Roderick Hudson

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RODERICK HUDSON

by Henry James



CONTENTS

I. Rowland
II. Roderick
III. Rome
IV. Experience
V. Christina
VI. Frascati
VII. St. Cecilia's
VIII. Provocation
IX. Mary Garland
X. The Cavaliere
XI. Mrs. Hudson
XII. The Princess Casamassima
XIII. Switzerland




CHAPTER I. Rowland

Mallet had made his arrangements to sail for Europe on the first
of September, and having in the interval a fortnight to spare, he
determined to spend it with his cousin Cecilia, the widow of a nephew of
his father. He was urged by the reflection that an affectionate farewell
might help to exonerate him from the charge of neglect frequently
preferred by this lady. It was not that the young man disliked her; on
the contrary, he regarded her with a tender admiration, and he had not
forgotten how, when his cousin had brought her home on her marriage, he
had seemed to feel the upward sweep of the empty bough from which the
golden fruit had been plucked, and had then and there accepted the
prospect of bachelorhood. The truth was, that, as it will be part of
the entertainment of this narrative to exhibit, Rowland Mallet had an
uncomfortably sensitive conscience, and that, in spite of the seeming
paradox, his visits to Cecilia were rare because she and her misfortunes
were often uppermost in it. Her misfortunes were three in number: first,
she had lost her husband; second, she had lost her money (or the
greater part of it); and third, she lived at Northampton, Massachusetts.
Mallet's compassion was really wasted, because Cecilia was a very clever
woman, and a most skillful counter-plotter to adversity. She had made
herself a charming home, her economies were not obtrusive, and there
was always a cheerful flutter in the folds of her crape. It was the
consciousness of all this that puzzled Mallet whenever he felt tempted
to put in his oar. He had money and he had time, but he never could
decide just how to place these gifts gracefully at Cecilia's service.
He no longer felt like marrying her: in these eight years that fancy had
died a natural death. And yet her extreme cleverness seemed somehow to
make charity difficult and patronage impossible. He would rather chop
off his hand than offer her a check, a piece of useful furniture, or
a black silk dress; and yet there was some sadness in seeing such a
bright, proud woman living in such a small, dull way. Cecilia had,
moreover, a turn for sarcasm, and her smile, which was her pretty
feature, was never so pretty as when her sprightly phrase had a lurking
scratch in it. Rowland remembered that, for him, she was all smiles, and
suspected, awkwardly, that he ministered not a little to her sense of
the irony of things. And in truth, with his means, his leisure, and his
opportunities, what had he done? He had an unaffected suspicion of
his uselessness. Cecilia, meanwhile, cut out her own dresses, and was
personally giving her little girl the education of a princess.

This time, however, he presented himself bravely enough; for in the way
of activity it was something definite, at least, to be going to Europe
and to be meaning to spend the winter in Rome. Cecilia met him in the
early dusk at the gate of her little garden, amid a studied combination
of floral perfumes. A rosy widow of twenty-eight, half cousin, half
hostess, doing the honors of an odorous cottage on a midsummer evening,
was a phenomenon to which the young man's imagination was able to do
ample justice. Cecilia was always gracious, but this evening she was
almost joyous. She was in a happy mood, and Mallet imagined there was
a private reason for it--a reason quite distinct from her pleasure in
receiving her honored kinsman. The next day he flattered himself he was
on the way to discover it.

For the present, after tea, as they sat on the rose-framed porch, while
Rowland held his younger cousin between his knees, and she, enjoying
her situation, listened timorously for the stroke of bedtime, Cecilia
insisted on talking more about her visitor than about herself.

"What is it you mean to do in Europe?" she asked, lightly, giving a
turn to the frill of her sleeve--just such a turn as seemed to Mallet to
bring out all the latent difficulties of the question.

"Why, very much what I do here," he answered. "No great harm."

"Is it true," Cecilia asked, "that here you do no great harm? Is not a
man like you doing harm when he is not doing positive good?"

"Your compliment is ambiguous," said Rowland.

"No," answered the widow, "you know what I think of you. You have a
particular aptitude for beneficence. You have it in the first place in
your character. You are a benevolent person. Ask Bessie if you don't
hold her more gently and comfortably than any of her other admirers."

"He holds me more comfortably than Mr. Hudson," Bessie declared,
roundly.

Rowland, not knowing Mr. Hudson, could but half appreciate the eulogy,
and Cecilia went on to develop her idea. "Your circumstances, in
the second place, suggest the idea of social usefulness. You are
intelligent, you are well-informed, and your charity, if one may call it
charity, would be discriminating. You are rich and unoccupied, so that
it might be abundant. Therefore, I say, you are a person to do something
on a large scale. Bestir yourself, dear Rowland, or we may be taught to
think that virtue herself is setting a bad example."

"Heaven forbid," cried Rowland, "that I should set the examples of
virtue! I am quite willing to follow them, however, and if I don't
do something on the grand scale, it is that my genius is altogether
imitative, and that I have not recently encountered any very striking
models of grandeur. Pray, what shall I do? Found an orphan asylum, or
build a dormitory for Harvard College? I am not rich enough to do either
in an ideally handsome way, and I confess that, yet awhile, I feel
too young to strike my grand coup. I am holding myself ready for
inspiration. I am waiting till something takes my fancy irresistibly. If
inspiration comes at forty, it will be a hundred pities to have tied up
my money-bag at thirty."

"Well, I give you till forty," said Cecilia. "It 's only a word to
the wise, a notification that you are expected not to run your course
without having done something handsome for your fellow-men."

Nine o'clock sounded, and Bessie, with each stroke, courted a closer
embrace. But a single winged word from her mother overleaped her
successive intrenchments. She turned and kissed her cousin, and
deposited an irrepressible tear on his moustache. Then she went and
said her prayers to her mother: it was evident she was being admirably
brought up. Rowland, with the permission of his hostess, lighted a cigar
and puffed it awhile in silence. Cecilia's interest in his career seemed
very agreeable. That Mallet was without vanity I by no means intend to
affirm; but there had been times when, seeing him accept, hardly less
deferentially, advice even more peremptory than the widow's, you
might have asked yourself what had become of his vanity. Now, in the
sweet-smelling starlight, he felt gently wooed to egotism. There was a
project connected with his going abroad which it was on his tongue's end
to communicate. It had no relation to hospitals or dormitories, and yet
it would have sounded very generous. But it was not because it would
have sounded generous that poor Mallet at last puffed it away in
the fumes of his cigar. Useful though it might be, it expressed most
imperfectly the young man's own personal conception of usefulness. He
was extremely fond of all the arts, and he had an almost passionate
enjoyment of pictures. He had seen many, and he judged them sagaciously.
It had occurred to him some time before that it would be the work of a
good citizen to go abroad and with all expedition and secrecy purchase
certain valuable specimens of the Dutch and Italian schools as to which
he had received private proposals, and then present his treasures out of
hand to an American city, not unknown to aesthetic fame, in which at
that time there prevailed a good deal of fruitless aspiration toward an
art-museum. He had seen himself in imagination, more than once, in
some mouldy old saloon of a Florentine palace, turning toward the deep
embrasure of the window some scarcely-faded Ghirlandaio or Botticelli,
while a host in reduced circumstances pointed out the lovely drawing
of a hand. But he imparted none of these visions to Cecilia, and he
suddenly swept them away with the declaration that he was of course an
idle, useless creature, and that he would probably be even more so in
Europe than at home. "The only thing is," he said, "that there I shall
seem to be doing something. I shall be better entertained, and shall be
therefore, I suppose, in a better humor with life. You may say that that
is just the humor a useless man should keep out of. He should cultivate
discontentment. I did a good many things when I was in Europe before,
but I did not spend a winter in Rome. Every one assures me that this is
a peculiar refinement of bliss; most people talk about Rome in the same
way. It is evidently only a sort of idealized form of loafing: a passive
life in Rome, thanks to the number and the quality of one's impressions,
takes on a very respectable likeness to activity. It is still
lotus-eating, only you sit down at table, and the lotuses are served up
on rococo china. It 's all very well, but I have a distinct prevision of
this--that if Roman life does n't do something substantial to make you
happier, it increases tenfold your liability to moral misery. It seems
to me a rash thing for a sensitive soul deliberately to cultivate its
sensibilities by rambling too often among the ruins of the Palatine, or
riding too often in the shadow of the aqueducts. In such recreations the
chords of feeling grow tense, and after-life, to spare your intellectual
nerves, must play upon them with a touch as dainty as the tread of
Mignon when she danced her egg-dance."

"I should have said, my dear Rowland," said Cecilia, with a laugh, "that
your nerves were tough, that your eggs were hard!"

"That being stupid, you mean, I might be happy? Upon my word I am not.
I am clever enough to want more than I 've got. I am tired of myself, my
own thoughts, my own affairs, my own eternal company. True happiness,
we are told, consists in getting out of one's self; but the point is not
only to get out--you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some
absorbing errand. Unfortunately, I 've got no errand, and nobody will
trust me with one. I want to care for something, or for some one. And I
want to care with a certain ardor; even, if you can believe it, with
a certain passion. I can't just now feel ardent and passionate about a
hospital or a dormitory. Do you know I sometimes think that I 'm a man
of genius, half finished? The genius has been left out, the faculty of
expression is wanting; but the need for expression remains, and I spend
my days groping for the latch of a closed door."

"What an immense number of words," said Cecilia after a pause, "to say
you want to fall in love! I 've no doubt you have as good a genius for
that as any one, if you would only trust it."

"Of course I 've thought of that, and I assure you I hold myself ready.
But, evidently, I 'm not inflammable. Is there in Northampton some
perfect epitome of the graces?"

"Of the graces?" said Cecilia, raising her eyebrows and suppressing too
distinct a consciousness of being herself a rosy embodiment of several.
"The household virtues are better represented. There are some excellent
girls, and there are two or three very pretty ones. I will have them
here, one by one, to tea, if you like."

"I should particularly like it; especially as I should give you a chance
to see, by the profundity of my attention, that if I am not happy, it 's
not for want of taking pains."

Cecilia was silent a moment; and then, "On the whole," she resumed, "I
don't think there are any worth asking. There are none so very pretty,
none so very pleasing."

"Are you very sure?" asked the young man, rising and throwing away his
cigar-end.

"Upon my word," cried Cecilia, "one would suppose I wished to keep
you for myself. Of course I am sure! But as the penalty of your
insinuations, I shall invite the plainest and prosiest damsel that can
be found, and leave you alone with her."

Rowland smiled. "Even against her," he said, "I should be sorry to
conclude until I had given her my respectful attention."

This little profession of ideal chivalry (which closed the conversation)
was not quite so fanciful on Mallet's lips as it would have been on
those of many another man; as a rapid glance at his antecedents may help
to make the reader perceive. His life had been a singular mixture of the
rough and the smooth. He had sprung from a rigid Puritan stock, and had
been brought up to think much more intently of the duties of this life
than of its privileges and pleasures. His progenitors had submitted in
the matter of dogmatic theology to the relaxing influences of recent
years; but if Rowland's youthful consciousness was not chilled by the
menace of long punishment for brief transgression, he had at least been
made to feel that there ran through all things a strain of right and of
wrong, as different, after all, in their complexions, as the texture, to
the spiritual sense, of Sundays and week-days. His father was a chip of
the primal Puritan block, a man with an icy smile and a stony frown. He
had always bestowed on his son, on principle, more frowns than smiles,
and if the lad had not been turned to stone himself, it was because
nature had blessed him, inwardly, with a well of vivifying waters. Mrs.
Mallet had been a Miss Rowland, the daughter of a retired sea-captain,
once famous on the ships that sailed from Salem and Newburyport. He
had brought to port many a cargo which crowned the edifice of fortunes
already almost colossal, but he had also done a little sagacious trading
on his own account, and he was able to retire, prematurely for so
sea-worthy a maritime organism, upon a pension of his own providing. He
was to be seen for a year on the Salem wharves, smoking the best tobacco
and eying the seaward horizon with an inveteracy which superficial
minds interpreted as a sign of repentance. At last, one evening, he
disappeared beneath it, as he had often done before; this time,
however, not as a commissioned navigator, but simply as an amateur of an
observing turn likely to prove oppressive to the officer in command of
the vessel. Five months later his place at home knew him again, and made
the acquaintance also of a handsome, blonde young woman, of redundant
contours, speaking a foreign tongue. The foreign tongue proved, after
much conflicting research, to be the idiom of Amsterdam, and the young
woman, which was stranger still, to be Captain Rowland's wife. Why
he had gone forth so suddenly across the seas to marry her, what had
happened between them before, and whether--though it was of questionable
propriety for a good citizen to espouse a young person of mysterious
origin, who did her hair in fantastically elaborate plaits, and in whose
appearance "figure" enjoyed such striking predominance--he would
not have had a heavy weight on his conscience if he had remained an
irresponsible bachelor; these questions and many others, bearing with
varying degrees of immediacy on the subject, were much propounded but
scantily answered, and this history need not be charged with resolving
them. Mrs. Rowland, for so handsome a woman, proved a tranquil neighbor
and an excellent housewife. Her extremely fresh complexion, however, was
always suffused with an air of apathetic homesickness, and she played
her part in American society chiefly by having the little squares of
brick pavement in front of her dwelling scoured and polished as nearly
as possible into the likeness of Dutch tiles. Rowland Mallet remembered
having seen her, as a child--an immensely stout, white-faced lady,
wearing a high cap of very stiff tulle, speaking English with a
formidable accent, and suffering from dropsy. Captain Rowland was a
little bronzed and wizened man, with eccentric opinions. He advocated
the creation of a public promenade along the sea, with arbors and little
green tables for the consumption of beer, and a platform, surrounded by
Chinese lanterns, for dancing. He especially desired the town library
to be opened on Sundays, though, as he never entered it on week-days,
it was easy to turn the proposition into ridicule. If, therefore, Mrs.
Mallet was a woman of an exquisite moral tone, it was not that she had
inherited her temper from an ancestry with a turn for casuistry.
Jonas Mallet, at the time of his marriage, was conducting with silent
shrewdness a small, unpromising business. Both his shrewdness and his
silence increased with his years, and at the close of his life he was an
extremely well-dressed, well-brushed gentleman, with a frigid gray eye,
who said little to anybody, but of whom everybody said that he had
a very handsome fortune. He was not a sentimental father, and the
roughness I just now spoke of in Rowland's life dated from his early
boyhood. Mr. Mallet, whenever he looked at his son, felt extreme
compunction at having made a fortune. He remembered that the fruit had
not dropped ripe from the tree into his own mouth, and determined it
should be no fault of his if the boy was corrupted by luxury. Rowland,
therefore, except for a good deal of expensive instruction in foreign
tongues and abstruse sciences, received the education of a poor man's
son. His fare was plain, his temper familiar with the discipline of
patched trousers, and his habits marked by an exaggerated simplicity
which it really cost a good deal of money to preserve unbroken. He was
kept in the country for months together, in the midst of servants who
had strict injunctions to see that he suffered no serious harm, but
were as strictly forbidden to wait upon him. As no school could be found
conducted on principles sufficiently rigorous, he was attended at home
by a master who set a high price on the understanding that he was to
illustrate the beauty of abstinence not only by precept but by example.
Rowland passed for a child of ordinary parts, and certainly, during his
younger years, was an excellent imitation of a boy who had inherited
nothing whatever that was to make life easy. He was passive,
pliable, frank, extremely slow at his books, and inordinately fond of
trout-fishing. His hair, a memento of his Dutch ancestry, was of
the fairest shade of yellow, his complexion absurdly rosy, and his
measurement around the waist, when he was about ten years old, quite
alarmingly large. This, however, was but an episode in his growth; he
became afterwards a fresh-colored, yellow-bearded man, but he was never
accused of anything worse than a tendency to corpulence. He emerged from
childhood a simple, wholesome, round-eyed lad, with no suspicion that a
less roundabout course might have been taken to make him happy, but with
a vague sense that his young experience was not a fair sample of human
freedom, and that he was to make a great many discoveries. When he was
about fifteen, he achieved a momentous one. He ascertained that his
mother was a saint. She had always been a very distinct presence in his
life, but so ineffably gentle a one that his sense was fully opened to
it only by the danger of losing her. She had an illness which for many
months was liable at any moment to terminate fatally, and during her
long-arrested convalescence she removed the mask which she had worn for
years by her husband's order. Rowland spent his days at her side and
felt before long as if he had made a new friend. All his impressions at
this period were commented and interpreted at leisure in the future, and
it was only then that he understood that his mother had been for fifteen
years a perfectly unhappy woman. Her marriage had been an immitigable
error which she had spent her life in trying to look straight in the
face. She found nothing to oppose to her husband's will of steel but the
appearance of absolute compliance; her spirit sank, and she lived for
a while in a sort of helpless moral torpor. But at last, as her child
emerged from babyhood, she began to feel a certain charm in patience, to
discover the uses of ingenuity, and to learn that, somehow or other, one
can always arrange one's life. She cultivated from this time forward a
little private plot of sentiment, and it was of this secluded precinct
that, before her death, she gave her son the key. Rowland's allowance at
college was barely sufficient to maintain him decently, and as soon as
he graduated, he was taken into his father's counting-house, to do small
drudgery on a proportionate salary. For three years he earned his living
as regularly as the obscure functionary in fustian who swept the office.
Mr. Mallet was consistent, but the perfection of his consistency was
known only on his death. He left but a third of his property to his
son, and devoted the remainder to various public institutions and local
charities. Rowland's third was an easy competence, and he never felt
a moment's jealousy of his fellow-pensioners; but when one of the
establishments which had figured most advantageously in his father's
will bethought itself to affirm the existence of a later instrument, in
which it had been still more handsomely treated, the young man felt a
sudden passionate need to repel the claim by process of law. There was a
lively tussle, but he gained his case; immediately after which he made,
in another quarter, a donation of the contested sum. He cared nothing
for the money, but he had felt an angry desire to protest against a
destiny which seemed determined to be exclusively salutary. It seemed to
him that he would bear a little spoiling. And yet he treated himself
to a very modest quantity, and submitted without reserve to the great
national discipline which began in 1861. When the Civil War broke out he
immediately obtained a commission, and did his duty for three long years
as a citizen soldier. His duty was obscure, but he never lost a certain
private satisfaction in remembering that on two or three occasions
it had been performed with something of an ideal precision. He had
disentangled himself from business, and after the war he felt a profound
disinclination to tie the knot again. He had no desire to make money,
he had money enough; and although he knew, and was frequently reminded,
that a young man is the better for a fixed occupation, he could discover
no moral advantage in driving a lucrative trade. Yet few young men of
means and leisure ever made less of a parade of idleness, and indeed
idleness in any degree could hardly be laid at the door of a young
man who took life in the serious, attentive, reasoning fashion of
our friend. It often seemed to Mallet that he wholly lacked the prime
requisite of a graceful flaneur--the simple, sensuous, confident relish
of pleasure. He had frequent fits of extreme melancholy, in which he
declared that he was neither fish nor flesh nor good red herring. He was
neither an irresponsibly contemplative nature nor a sturdily practical
one, and he was forever looking in vain for the uses of the things
that please and the charm of the things that sustain. He was an awkward
mixture of strong moral impulse and restless aesthetic curiosity,
and yet he would have made a most ineffective reformer and a very
indifferent artist. It seemed to him that the glow of happiness must be
found either in action, of some immensely solid kind, on behalf of
an idea, or in producing a masterpiece in one of the arts. Oftenest,
perhaps, he wished he were a vigorous young man of genius, without a
penny. As it was, he could only buy pictures, and not paint them; and
in the way of action, he had to content himself with making a rule to
render scrupulous moral justice to handsome examples of it in others. On
the whole, he had an incorruptible modesty. With his blooming complexion
and his serene gray eye, he felt the friction of existence more than was
suspected; but he asked no allowance on grounds of temper, he assumed
that fate had treated him inordinately well and that he had no excuse
for taking an ill-natured view of life, and he undertook constantly to
believe that all women were fair, all men were brave, and the world was
a delightful place of sojourn, until the contrary had been distinctly
proved.

Cecilia's blooming garden and shady porch had seemed so friendly to
repose and a cigar, that she reproached him the next morning with
indifference to her little parlor, not less, in its way, a monument to
her ingenious taste. "And by the way," she added as he followed her in,
"if I refused last night to show you a pretty girl, I can at least show
you a pretty boy."

She threw open a window and pointed to a statuette which occupied the
place of honor among the ornaments of the room. Rowland looked at it a
moment and then turned to her with an exclamation of surprise. She
gave him a rapid glance, perceived that her statuette was of altogether
exceptional merit, and then smiled, knowingly, as if this had long been
an agreeable certainty.