HENRY JAMES
447
ten, and it strikes one that, with the South accounted for, the rest was
to him merely appendix.
At any rate, his visits to Richmond and Charleston- where he
had never been before-stand out as especially significant. He says,
in speaking of his "going South," that it somehow corresponded now
to what in ancient days the yearning fon Europe seemed romantically
to promise. Early in the chapter on Richmond he alludes to the out–
break of the Civil War and describes the city almost purely in terms
of its having been the Confederate capital. He characterizes it (2, p.
358,
passim )
as "the haunted scene" and "the tragic ghost-haunted
city," full of an "adorable weakness" that evokes a certain "tender–
ness" in the visitor. The gist of his impression he gives in an image:
"I can doubtless not sufficiently tell why, but there was something in
my whole sense of the South that projected at moments a vivid and
painful image-that of a figure somehow blighted or stricken, dis–
comfortably, impossibly seated in an invalid-chair, and yet fixing one
with strange eyes that were half a defiance and half a deprecation of
one's noticing, and much more of one's referring to, an abnormal
sign" (2, p. 362). A strong suspicion arises that the image here projec–
ted is that of James himself in
1861.
For confirmation one need only
recall his own description of the manner in which his youthful injury
had united itself indissolubly in his mind with the Civil War.
As
his
own inner turmoil had corresponded then to the internal conflict of
the country, so now his highly sympathetic and tender response to the
vanquished faction seems builded on an understanding of his quite
similar fate.
This view is borne out by his impressions of Charleston. Here,
again, the war of North and South dominates his field of vision, but,
unlike the Northern friend who accompanied him, he finds himf>elf
concentrating on the "bled" condition and his heart fails to harden
even against the treachery at Fort Sumter. Once more a synoptic
in1age emerges, this time of feminization: "The feminization is there
just to· promote for us some eloquent antithesis; just to make us :say
that whereas the ancient order was masculine, fierce and moustachi–
oed, the present is at the most a sort of sick lioness who has so visibly
parted with her teeth and claws. that we may patronizingly walk all
round her.... This image really gives us the best word for the general
effect of Charleston.... " (
2,
pp.
401
f.) .
One recalls almost with a
start the bantering conversation in "The Story of a Year" of forty
years earlier between the hero and the heroine as to the possibility of
his looking like a "lady" when he returns from the war with his
