculties.
♥ "She admires you immensely," said Felix.
"I don't care for that. Other women should not admire one."
"They should dislike you?"
Again Madame Münster hesitated. "They should hate me! It's a measure of the time I have been losing here that they don't."
"No time is lost in which one has been happy!" said Felix, with a bright sententiousness which may well have been a little irritating.
♥ Felix went with him to the garden-gate, and watched him slowly walk away into the thickening twilight with a relaxed rigidity that tried to rectify itself. "He is offended, excited, bewildered, perplexed-and enchanted!" Felix said to himself. "That's a capital mixture."
♥ "What could I say to keep you?" asked Acton. He wanted to keep her, and it was a fact that he had been thinking of her for a week. He was in love with her now; he was conscious of that, or he thought he was; and the only question with him was whether he could trust her.
"What can you say to keep me?" she repeated. "As I want very much to go it is not in my interest to tell you. Besides, I can't imagine."
He went on with her in silence; he was much more affected by what she had told him than appeared. Ever since that evening of his return from Newport her image had had a terrible power to trouble him. What Clifford Wentworth had told him-that had affected him too, in an adverse sense; but it had not liberated him from the discomfort of a charm of which his intelligence was impatient. "She is not honest, she is not honest," he kept murmuring to himself. That is what he had been saying to the summer sky, ten minutes before. Unfortunately, he was unable to say it finally, definitively; and now that he was near her it seemed to matter wonderfully little. "She is a woman who will lie," he had said to himself. Now, as he went along, he reminded himself of this observation; but it failed to frighten him as it had done before. He almost wished he could make her lie and then convict her of it, so that he might see how he should like that. He kept thinking of this as he walked by her side, while she moved forward with her light, graceful dignity. He had sat with her before; he had driven with her; but he had never walked with her.
♥ "I am fond of pleasure-yes; but of innocent pleasure. Pain is all one; but in pleasure, you know, there are tremendous distinctions."
♥ Mr. Brand looked at him; then at Mr. Wentworth; lastly at Gertrude. He did not look at Charlotte. But Charlotte's earnest eyes were fastened to his own countenance; they were asking an immense question of it. The answer to this question could not come all at once; but some of the elements of it were there. It was one of the elements of it that Mr. Brand was very red, that he held his head very high, that he had a bright excited eye and an air of embarrassed boldness-the air of a man who has taken a resolve in the execution of which he apprehends the failure, not of his moral, but of his personal, resources. Charlotte thought he looked very grand; and it is incontestable that Mr. Brand felt very grand. This, in fact, was the grandest moment of his life; and it was natural that such a moment should contain opportunities of awkwardness for a large, stout, modest young man.
♥ Eugenia congratulated him, and replied that if he were as reasonable a husband as he had been, on the whole, a brother, his wife would have nothing to complain of.
Felix looked at her a moment, smiling. "I hope," he said, "not to be thrown back on my reason."
"It is very true," Eugenia rejoined, "that one's reason is dismally flat. It's a bed with the mattress removed."