A SENTIMENTAL TR A_VELLER.*
WE have long had to go to America for our sewing-machines and egg-whisks. We now have to seek there for actresses and authors, and very charming specimens we get. There is certainly a freshness and directness about the American style which is peculiarly charming. The scattered papers which compose this book were written for American magazines and newspapers, but they have a simplicity and a naturalness, coupled with a quaint- ness and picturesqueness, which are rarely seen combined in English writers anywhere, and still more rarely in magazines and newspapers. A part of the peculiar flavour in Mr. Henry James's writings is no doubt due to the fact that the style is exotic here, and is therefore a little out of the common, and has the same sort of relish that a slight brogue has on the lips of a pretty woman. But when all allowance is made for the man- nerisms of other nations being different to our own, there remains what Mr. Matthew Arnold would call a note of dis- tinction.
The volume begins with a pleasant sketch of Venice, which, in spite of the disclaimer of having anything original to say with which it opens, yet manages to say something original. The author honestly acknowledges that "though it is easy to admire Venice, it is not easy to live in it." Mr. James's receipt for doing so is decidedly novel. It is, "when you have called for the bill, to go, to pay it and remain, and you will find on the morrow that you are deeply attached to Venice." In the same spirit of paradox he finds compensation for the civilisation of the bathing-place at the Lido in the fact that the cuisine is still barbarous. So, too, there is a great deal of original observation in the remark that" Venice is emphatically the city of conversation ; people talk all over the place, because there is nothing to interfere with their being heard. The still water carries the voice, and good Venetians exchange confidences at the distance of half a mile. Their delightful, garrulous language helps them to make Venetian life a long converse- 2ione." Mr. James seems to have been rather more fortunate than some people in his gondolier, as be found the price he set on his services was "touchingly small." Five francs a day for a few hours' "graceful toil" is not bad pay, even in England, though it may be small estimated by an American standard; and later in the year that Mr. James was there, when the grand regatta was going on in honour of the Geographical Congress, and Venice was more like a "big bazaar" than ever, the touch- ing price of twenty-five francs was demanded for a single day. When from the people the author turns to the place, he is equally happy in his observations. Nothing could sum up Venice better than this :—
" When I hear, when I see the magical name I have written above these pages, it is not of the great Square that I think, with its strange • Portraits of Plum By Henry James. London; Macmillan and Co. 1883. basilica and its high arcades, nor of the wide mouth of the Grand Canal, with the stately steps and the well-poised dome of the Salute. It is not of the low lagoon, nor of the sweet Piazzetta, nor the dark chambers of St. Mark's. I simply see a narrow canal in the heart of the city,—a patch of green water and a surface of pink wall. The gondola moves slowly ; it gives a great, smooth swerve, passes under a bridge, and the gondolier's cry, carried over the still water, makes a kind of splash in the stillness. A girl is passing over the little bridge, which has an arch like a camel's back, with an old shawl on her head, which makes her look charming ; you see her against the sky as you float beneath. The pink of the old wall seems to Ell the whole place ; it sinks even into the opaque water. Behind the wall is a garden, out of which the long arm of a white June rose—the roses of Venice are splendid—has flung itself, by way of spontaneous ornament?'
But we must not linger longer in Venice. From Venice we are taken to Turin, where the same humorous originality surprises us, as in the incident of the shrine-lamp which
he suddenly recognised as being lighted with kerosene, awakening to the fact that, after all, Italy has a right to use petroleum and tramways, and to be indignant at being looked on as "a kind of soluble pigment," an historical and artistic curiosity-shop. It is somewhat humiliating, however, to our- selves to find that this son of the New World regards England in very much the same light as we regard Italy,—as a museum.
He takes delight most in that of which we are properly ashamed, —in the mansions, like Compton Wyniates, which "stands empty all the year round with its air of solitude and delicate decay,"—useless, while the people are crowded into the foul slums of the great towns, thanks to "those ancient and curious opinions of self-complacent British Toryism which is by no means a thing which the irresponsible stranger would wish away." In one case, indeed, he recognises that "it takes a great many plain people to keep a gentleman going ; it takes a great deal of wasted sweetness to make up a property," but the reflec- tion is evoked by the " eesthetic wrong" of an old house being left empty because it is let by the owner, who cannot live in it, to a rich young man who only occupies it for three weeks in the year for the shooting. It was not evoked by the slums of Seven Dials. But we can hardly be angry with an American who admires the fine, old Tory landlord of Warwickshire, when we re- member how our own people wanted to rush into war with America on behalf of that fine gentleman, the Southern slave- owner.
Mr. James is certainly a more appreciative observer of English life than the famous Mr. Max O'Rell. His picture of Oxford, with its "air of liberty to care for intellectual things, assured and secured by machinery which is in itself a satisfaction to sense," is very flattering. We may, perhaps, detect a little irony in his reflection that the Fellows of the College which he carefully does not name (and whose name it is of course impossible to guess, as it is described as having no Undergraduates), " having no dreary instruction to administer, no noisy hobbledehoys to govern, no obligation but towards their own culture, no care save for learning as learning, and truth as truth, are presumably the happiest and most charming people in the world." But the irony is so delicate, that the writer's evident appreciation of the lunch be got there would win a ready forgiveness, even if he had re- vealed the name of this mystic home of learning. From Oxford to Epsom is a sudden transition, made perhaps less abrupt by the author's detection of the resemblance between the orgies of the Derby Day and the saturnalia of Commemoration, which reveal to him the fact that "the decent, dusky vistas of the London residential streets are not a complete symbol of the complicated race which created them." Unfortunately, as a foreigner, he enjoys the sights of Derby Day, of which we are heartily ashamed, just as he enjoys the feudal stagnation of Warwickshire, which we wish heartily reformed.
He is slightly annoying, too, from the fact that his sense of the present greatness of England is roused chiefly by the sight of a barrack and a redcoat, which, after all, have done but little for England, in comparison with the ships of the Pool and the spade of the engineer. Nor do we accept with too great a feeling of gratitude the description of the Spectator as the "most ingenious of journals," especially as the Spectator is not, strictly speak- ing, a "]ournal," but a "weekly." However, we must be thankful for the appreciation of an American at all, even if he appreciates chiefly our weak points, and praises us for qualities which we hardly regard as our chief virtues. But whether he praise or blame, whether he discourse of Venice or Turin, Paris or London, Saratoga or New Town, Mr. James is always charming, easy, interesting, ingenuous, and to return him his own epithet, "ingenious."
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