"London
parks are the drawing-rooms and clubs of the poor..." Making allowance for
the fact that Henry was a 19th-century man, is that statement still a bit too
smug and insensitive to the deprivations imposed on the poor by a rigid class
structure?
As Henry James described his travels through England and
specifically in London, he gave a realistic portrayal of what he saw colored in
a degree by his own social class. It is doubtful that he ever attempted to live
among the poor as Jack London did when he researched the plight of the poor in
London in 1902 and later published People
of the Abyss in 1903. If James had, his writings may have been associated
more with naturalism than realism and given his upbringing, it is unlikely that
he would have seen the conditions of London’s poor from a socialistic
perspective.
Clearly in the Chapter 1 of English Hours (London) he writes disparagingly of the lower class,
“There are few hours of the day when a thousand smutty children are not
sprawling over it (referring to Green Park), and the unemployed lie thick on
the grass and cover the benches with a brotherhood of greasy corduroys.”[1]
He personifies London as a rapacious ogress who is “so clumsy and so brutal,
and has gathered together so many of the darkest sides of life…who devours
human flesh.”[2]
However, in a nod towards realism, he writes, “And yet I should not go so far
as to say that it is a condition of such geniality to close one’s eyes upon the
immense misery; on the contrary, I think it is partly because we are
irremediably conscious of that dark gulf that the most general appeal of the
great city remains exactly what it is, the largest chapter of human accidents.
I have no idea of what the future evolution of the strangely mingled monster
may be; whether the poor will improve away the rich, or the rich will
expropriate the poor, or they will all continue to dwell together on the
present imperfect terms of intercourse.”[3]
Chapter 1 was written in 1888. When he came twenty years
earlier, his observations were more poignant, in Chester he referred to “the population has overflowed,”… “And
everywhere you go you are accompanied by a vague consciousness of the British
child hovering about your knees and coat-skirts, naked, grimy, and portentous.”[4]
Five years later in London in Midsummer ,
he noted, “Yet at the season of which I write one’s social studies must at the
least be studies of low life, for wherever one may go for a stroll or to spend
the summer afternoon the comparatively sordid side of things is uppermost. There
is no one in the parks save the rough characters who are lying on their faces
in the sheep-polluted grass.”[5]
I don’t know if he lacks sympathy for the poor or if his heart is hardened to
his observed reality spoken of in Matthew, that “the poor will always have with
you.” Perhaps he believes that there is nothing he can do about it, so he might
as well look after himself, forgetting the old adage from English reformer,
John Bradford, “there but for the grace of God go I”.
My guess is that Henry did have a strong sense of empathy or at least sympathy for the poor, but that the class rigidities and political realities of his day made it difficult for him to think of how to apply and enact his sensibility in practical ways. And, he was by nature and choice more an observer than a participant - to his discredit, in my view. He was the literary analogue to his brother's Harvard colleague George Santayana, whose spectatorial detachment drove William crazy. No wonder Henry's "late manner" of writing also drove him crazy.
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