English Hours

by Henry James

RYE, FROM WINCHELSEA GATE

The recital here, as every one remembers, is autobiographic; the old battered, but considerably enriched, world-worn, but finely sharpened Denis looks back upon a troubled life from the winter fireside and places you, in his talkative and contagious way,—he is a practised literary artist,—in possession of the story. We see him in a placid port after many voyages, and have that amount of evidence—the most, after all, that the most artless reader needs—as to the “happy” side of the business. The evidence indeed is, for curiosity, almost excessive, or at least premature; as he again and again puts it before us that the companion of his later time, the admirable wife seated there beside him, is nobody else at all, any hopes of a more tangled skein notwithstanding, than the object of his infant passion, the little French orphan, slightly younger than himself, who is brought so promptly on the scene. The way in which this affects us as undermining the “love-interest” bears remarkably on the specific question of the subject of the book as the author would have expressed this subject to his own mind. We get, to the moment the work drops, not a glimpse of his central idea; nothing, if such had been his intention, was in fact ever more triumphantly concealed. The darkness therefore is intensified by our seeming to gather that, like the love-interest, at all events, the “female interest” was not to have been largely invoked. The narrator is in general, from the first, full of friendly hints, in Thackeray’s way, of what is to come; but the chapters completed deal only with his childish years, his wondrous boy-life at Winchelsea and Rye, the public and private conditions of which—practically, in the last century, the same for the two places—form the background for this exposition. The southeastern counties, comparatively at hand, were enriched at that period by a considerable French immigration, the accession of Huguenot fugitives too firm in their faith to have bent their necks to the dire rigours with which the revocation of the Edict of Nantes was followed up. This corner of Sussex received—as it had received in previous centuries—its forlorn contingent; to the interesting origin of which many Sussex family names—losing, as it were, their drawing but not their colour—still sufficiently testify. Portions of the stranger race suffered, struggled, sank; other portions resisted, took root and put forth branches, and Thackeray, clearly, had found his rough material in some sketchy vision of one of these obscure cases of troubled adjustment, which must often have been, for difficulty and complexity, of the stuff of dramas. Such a case, for the informed fancy, might indeed overflow with possibilities of character, character reinforced, in especial, by the impression, gathered and matured on the spot, of the two small ghosts of the Cinque Ports family, the pair of blighted hill-towns that were once sea-towns and that now draw out their days in the dim after-sense of a mere indulged and encouraged picturesqueness. “Denis Duval” could only, it would seem, have been conceived as a “picturesque” affair; but that may serve exactly as a reason for the attempt to refigure it.

Little hilltop communities sensibly even yet, with the memory of their tight walls and stiff gates not wholly extinct, Rye and Winchelsea hold fast to the faint identity which remains their least fragile support, their estate as “Antient Towns” involved (with the distincter Five and raising the number to seven), in that nominal, though still occasionally pompous Wardenship, the image—for our time—of the most famous assignment of which is preserved in Longfellow’s fine verses on the death of the Duke of Wellington. The sea, in previous times half friend, half foe, began long since to fight, in each character, shy of them, and now, in wrinkled wistfulness, they look across at the straight blue band, two miles or so away, that tells of the services they rendered, the illusions they cherished,—illusions in the case of poor Winchelsea especially absurd,—and the extreme inconvenience they repeatedly suffered. They were again and again harried and hacked by the French, and might have had, it would seem, small appetite for the company, however reduced and disarmed, of these immemorial neighbours. The retreating waters, however, had even two centuries ago already placed such dangers on a very different footing, and the recovery and evocation of some of the old processes of actual absorption may well have presented themselves to Thackeray as a problem of the sort that tempts the lover of human histories. Happy and enviable always the first trepidation of the artist who lights on a setting that “meets” his subject or on a subject that meets his setting. The editorial notes to “Denis Duval” yield unfortunately no indication of whether Winchelsea put into his head the idea of this study, or of whether he carried it about till he happened judiciously to drop it there. Appearances point, in truth, to a connection of the latter kind, for the fragment itself contains no positive evidence that Thackeray ever, with the mere eye of sense, beheld the place; which is precisely one of the ambiguities that challenge the critic and an item in the unexpectedness that I spoke of at the beginning of these remarks. What—in the light, at least, of later fashions—the place has to offer the actual observer is the effect of an object seen, a thing of aspect and suggestion, situation and colour; but what had it to offer Thackeray—or the taste of forty years ago—that he so oddly forbore to give us a tangled clew to? The impression of to-day’s reader is that the chapters we possess might really have been written without the author’s having stood on the spot; and that is just why they have, as I began by saying, so much less to contribute to our personal vision than this influence, for its part, has to suggest in respect to the book itself.

Evidently, none the less, the setting, little as it has got itself “rendered,” did somehow come into the painter’s ken; we know this, moreover, independently, and we make out that he had his inner mysteries and his reasons. The little house of Duval, faring forth from the stress of the Alsatian fatherland, seeks safety and finds business in the shrunken city, scarce at last more than a hamlet, of Edward the First’s defeated design, where, in three generations, well on into the century, it grinds and sleeps, smuggles and spends, according to the fashions of the place and time. These communities appear to have had, in their long decline, little industry but their clandestine traffic with other coasts, in the course of which they quite mastered the art of going, as we say, “one better” than the officers of the revenue. It is to this hour a part of the small romance of Rye that you may fondly fancy such scant opulence as rears its head to have had its roots in the malpractice of forefathers not too rude for much cunning—in nightly plots and snares and flurries, a hurrying, shuffling, hiding, that might at any time have put a noose about most necks. Some of those of the small gentry who were not smugglers were recorded highwaymen, flourishing about in masks and with pistols; and indeed in the general scene, as rendered by the supposed chronicler, these appear the principal features. The only others are those of his personal and private situation, which in fact, however, strikes me as best expressed in the fact that the extremely talkative, discursive, ejaculatory, and moralising Denis was possessed in perfection of his master’s maturest style. He writes, almost to the life, the language of the “Roundabout Papers;” so that if the third person had been exchanged, throughout, for his first, and his occasional present tense been superseded by the past, the rest of the text would have needed little rearrangement. This imperfect unity was more or less inevitable—the difficulty of projecting yourself as somebody else is never so great as when you retain the form of being yourself; but another of the many reflections suggested by reperusal is as to whether the speaker is not guilty of a slight abuse. Of course it may be said that what really has happened was that Thackeray had, on his side, anticipated his hero in the use of his hero’s natural idiom. It may thus have been less that Denis had come to write highly “evolved” nineteenth-century English than that his creator had arrived, in the “Roundabout Papers” and elsewhere, at writing excellent reconstructed eighteenth. It would not, however, were the enquiry to be pushed, be only on the autobiographer’s personal and grammatical, but on his moral and sentimental accent, as it were, that criticism would probably most bear. His manner of thinking and feeling is quite as “Roundabout” as his manner of saying.

RYE, FROM THE WINCHELSEA ROAD

A dozen wonderments rise here, and a dozen curiosities and speculations; as to which, in truth, I am painfully divided between the attraction of such appeals and a certain other aspect of my subject to which I shall attempt presently to do justice. The superior stroke, I remind myself—possibly not in vain—would be to deal handsomely with both solicitations. The almost irresistible fascination, critically speaking, of the questions thus abruptly, after long years, thrust forth by the book, lies in their having reference to this very opposition of times and tastes. The thing is not forty years old, but it points already—and that is above all the amusement of it—to a general poetic that, both on its positive and its negative sides, we have left well behind. Can the author perhaps have had in mind, misguidedly, some idea of what his public “wanted” or didn’t want? The public is really, to a straight vision, I think, not a capacity for wanting, at all, but only an unlimited capacity for taking—taking that (whatever it is) which will, in effect, make it open its mouth. It goes to the expense of few preconceptions, and even on the question of opening its mouth has a consciousness limited to the suspicion that in a given case this orifice has—or has not—gaped. We are therefore to imagine Thackeray as perfectly conscious that he himself, working by his own fine light, constituted the public he had most to reckon with. On the other hand his time, in its degree, had helped to shape him, and a part of the consequence of this shaping, apparently, was his extraordinary avoidance of picture. This is the mystery that drives us to the hypothesis of his having tried to pay, in some uncanny quarter, some deluded deference. Was he under the fear that, even as he could do it, “description” would not, in the early sixties, be welcome? It is impossible to stand to-day in the high, loose, sunny, haunted square of Winchelsea without wondering what he could have been thinking of. There are ladies in view with easels, sun-bonnets and white umbrellas—often perceptibly, too, with nothing else that makes for successful representation; but I doubt if it were these apparitions that took the bloom from his vision, for they were much less frequent in those looser days, and moreover would have formed much more a reason for not touching the place at all than for taking it up indifferently. Of any impulse to make the reader see it with seeing eyes his page, at all events, gives no sign. We must presently look at it for ourselves, even at the cost, or with the consequence, of a certain loyal resentment. For Winchelsea is strange, individual, charming. What could he—yes—have been thinking of? We are wound up for saying that he has given his subject away, until we suddenly remember that, to this hour, we have never really made out what his subject was to have been.