Adina

By Henry James

Henry James was a well-respected author whose command of the English language was sublime. He wrote many novels and novellas. Adina is set in Italy and begins with a description of a man called Scrote, the friend of the narrator, and a complete contrast in character to himself. One day when they are out for a walk they come across a young Italian man asleep on the ground. In his hand, he has a rough uncut gem…

• Language: English
• Publisher: Good Press
• Release date: Apr 11, 2021
• ISBN: 4064066456122

Henry James

Henry James (1843-1916) was an American author and master of literary realism. He split his time between America and Europe, eventually settling in England. Consequently, his novels are known for their interactions between American and European characters. He was one first American novelists to explore first-person consciousness and perception.

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Henry James

Adina

Published by Good Press, 2022

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EAN 4064066456122

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Versions ofAdina

Adina

Versions ofAdina

Table of Contents

Versions of Adina include:

Adina in Scribner's Monthly8(1–2) (May–June 1874):

Adina in Scribner's Monthly8(1) (May 1874): 33–43.

Adina in Scribner's Monthly8(2) (June 1874): 181–191.

— First publication in any form

"Adina" in Travelling Companions (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1919): 223–267. — First American book edition; published posthumously.

Adina

Table of Contents

ADINA

I

WE had been talking of Sam Scrope round the fire—mindful, such of us, of the rule de mortuis . Our host, however, had said nothing; rather to my surprise, as I knew he had been particularly intimate with our friend. But when our group had dispersed, and I remained alone with him, he brightened the fire, offered me another cigar, puffed his own awhile with a retrospective air, and told me the following tale:

Eighteen years ago Scrope and I were together in Rome. It was the beginning of my acquaintance with him, and I had grown fond of him, as a mild, meditative youth often does of an active, irreverent, caustic one. He had in those days the germs of the eccentricities,—not to call them by a hard name,—which made him afterwards the most intolerable of the friends we did not absolutely break with; he was already, as they say, a crooked stick. He was cynical, perverse, conceited, obstinate, brilliantly clever. But he was young, and youth, happily, makes many of our vices innocent. Scrope had his merits, or our friendship would not have ripened. He was not an amiable man, but he was an honest one—in spite of the odd caprice I have to relate; and half my kindness for him was based in a feeling that at bottom in spite of his vanity, he enjoyed his own irritability as little as other people. It was his fancy to pretend that he enjoyed nothing, and that what sentimental travelers call picturesqueness was a weariness to his spirit; but the world was new to him and the charm of fine things often took him by surprise and stole a march on his premature cynicism. He was an observer in spite of himself, ​and in his happy moods, thanks to his capital memory and ample information, an excellent critic and most profitable companion. He was a punctilious classical scholar. My boyish journal, kept in those days, is stuffed with learned allusions; they are all Scrope's. I brought to the service of my Roman experience much more loose sentiment than rigid science. It was indeed a jocular bargain between us that in our wanderings, picturesque and archæological, I should undertake the sentimental business—the raptures, the reflections, the sketching, the quoting from Byron. He considered me absurdly Byronic, and when, in the manner of tourists at that period, I breathed poetic sighs over the subjection of Italy to the foreign foe, he used to swear that Italy had got no more than she deserved, that she was a land of vagabonds and declaimers, and that he had yet to see an Italian whom he would call a man. I quoted to him from Alfieri that the human plant grew stronger in Italy than anywhere else, and he retorted, that nothing grew strong there but lying and cheating, laziness, beggary and vermin. Of course we each said more than we believed. If we met a shepherd on the Campagna, leaning on his crook and gazing at us darkly from under the shadow of his matted locks, I would proclaim that he was the handsomest fellow in the world, and demand of Scrope to stop and let me sketch him. Scrope would confound him for a filthy scare-crow and me for a drivelling album-poet. When I stopped in the street to stare up at some mouldering palazzo with a patched petticoat hanging to dry from the drawing-room window, and assured him that its haunted disrepair was dearer to my soul than the neat barred front of my Aunt Esther's model mansion in Mount Vernon street, he would seize me by the arm and march me off, pinching me till I shook myself free, and whelming me, my soul and my palazzo in a ludicrous torrent of abuse. The truth was that the picturesque of Italy, both in man and in nature, fretted him, depressed him, strangely. He was consciously a harsh note in the midst of so many mellow harmonies; everything seemed to say to him—Don't you wish you were as easy, as loveable, as carelessly beautiful ​as we? In the bottom of his heart he did wish it. To appreciate the bitterness of this dumb disrelish of the Italian atmosphere, you must remember how very ugly the poor fellow was. He was uglier at twenty than at forty, for as he grew older it became the fashion to say