Mulberry Garden

Black Mulberry (Morus nigra)

[Image source: https://www.moruslondinium.org/events .]

 

I remember plain John Dryden (before he paid his court with success to the great,) in one uniform cloathing of Norwich drugget. I have eat tarts with him and Madame Reeve at the Mulberry-garden, when our author advanced to a sword, and chadreux wig. -- Posterity is absolutely mistaken as to that great man; tho' forced to be a satirist, he was the mildest creature breathing, and the readiest to help the young and deserving; tho' his comedies are horribly full of double entendres, yet 'twas owing to a false complaisance for a dissolute age. He was in company the modestest man that ever convers'd.

(From the Gentleman's Magazine, 1745. The correspondent, a certain Mr W.G., being then in his 87th year.)

The correspondent seems to be remembering Mac Flecknoe: "coarsely clad in Norwich drugget". Dryden was attacking Thomas Shadwell, who did indeed come from Norfolk. (Dryden himself was born in Aldwincle, Northamptonshire.) Drugget was a coarse, cheap, semi-woolen fabric. (Incidentally, WG later remarks that "Shadwell in conversation was a brute.") 

Pace Scott, it isn't impossible that a fifteen year old WG should have eaten tarts with Dryden and Anne Reeve before the Mulberry Garden closed in around 1674. (And hence, I suppose, the point about Dryden's readiness to help the young and deserving.) But I do have to agree with J R Lowell that WG can't have remembered a time before Dryden paid court to the great. Dryden's first real success was the 1665 hit The Indian Queen, but he had been seeking favour ever since the Restoration (1661). In 1668 he was appointed Poet Laureate with an income of £200 a year -- the same salary Sir Peter Lely received as court painter. 

Perhaps the whole memoir is a fabrication. There's something almost too convincing about this picture of Dryden in his glory days, still inwardly so plain and modest. (Dryden's family had been Puritans.)

This Mulberry Garden was originally a four acre plantation of James I in c. 1609, at the west end of St James's Park. The north wing of Buckingham Palace now occupies the site. James wanted to kick-start a British silk industry, and he encouraged others to plant the trees too. Nearly all the trees were black mulberries, the ones with delicious fruit, though it was well known that they were inferior from the silkworm point of view; perhaps the white mulberry didn't thrive in Britain during the Little Ice Age. One aged tree still survives in Buckingham Palace garden. Anyway, the silk industry never took off, but the Mulberry Garden blazed briefly during the Restoration as a pleasure garden with refreshments, visited by Pepys, and celebrated in the plays of Sedley and Wycherley. (It's an easy but perhaps false assumption that the tarts were mulberry tarts; other sources mention the Mulberry Garden's cheesecakes.)

"Madame Reeve" was Anne Reeve or Reeves, a minor actress in Dryden's company. She was apparently Dryden's mistress from around 1671 to 1675. Dryden never said so, but it was a regular feature of his enemies' writings. (Dryden had married in 1663 and had three sons.) Anne, never a leading actress, disappeared from stage records around 1675. The tradition is that she entered a convent.

In S.G.'s poem on the previous page of the Gentleman's Magazine (to which Mr W.G. responds), Reeve is named in a list of actresses who had appeared in the first performance of Dryden's Marriage a la Mode (1673). A note adds: "Mrs Anne Reeve, Dryden's mistress, acted the part of Amarillis in the Rehearsal, &c. She died a religious." 

"A chadreux wig". More commonly Chedreux: a famous Paris maker of perruques. It doesn't seem to mean any particular style of wig, just the normal curled long-bottomed wig of the Restoration era. 

E.g  in John Oldham's Imitation of Juvenal 3:

What wouldst thou say, great Harry, shouldst thou view

Thy gaudy fluttering race of English now,

Their tawdry clothes, pulvilios, essences;

Their Chedreux perruques, and those vanities

Which thou, and they of old, didst so despise?

*

Sir Charles Sedley's play The Mulberry Garden,  first performed 18 May 1668. Pepys was at the first night and was unimpressed, but it proved popular. 

Wildish. What, is there store of game here, gentlemen?

Modish. Troth, little or none; a few citizens that have brought their children out to air 'em, and eat cheesecakes.

Wildish. I thought this place had been so full of beauties, that like a pack of hounds in a hare warren, you could hunt one for another: what think you of an arbor and a bottle of Rhenish?

The scene proceeds: Olivia and Victoria are secreted in the next arbour while Estridge and Modish are lured by Wildish into ever more outrageous brags about what they get up to with these ladies. (But if I were Olivia I am not sure the scene would make me more inclined to marry Wildish.) 

The Mulberry Garden has plenty of lively dialogue, switching into pleasing couplets for the "high" characters. But the stagecraft is rather basic; it's a sequence of situations rather than a logical development. The main issue is resolved by an external political event: the Commonwealth becomes the Restoration and everyone can be friends again. Its high and low characters don't interact, not in credible ways anyhow, and it doesn't build an organic picture of society in motion. All this is in marked contrast to Wycherley's brilliant Love in a Wood (below). 

If you want to read The Mulberry Garden online, ignore the ruinous Michigan text (OCR problems I suppose), and instead read it in the 1675 edition on Google Books.

https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Mulberry_Garden_a_Comedy/mhNSAAAAcAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover

*

William Wycherley's Love in a Wood, or St James's Park, first performed in Lent 1671. The final scene in Wycherley's park-ranging play takes place in "The dining-room at Mulberry Garden House". Wycherley may preserve the name of its proprietor: at one point he calls it "Colby's Mulberry Garden"; Sedley gives the name as Coleby.

L. Flip. Have I not constantly kept Covent-Garden church, St. Martin's, the playhouses, Hyde Park, Mulberry garden, and all the other public marts where widows and maids are exposed?

 (Act I Scene 1 -- Lady Flippant assuring Mrs Joyner that she has done everything possible to get a new husband.)

Mrs. Joyn. Your reputation! indeed, your worship, 'tis well known there are as grave men as your worship; nay, men in office too, that adjourn their cares and businesses, to come and unbend themselves at night here, with a little vizard-mask.

Gripe. I do believe it, Mrs. Joyner.

Lucy. Ay, godmother, and carries and treats her at Mulberry-garden.

Mrs. Cros. Nay, does not only treat her, but gives her his whole gleaning of that day.

....  

Lucy. But I have the boldness to ask him for a treat.—Come, gallant, we must walk towards the Mulberry-garden.

Gripe. So!—I am afraid, little mistress, the rooms are all taken up by this time.

Mrs. Joyn. Will you shame yourself again? [Aside to Gripe.

Lucy. If the rooms be full we'll have an arbour.

Gripe. At this time of night!—besides, the waiters will ne'er come near you.

(Act V Scene 1 -- Gripe trying to get out of spending any money.)

My post about Love in a Wood:

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2024/05/william-wycherley-love-in-wood-1671.html

Another post about oat drink

 

New packaging of Arla Jord (Jörđ), March 2024

The rebrand of JORD (JÖRĐ) oat drink, in March 2024. The basic difference is that it used to be organic and now it isn't. 

That wasn't so hard to say, was it? Except for the company themselves, who have done their absolute best to bury this brute fact amid evasive fluff about their exciting refresh, with desperate emphasis on the added vitamins. (Once your base doesn't come from organic sources, you may as well add cheap vits that are also from non-organic sources.)

It's a common-or-garden lack of integrity, typical of companies addressing the public. Could it be done differently? Is a culture of deceit simply something we factor in? 

Pre-relaunch packaging of Jord (Jörđ), when it was an organic product.

*

Jörđ (pronounced "yerth") means "earth" in Old Norse and is also the name of the obscure goddess or giantess who was the mother of Thor. Not to be confused with Wagner's Erda, one of the Norns: her name (Urđr in Old Norse) meant "fate".

The product name is often simplified to Jord, which happens to mean "earth" in modern Swedish (pronounced "yood").

*

Also pictured above, Plenish oat drink, which is still an organic product. Of course we will now buy Plenish or organic Oatly instead of Jord. But Plenish doesn't entirely escape my strictures. The oats are labelled as EU agriculture, but the company website says nothing about their place of origin. My assumption is they're sourced from an EU-wide collection facility. Fine: it's not as romantically suggestive as a single source (like Oatly's Landskrona) or even the vague Nordic origin claimed by Jord, but it's hardly a disgrace. Why not be candid? Why automatically conceal your operations? 

*

What none of the vegetable drink suppliers talk  about is the basically non-recyclable nature of the packaging (cardboard bonded with plastic). It's an irony that plastic bottles of the kind used for fresh cow's milk are possibly better from a recycling point of view. (Though, I gather, not much better.)

For capitalism to proceed, there needs to be a certain shared blindness to its environmental and human costs. Consumers and employees alike need reassurance. It's what company literature is all about. 

Historic Oatly packaging: https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2012/04/specimens-of-literature-of-sweden-oatly.html

The men looked round the basement with flashlights.

 

1930s pressmen

[Image source: https://dk.pinterest.com/pin/88805423879125677/ .]

  "But Britten," asked one of the men, "why did the old man want this Erlone released?"

  "Figure it out for yourself," Britten said.

  "Then he thinks Erlone had something to do with the snatching of his daughter and wanted him out so he could give her back?"

   "I don't know," Britten said.

   "Aw, come on, Britten."

   "Use your imagination."

   Two more of the men buttoned their coats, pulled their hats low over their eyes and left. Bigger knew that they were going to phone in more information to their papers; they were going to tell about Jan's trying to convert him to communism, the Communist literature Jan had given him, the rum, the half-packed trunk being taken down to the station, and lastly, about the kidnap note and the demand for ten thousand dollars. The men looked round the basement with flashlights. Bigger still leaned against the wall. Britten sat on the steps. The fire whispered in the furnace. Bigger knew that soon he would have to clean the ashes out, for the fire was not burning as hotly as it should. He would do that as soon as some of the excitement died down and all of the men left.

   "It's pretty bad, hunh, Bigger?" Britten asked.

   "Yessuh."

   "I'd bet a million dollars that this is Jan's smart idea."

   Bigger said nothing. He was limp all over; he was standing up here against this wall by some strength not his own. Hours past he had given up trying to exert himself any more; he could no longer call up any energy  So he just forgot it and found himself coasting along.

   It was getting a little chilly; the fire was dying. The draft could scarcely be heard. Then the basement door burst open suddenly and one of the men who had gone to telephone came in, his mouth open, his face wet and red from the snow.

   "Say!" he called. 

   "Yeah?"

   "What is it?"

   "My city editor just told me that that Erlone fellow won't leave jail."

   For a moment the strangeness of the news made them all stare silently. Bigger roused himself and tried to make out just what it meant. Then someone asked the question he longed to ask.

   "Won't leave? What you mean?"

   "Well, this Erlone refused to go when they told him that Mr Dalton had requested his release. It seems he had got wind of the kidnapping and said that he didn't want to go out."

   "That means he's guilty!" said Britten. "He doesn't want to leave jail because he knows they'll shadow him and find out where the girl is, see? He's scared."

   "What else?"

   "Well, this Erlone says he's got a dozen people to swear that he did not come here last night."

   Bigger's body stiffened and he leaned forward slightly. 

   "That's a lie!" Britten said."This boy here saw him."

   "Is that right, boy?"

   Bigger hesitated. He suspected a trap. But if Jan really had an alibi, then he had to talk; he had to steer them away from himself.

(From Richard Wright's Native Son (1940).)

This is a relative lull in one of the elongated, crowded scenes for which Native Son is famous. The Daltons have made their appeals, the flashbulbs have stopped popping, surely the reporters will go away now. The reader's on edge, even if maybe Bigger isn't. We feel his exhaustion, but he's also excited, here at close quarters with white pressmen and with the white world of Chicago at a critical juncture, having this story unfold around him, a story that no-one yet suspects has Bigger at its centre. 

The natural thing might have been to run, but Bigger is back at the scene, he wants to steer and also to watch. Later on, the sole interest he'll retain is reading about himself in the papers. It isn't about fame but about power; the power to sway events, to write on the sky; a power that has always been denied to him until this day.  

The press pack is a brilliant example of the just-go-with-it way that Wright composed Native Son. Bigger registers their horrible eagerness when they know they're going to be fed some dope, their callousness in the midst of tragedy. At the same time there's a freshness in their outlook, the hungry professional alertness reflected in how they continue to throw their flashlights around the basement, as if a story lurks in its corners. The press are too self-interested to be inflexible, they are the controllers of prejudice not controlled by it.  They aren't worried about maintaining status over a black man. (Unlike Britten, who has all the predictable racist and anti-Red attitudes of his time, and who Bigger easily fools.) If everyone, black or white, is seen as just story material, what difference does it make?

The reporters even try to make clumsy overtures to Bigger (though no more clumsy than Jan's and Mary's were). The guy who addresses Bigger as "Mike" (America's commonest name) is evidently being friendly, saying "you're one of us" -- maybe he's genuine, but that's what you can never know with a pressman.

Bigger almost snaps at him. He's numbed to the institutional racism of being addressed as "boy" (he's 20) and answering "Yessuh". It's only when white people change the tune that he's shocked into feeling, and sees anew all his accumulated despair and hate and fury. 

It was a dangerous moment. Bigger recovers himself, and by the time of this extract he's coasting. 

But now the endgame approaches, with Jan's impressive roster of witnesses, and with, above all, the fateful cooling of the furnace. The strangely egalitarian temper of the press pack,  willing to muck in with the black boy's work, gifts them the story they've been looking for. From now on Bigger's hopeless power will be meted out only on his girl Bessie.

Men in Southside Chicago, 1940

[Image source: https://mymodernmet.com/southside-chicago-great-migration/ . One of Edwin Rosskam's photographs from Chicago's Black Belt, taken in July 1940. Richard Wright acted as the Rosskams' guide to the area. In 1941 they collaborated on the book 12 Million Black Voices.]

One of the billboard posters in the background advertises the touring production of The Man Who Came to Dinner, with Alexander Woollcott finally getting to play the lead role, originally written with him in mind. Another poster advertises Life With Father; both these hit plays were gently subversive and utterly inoffensive comedies.

In Native Son Bigger is keenly aware of billboards like these. They are a glimpse of -- indeed a hammered-home message about -- the world he's excluded from. 

Chicago skyline with snowstorm, 1930

[Image source: https://chuckmanchicagonostalgia.wordpress.com/2010/10/20/photo-chicago-skyline-panorama-aerial-sunset-with-snow-storm-note-building-under-construction-in-center-distance-1930/photo-chicago-skyline-panorama-aerial-sunset-with-snow-storm-note-building-under-construction-in-center-distance-1930/ . From Chuckman's collection of vintage photos of Chicago.]

Native Son is one of the most demonstrably significant novels. It changed the discourse about race forever; effectively, it was the first book to bring what we now call "institutional racism" into sharp relief, to show how it played out. The ground had been importantly prepared by Wright's first book Uncle Tom's Children (1938); an influential audience were already listening for what he did next. When Native Son was published on 1st March 1940 it was already a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, the Club News comparing it to The Grapes of Wrath (1939). On 12th March Wright gave his brilliant lecture "How Bigger Was Born" at Columbia; it was published as a pamphlet soon afterwards, and is included in modern editions of Native Son.

Books as significant as this always have their detractors and in a way it's right they should, because they have already made the world a different place from how it was when they were written. There's a fine risky freedom about the writing both in the novel and the essay, a boldness of trusting to inspiration without worrying how it's going to be received.

What shall I play next?

Favourite pitches #1: halfway across this footbridge leading from the carpark to the shops and cafés. Lots of passers-by, not much road noise. Also used by other musicians, homeless beggars, Big Issue sellers, so I usually only play here at quiet times. If it's a market day, recorded music from a nearby stall can make it unfeasible. 

It's beautifully simple, but there's a process. Before leaving the van, I tune the guitar with my electronic tuner. Later adjustments I can do by ear, but I do like to start off knowing that my E really is an E. It stops me imagining that the songs all seem too low today, or too high. 

A classical guitar with two unclassical aspects: a strap and a capo. (The wide-neck capo, which cost £40, is my pride and joy.) I'm highly dependent on the capo, my vocal range being so limited; often a song is only singable in one key.

And of course a hat (ground-baited with a few coins), and a bottle of water. 

That's it. No amplification and no means of taking electronic payment (these are matters of principle). 

The audiences are lovely. They're local. Elderly people, young people, children who beg a coin from mum or dad so they can put it in the hat. Sometimes people are too generous (in my view), and I've had to learn not to reject this generosity. The whole thing's about respectful human relationships, outside the withering frameworks of commerce and institution. Often, of course, I earn next to nothing, and that feels fine too. I'm singing because I enjoy it. 

I'm always learning a new song, and others have gone rusty through not being played, but here's a list of what I think I could play today without needing to rehearse; a longer list than I expected! 

I'll take a glass

Sweet sixteen

Two songs Laura found on YouTube,  performed by Finbar Furey. The latter one dates back to the 1890s. Both of them strong and nostalgic, making an instant emotional connection.

La mer

The great song by Charles Trenet that he wrote on a demob train at the end of WW2, celebrating the unglamorous Mediterranean coast near his birthplace of Narbonne; and for his nation the half-forgotten possibility, at last, of something called leisure. For some reason I decided at an early stage to switch the rhythm to triple time. (My French accent is atrocious, but it doesn't matter.)

Singing in the rain

For obvious reasons, a handy song to have in a busker's repertoire. Just four chords, and loads of fun to play.

The weight

Robbie Robertson's 1960s classic of mundane hanging around and getting tangled up in complications, that somehow takes on a biblical resonance and encapsulates a new youth culture.  Lots of opportunity for neat little guitar fills. You'd think the chorus wouldn't work with just a single voice, but I enjoy trying.

A matter of time

Evangeline

Two songs I've lived with for forty years, since Los Lobos released their first album. Both in different ways songs about leaving home, the experience of Mexicans seeking a better life in the USA. I feel I do pretty well emulating the band's arrangement of Matter of Time, but the awesome guitar introduction to Evangeline still eludes me. 

Joanne

The Michael Nesmith classic, from Magnetic South; challenging falsetto bits, a bouncy rhythm and irresistible melody.

Grandpa (tell me 'bout the good old days)

Another song Laura put me on to, bringing back distant memories of the Judds. A song whose sweetness contains irony, doubt and anger.

Our last summer

The Abba song about a Paris romance in flower power days. I always (mentally) take a deep breath before starting it; it's all action, with no pauses for thought. Of course it's not unusual for me to make a mistake, in this and all the other songs, but that doesn't matter much when you're busking, when people are mostly just hearing snatches. The emphasis is on keeping going and communicating a feeling, and playing as loud as you can without it falling apart. It's a completely different skillset from the expressive dynamics and subtleties of playing in a quiet room.

Thanks for the memory

I discovered this on a CD by one of my heroes, Mildred Bailey. Fantastic swing era number; it's a lot of fun trying to emulate a swing band on an acoustic guitar. 

Georgia on my mind

This was on the Mildred Bailey CD too; it's from her I learnt the introductory verse, which Ray Charles and The Band didn't use. I rarely have the feeling that my British passers-by recognize this song or feel strongly about it, but I do.

Get set for the blues

Another jazzy song that steps from seventh to seventh. I heard it many years ago on Julie London's About the Blues, and I've loved it ever since.

Baby I'm feeling it now

Cloud

Lay all your cards on the table

Waltz 1

Waltz 2

Three songs composed by me, and two guitar pieces that have no titles. Waltz 1 really needs Laura's harmonica. 

Please help me I'm falling

I've been playing this song so long that I can't really remember how it came about. I knew Don Gibson's version, but that was in prehistory. I think I must have been reminded of it in more recent years by hearing it on a cheap country compilation during dull commutes. 

Den första gång jag såg dig

Så länge skutan kan gå

Dansen på Sunnanö

Sjösala vals

Sol vind och vatten

Fryksdalsdans nr 2

Five Swedish songs of various ages, and a schottische to get the fingers working. (On cold days I know it's time to stop playing when I can no longer manage the chord shape of C.) No-one in England has shown any recognition of these songs, but in Stockholm they did.

Calle Schewen's Waltz

Another Swedish song (by Evert Taube, like three of the previous) -- for some reason I tend to sing this one in my own English translation.

Who knows where the time goes

Sandy Denny's song, with a lovely easy progression based on the E shape, and added guitar twiddles that vainly seek to replicate Richard Thompson. As you've already seen, I often seem to be attracted to songs associated with women singers. I think detaching the singer from the song and its protagonist, as folk singers have always done, opens up many creative possibilities. There's something appealing, too, about applying my very limited vocal skills to songs sung by amazing vocal stylists like Sandy. (The song I'm learning at the moment is Al Green's Sha La La.)

I want to see the bright lights tonight

This is another one with a woman protagonist: a Richard Thompson song originally sung by Linda. 

Streets of Forbes

Australian folk ballad, the only real story song in my repertoire. It seemed appropriate to have a bare bones accompaniment using only the middle four strings, the right hand never shifting position. 

Hickory wind

You're still on my mind

You don't miss your water

Three songs I discovered half a century ago on the Byrds' Sweetheart of the Rodeo. The lovely melody of Gram Parsons' Hickory Wind, his song about growing up too fast, is astonishingly founded on  the most basic of three-chord tricks. You're still on my mind is a George Jones swing country blues about trying to treat heartache with alcohol. You don't miss your water is William Bell's song, originally from 1961. 

I won't let you down

An obscure song these days, wriitten by the great Albert Lee; it appeared on the final album by Heads Hands and Feet in 1973. A sweet song about love and memory with an extended coda of joyous guitar at the end.

Wide open road

The W. Australian classic by the Triffids; basically the same chord progression throughout, but you can be very inventive with it.

Atlantic City

Bruce Springsteen's song about drifting into crime, again mostly over a constantly repeated chord progression. 

You wear it well

The Rod Stewart hit, a song that's strong enough to flourish even without his voice.

Warwick Avenue

One of many fantastic songs on Duffy's first album. Like a lot of others here, I learnt the chords from online sources. Some of the online chords don't seem to quite match the complex original arrangement, but it's close enough.

(Working out the chords was so much harder in pre Internet days. Nowadays you can at least start with what others have made of it.)

Always on my mind

As sung by Elvis Presley, but my version comes mostly via Willie Nelson.

Celluloid heroes

By Ray Davies: a wonderful hymn to Hollywood's golden age as seen from Muswell Hill, though it feels rather different from the songs of the Kinks' greatest years. 

The water

Johnny Flynn's song, originally a duet, about dying: the river of life debouching into the sea of eternity.

The mayor of Simpleton

By XTC; their warm-hearted hymn to being a dimbo; great fun to play on an acoustic guitar. My tribute to my Swindon years. We often used to take a walk over the fields to the big council estate where, I later learnt, Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding both grew up.

Favourite pitches #2: beside what is now just a pollard stump, but last year was a fine clean-limbed lime tree. (The council were worried about the hollow at the base.) Plenty of people going past on this riverside walk. Well away from the noise of motor traffic. Sometimes I get drowned out by birdsong; not so much the constant low-register chatter of the rooks, as the piercing jubilations of the wrens. 

the little feast

 

Dewberry

Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea. There are circumstances in which, whether you partake of the tea or not—some people of course never do,—the situation is in itself delightful. Those that I have in mind in beginning to unfold this simple history offered an admirable setting to an innocent pastime. The implements of the little feast had been disposed upon the lawn of an old English country-house, in what I should call the perfect middle of a splendid summer afternoon. Part of the afternoon had waned, but much of it was left, and what was left was of the finest and rarest quality. Real dusk would not arrive for many hours; but the flood of summer light had begun to ebb, the air had grown mellow, the shadows were long upon the smooth, dense turf. They lengthened slowly, however, and the scene expressed that sense of leisure still to come which is perhaps the chief source of one’s enjoyment of such a scene at such an hour. From five o’clock to eight is on certain occasions a little eternity; but on such an occasion as this the interval could be only an eternity of pleasure.

(Opening of Henry James' The Portrait of a Lady (1881).)

Well yes, I can relate to the last bit. It's like the tea interval during a test match, when you know that the longest and often most eventful session of play still lies ahead of you.

This was before British Summer Time came into existence. James's five to eight o'clock is our six to nine o'clock (in terms of the July light). 

To really relish the "little feast" we seem to need an expanse of green and a lot of leisure. 

Perhaps, too, the absence of too much food: the outcome should be energising, refreshing us for a longer pull. Heavier meals slow us down, change our mood, break our impetus. But afternoon tea, not overly laden with cakes, prolongs it. 

And one final element of the agreeable hour (James' "hour" means a certain time of day, not a period of sixty minutes): the preparation of the tea should be carried out by others. Gardencourt, like everywhere else in this novel, is sustained by unnamed invisible servants. The characters in the novel need do no more than occasionally order a change of location. (It's a pitiful sign of Pansy Osmond's constrained position that she's always busying herself with pouring the tea.)

"Under certain circumstances .." The thrice-referred-to circumstances aren't specified. (The opening sentences have often been noted for their clumsiness.) When these circumstances offer "an admirable setting to an innocent pastime" James sounds like an estate agent. But perhaps his eventual aim is to contradict the sales literature, to show that the idyllic picture is conditional,  not guaranteed by money or anything else, and very definitely not timeless?

Who, actually, is experiencing the agreeable quality of the hour? Most evidently the reader, guided by the pleasantly waffling narrator. We're perhaps being readied too for Isabel Archer's response to the scene when she emerges from the house in the next chapter. 

But as for this afternoon's three partakers (or non-partakers) it's a bit less clear. It's perfect weather for tea outdoors, though Mr Touchett must keep the shawl over his knees, Ralph insists. It's nice that Warburton has ridden over. (That's what Ralph calls him; the narrator wouldn't dare.) Still there's a consonance between the hour (mellow light, ebbing sun) and the sickly father and son, the father much declined in the last year. His tea, we'll learn later, is diluted. There isn't much to talk about. The younger pair spin jokes out of misrepresenting what they've said to each other. Father and son have gone over and over Mrs Touchett's cablegrams, teasing every possible ambiguity out of their fairly plain substance. It's evident that the unknown niece has been much talked of; Ralph is very clear about her name, though it isn't in the cablegrams. And she's very much wanted too, in these senescent, comfortably numb surroundings. The moment they see her in person, see that she's pretty and smart, both Ralph and Lord Warburton are powerfully stirred, and it's just as the elder Mr Touchett has foreseen: the crosscurrents of acquisitiveness and protectiveness that will ripple through his exclusive backwater.

The freighted word "interesting" is thrown around in relation to Miss Archer; that familiar euphemism, in 19th-century literature, for feelings of a romantic nature. Still, the word of which the gentlemen are most aware is "Miss". Isabel's availability, her not yet settled state, is apparently like the unsolved clue that people can't stop being pleasantly tormented by. The Portrait of a Lady is monomanically obsessed with marriage; this tiresome staple of mediocre novels fills its every nook.

Litter, weedkilled field

*

Marriage is apparently highly desirable, hyperinflatedly identified with the lover's self-realization and summation, yet the actual marriages we glimpse in The Portrait of a Lady seem quite out of key with that idea. If not patently unsatisfactory (like the Touchetts'), they're at best rather mundane: Lilian's you would call a happy marriage, but not a magical one of the sort that the suitors seem to think is in their grasp. Anyway, Lilian's anxiously aware that her own kind of marriage wouldn't appeal to her sister; and that Isabel might do something awful, like marrying a foreigner. 

It's crudely pictured, but her insight is sound. Lilian and Edmund are doers, their marriage and their life are productive. But Isabel doesn’t look like being one of life's doers; for her, marriage isn't about doing but about experiencing, like a visit to Egypt.

Only at the end does Isabel really do something, when she makes her small rebellion and travels to England, against Gilbert's wishes, to say goodbye to Ralph. When she goes back to Gilbert and Pansy, we hope it's to do plenty more, but that isn't an inevitability.

Blackthorn

Henrietta’s letters from Spain had proved the most acceptable she had yet published, and there had been one in especial, dated from the Alhambra and entitled ‘Moors and Moonlight,’ which generally passed for her masterpiece.

I think that's my favourite sentence in The Portrait of a Lady.

(Here, as often in Sherlock Holmes etc, "dated" refers to location as much as date.)

In his later prefaces Henry James fought a rearguard action against readers who saw too much in Henrietta Stackpole and Maria Gostrey, figures he saw as ancillary, or even light refreshment. He knew he couldn't dictate how his novels would be read, but he didn't want their central focus to be overlooked in a simplistic or perverse way. 

Nevertheless, I sometimes think he wrote most naturally and penetratingly when he wasn't so fixed on making out his theme; when he neither overtreated nor undertreated -- in fact did not "treat" at all -- but just allowed his fancy free rein. 

Late blackthorn, unopened hawthorn buds

Freedom is highly problematized here. It must be freedom to do something; if it's just freedom it's an empty set, for instance the idleness gently criticized by Mr Touchett in that opening chapter. Ralph has an idleness licensed by ill health; Lord Warburton's is maintained by a framework of opposing values (upper-class guilt, as it were) and we readily believe Ralph when he predicts that his friend, in consequence, won't do anything very much.

Mrs Touchett's freedom is mainly expended in asserting itself. For instance, by an uncowed judgment of "the great ones of the earth", or by proceeding with her own plans in proud disregard of her husband's or son's approaching deaths. Isabel "found her a strange and interesting figure: a figure essentially—almost the first she had ever met".

But that's a delusion; this isn't the kind of freedom that Isabel's looking for, which is something like freedom to fulfil her destiny. None of the Touchetts, enablers as they may be, can give her that freedom. It's a freedom that no-one can give you, you have to take it. 

Perhaps the wretchedness of being married to Gilbert Osmond confirms Isabel's youthful premonition that she, at least, needed adversity to fully come to life.

Weedkilled field

*

I wrote this after reading The Portrait of a Lady in the revised version published in 1908. 

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2833/2833-h/2833-h.htm#link2H_PREF

It wasn't a conscious choice, and I might not have chosen the revised version if I'd seen Nina Baym's essay, in which she demonstrates how it overlays a rather different story onto the one James told in 1881. (But without completely obliterating it, producing a sometimes blurry impression of character and action.)

Nina Baym, "Revision and Thematic Change in The Portrait of a Lady", Modern Fiction Studies, Vol 22 No 2 (Summer 1976), pp. 183-200.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/26280289

The 1881 text can be found here: https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Portrait_of_a_Lady_(James)

Rainbow

The Portrait of a Lady ... The definite article is teasing. James liked a definite article; most of his novel titles begin with "The". It usually suggests something that the novel is about: a character (The American), a symbol (The Golden Bowl), a theme (The Awkward Age)... Yet in this case the simplest thought is that it describes the novel itself, i.e. James's remarkable attempt to draw a large novel out of his initial vision of a young woman. But this would more naturally be expressed as A Portrait of a Lady.... like A Tale of Two Cities.

So I find myself looking for possible acts of portraiture within the story; for instance Gilbert Osmond framing his wife as a living artwork; or Isabel's own behaviour being shaped by how she wants to see herself. I'm not sure it works out, but I'll keep on being bothered about it.