Henry James: The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians, The Tragic Muse & Daisy Miller (4 Books in One Edition). Henry Foss James
said Isabel.
“Well,” her cousin rejoined, “if he isn’t he ought to be!”
In the afternoon she spent an hour with her uncle on the lawn, where the old man sat, as usual, with his shawl over his legs and his large cup of diluted tea in his hands. In the course of conversation he asked her what she thought of their late visitor.
Isabel was prompt. “I think he’s charming.”
“He’s a nice person,” said Mr. Touchett, “but I don’t recommend you to fall in love with him.”
“I shall not do it then; I shall never fall in love but on your recommendation. Moreover,” Isabel added, “my cousin gives me rather a sad account of Lord Warburton.”
“Oh, indeed? I don’t know what there may be to say, but you must remember that Ralph must talk.”
“He thinks your friend’s too subversive — or not subversive enough! I don’t quite understand which,” said Isabel.
The old man shook his head slowly, smiled and put down his cup. “I don’t know which either. He goes very far, but it’s quite possible he doesn’t go far enough. He seems to want to do away with a good many things, but he seems to want to remain himself. I suppose that’s natural, but it’s rather inconsistent.”
“Oh, I hope he’ll remain himself,” said Isabel. “If he were to be done away with his friends would miss him sadly.”
“Well,” said the old man, “I guess he’ll stay and amuse his friends. I should certainly miss him very much here at Gardencourt. He always amuses me when he comes over, and I think he amuses himself as well. There’s a considerable number like him, round in society; they’re very fashionable just now. I don’t know what they’re trying to do — whether they’re trying to get up a revolution. I hope at any rate they’ll put it off till after I’m gone. You see they want to disestablish everything; but I’m a pretty big landowner here, and I don’t want to be disestablished. I wouldn’t have come over if I had thought they were going to behave like that,” Mr. Touchett went on with expanding hilarity. “I came over because I thought England was a safe country. I call it a regular fraud if they are going to introduce any considerable changes; there’ll be a large number disappointed in that case.”
“Oh, I do hope they’ll make a revolution!” Isabel exclaimed. “I should delight in seeing a revolution.”
“Let me see,” said her uncle, with a humorous intention; “I forget whether you’re on the side of the old or on the side of the new. I’ve heard you take such opposite views.”
“I’m on the side of both. I guess I’m a little on the side of everything. In a revolution — after it was well begun — I think I should be a high, proud loyalist. One sympathises more with them, and they’ve a chance to behave so exquisitely. I mean so picturesquely.”
“I don’t know that I understand what you mean by behaving picturesquely, but it seems to me that you do that always, my dear.”
“Oh, you lovely man, if I could believe that!” the girl interrupted.
“I’m afraid, after all, you won’t have the pleasure of going gracefully to the guillotine here just now,” Mr. Touchett went on. “If you want to see a big outbreak you must pay us a long visit. You see, when you come to the point it wouldn’t suit them to be taken at their word.”
“Of whom are you speaking?”
“Well, I mean Lord Warburton and his friends — the radicals of the upper class. Of course I only know the way it strikes me. They talk about the changes, but I don’t think they quite realise. You and I, you know, we know what it is to have lived under democratic institutions: I always thought them very comfortable, but I was used to them from the first. And then I ain’t a lord; you’re a lady, my dear, but I ain’t a lord. Now over here I don’t think it quite comes home to them. It’s a matter of every day and every hour, and I don’t think many of them would find it as pleasant as what they’ve got. Of course if they want to try, it’s their own business; but I expect they won’t try very hard.”
“Don’t you think they’re sincere?” Isabel asked.
“Well, they want to FEEL earnest,” Mr. Touchett allowed; “but it seems as if they took it out in theories mostly. Their radical views are a kind of amusement; they’ve got to have some amusement, and they might have coarser tastes than that. You see they’re very luxurious, and these progressive ideas are about their biggest luxury. They make them feel moral and yet don’t damage their position. They think a great deal of their position; don’t let one of them ever persuade you he doesn’t, for if you were to proceed on that basis you’d be pulled up very short.”
Isabel followed her uncle’s argument, which he unfolded with his quaint distinctness, most attentively, and though she was unacquainted with the British aristocracy she found it in harmony with her general impressions of human nature. But she felt moved to put in a protest on Lord Warburton’s behalf. “I don’t believe Lord Warburton’s a humbug; I don’t care what the others are. I should like to see Lord Warburton put to the test.”
“Heaven deliver me from my friends!” Mr. Touchett answered. “Lord Warburton’s a very amiable young man — a very fine young man. He has a hundred thousand a year. He owns fifty thousand acres of the soil of this little island and ever so many other things besides. He has half a dozen houses to live in. He has a seat in Parliament as I have one at my own dinner-table. He has elegant tastes — cares for literature, for art, for science, for charming young ladies. The most elegant is his taste for the new views. It affords him a great deal of pleasure — more perhaps than anything else, except the young ladies. His old house over there — what does he call it, Lockleigh?— is very attractive; but I don’t think it’s as pleasant as this. That doesn’t matter, however — he has so many others. His views don’t hurt any one as far as I can see; they certainly don’t hurt himself. And if there were to be a revolution he would come off very easily. They wouldn’t touch him, they’d leave him as he is: he’s too much liked.”
“Ah, he couldn’t be a martyr even if he wished!” Isabel sighed. “That’s a very poor position.”
“He’ll never be a martyr unless you make him one,” said the old man.
Isabel shook her head; there might have been something laughable in the fact that she did it with a touch of melancholy. “I shall never make any one a martyr.”
“You’ll never be one, I hope.”
“I hope not. But you don’t pity Lord Warburton then as Ralph does?”
Her uncle looked at her a while with genial acuteness. “Yes, I do, after all!”
Chapter IX
The two Misses Molyneux, this nobleman’s sisters, came presently to call upon her, and Isabel took a fancy to the young ladies, who appeared to her to show a most original stamp. It is true that when she described them to her cousin by that term he declared that no epithet could be less applicable than this to the two Misses Molyneux, since there were fifty thousand young women in England who exactly resembled them. Deprived of this advantage, however, Isabel’s visitors retained that of an extreme sweetness and shyness of demeanour, and of having, as she thought, eyes like the balanced basins, the circles of “ornamental water,” set, in parterres, among the geraniums.
“They’re not morbid, at any rate, whatever they are,” our heroine said to herself; and she deemed this a great charm, for two or three of the friends of her girlhood had been regrettably open to the charge (they would have been so nice without it), to say nothing of Isabel’s having occasionally suspected it as a tendency of her own. The Misses Molyneux were not in their first youth, but they had bright, fresh complexions and something of the smile of childhood. Yes, their eyes, which Isabel