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.

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.)

Who, actually, is experiencing this agreeable feeling? Most evidently the reader, guided by the pleasant 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 refers to the novel itself: to James's remarkable attempt to draw a large novel out of his initial vision of a young woman. Which would more naturally be 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.