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Visual Art Devices and Parallels in the Fiction of Henry James

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Viola Hopkins
Viola Hopkins*
Affiliation:
Hunter College, New York 21
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Extract

No better “optical symbol” can be found for one aspect of Henry James than the photograph taken in 1906 showing him in top hat, cane and gloves in hand, bending slightly forward in the classic Daumier pose, taking in impressions of a painting. This is a portrait, however, not merely of the occasional James— the art critic, friend and befriender of painters, biographer of a sculptor—but also of the essential James—the master of the art of fiction. That his love of pictures and familiarity with the studio world were grist to his mill is evident in stories and novels such as “The Madonna of the Future” and The Tragic Muse in which his depiction of the artist and exploration of aesthetic questions are thematically central. Reflecting his experience of art less obviously but more significantly are the pictorial effects and art allusions permeating his fiction, both early and late. For though James was first and foremost a literary artist preoccupied with the problems of his own craft, his responsiveness to the visual arts was so keen, was so much an integral part of his consciousness, that it inevitably made itself felt in his literary technique. Clearly, a study of the pictorial aspects of his fiction is justified for the light it may cast on his method as well as on individual works.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 76 , Issue 5 , December 1961 , pp. 561 - 574
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1961

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References

Note 1 in page 561 This photograph by Alice Boughton has been reproduced in Hound & Horn, vii (April: June 1934), p. 478, and is the frontispiece to The Painter's Eye, ed. John L. Sweeney (Cambridge, Mass., 1956).

Note 2 in page 561 The following works have been especially helpful in clarifying for me the limitations of the comparative method in the study of literature and art: René Wellek, “The Parallelism between Literature and Art,” English Institute Annual, 1941 (New York, 1942); G. Giovannini, “Method in the Study of Literature in its Relation to the Other Fine Arts,” JAAC, vin (March 1950), 185–195; Susanne K. Langer, Problems of Art, Ten Philosophical Lectures (London, 1957); Jean H. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts, The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago, 1958).

Note 3 in page 561 Though the definition is my own, I am indebted for this term to F. O. Matthiessen, “James and the Plastic Arts,” Kenyan Review, v (Autumn 1943), 533–550.

Note 4 in page 561 Confidence (Boston, 1880), p. 1. As James's late revisions give a distorted picture of his earlier style, I refer to the earliest editions available of works prior to and including The Portrait of a Lady. As the revisions after that work do not seem crucial enough to justify using scattered and often difficult to obtain editions, for fiction that followed I refer to The Novels and Tales of Henry James (New York, 190709) and for works not included in the New York Edition, to The Novels and Stories of Henry James, ed. Percy Lubbock (London, 1921–23), abbreviated NY and NS respectively and incorporated in my text.

Note 5 in page 562 Ibid., p. 8.

Note 6 in page 562 Principles of Art History, trans. M. D. Hottinger, 7th ed. (New York, n.d.), p. 25.

Note 7 in page 562 Boston, 1877, p. 1.

Note 8 in page 562 Boston, 1875, p. 113.

Note 9 in page 563 The Portrait of a Lady (Boston, 1882), p. 321.

Note 10 in page 563 “An Introductory Essay,” The Sacred Fount (New York, 1953), xx.

Note 11 in page 564 James used this phrase in describing his reactions to Paris in a letter of 1899 to his architect friend Edward P. Warren. See John Russell, “Henry James and the Leaning Tower,” New Statesman and Nation, xxv (April 1943), 254–255.

Note 12 in page 564 The Painter's Eye, p. 43.

Note 13 in page 565 The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces, ed. Richard P. Blackmur (New York, 1934), p. 8.

Note 14 in page 565 The Notebooks of Henry James, ed. F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock (New York, 1947), p. 409.

Note 15 in page 566 See Life in Leiters of William Dean Howells, ed. Mildred Howells (Garden City, 1928), I, 175.

Note 16 in page 566 Travelling Companions (New York, 1919), p. 20.

Note 17 in page 566 There is a discussion of James's use of Italian art for background and imagery in Robert L. Gale, “Henry James and Italy,” Nineteenth Century Fiction, xiv (Sept. 1959), 157–171. Gale does not analyze in any detail the contextual significance of particular art images.

Note 18 in page 566 The Painter's Eye, p. 58.

Note 19 in page 568 Ibid., p. 76.

Note 20 in page 568 This identification was made by Miriam Allott, “The Bronzino Portrait in The Wings of the Dove,” MLN, lxviii (Jan. 1953), 23–25.

Note 21 in page 569 Arthur McComb, Agnolo Bronzino, His Life and Works (Cambridge, Mass., 1928), p. 9.

Note 22 in page 569 The Leiters of Henry James, ed. Percy Lubbock (New York, 1920), i, 127.

Note 23 in page 569 His memory of the 1887 visit is recorded in the preface to The Spoils of Poynton. See The Art of the Novel, pp. 135–136.

Note 24 in page 569 This painting, which is in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, is by Walter A. Gay. Sargent's Interior of a Palazzo in Venice is of the grand sala of the Palazzo Barbaro. With its representation of figures (the Daniel Curtises, their son and his wife) in informal poses, this picture could be a frontispiece to one of James's depictions of “modern” life in a sumptuous old world setting.

Note 25 in page 569 Portraits of Places (Boston, 1884), pp. 29–30.

Note 26 in page 569 For a brilliant interpretation of analogies between essentially the subjects of Veronese's paintings and this scene, see Laurence B. Holland, “The Wings of the Dove,” ELH, XXVI (Dec. 1959), 549–574.

Note 27 in page 569 James mentions seeing this painting in “From Cham-béry to Milan,” Transatlantic Sketches (Boston, 1875), p. 76.

Note 28 in page 570 Italian Painters of the Renaissance (New York, 1957), pp. 47–48.

Note 29 in page 570 “The Relations between Poetry and Painting,” The Necessary Angel (New York, 1951), p. 169.

Note 30 in page 570 David to Delacroix, trans. Robert Goldwater (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), p. 113.

Note 31 in page 570 See The Painter's Eye, p. 113.

Note 32 in page 571 Ibid., p. 74.

Note 33 in page 571 Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art (New York, 1951), I, 873.

Note 34 in page 572 Edward E. Hale, “The Impressionism of Henry James,” Faculty Papers of Union College, II (Jan. 1931), 17. Hale points out that James had much in common with the Impressionist sensibility, but he does not attempt to analyze specific Impressionist characteristics of his work.

Note 35 in page 572 The Life of Forms in Art, trans. Charles Beecher Hogan and George Kubier (New York, 1948), p. 15.

Note 36 in page 572 My discussion of Mannerist art is based largely on Walter Friedlaender, Mannerism and Anti-Mannerism in Italian Painting (New York, 1957); Nikolaus Pevsner, “The Architecture of Mannerism,” The Mint, A Miscellany of Literature, Art and Criticism, ed. Geoffrey Grigson (London, 1946), pp. 116–138; and I. L. Zupnik, “The ‘Aesthetics’ of the Early Mannerists,” Art Bulletin, xxxv (Dec. 1953), 302–306.

Note 37 in page 572 Friedlaender, p. 5.

Note 38 in page 572 P. 6.

Note 38 in page 572 Pevsner, p. 136.

Note 40 in page 572 Tintoretto, The Paintings and Drawings (New York, 1948), p. 44.

Note 41 in page 572 “Note sur Mallarmé et Poe,” La Nouvelle Revue Française, XXVII (Nov. 1926), 525.

Note 42 in page 572 The Method of Henry James (Philadelphia, 1954), Ixxxvii.

Note 43 in page 572 “The Vision of Grace: James's The Wings of the Dove,” Modern Fiction Studies, iii (Spring 1957), 34.

Note 44 in page 573 The Art oj the Novel, p. 84.

Note 45 in page 573 Transatlantic Sketches, pp. 91–92.

Note 46 in page 573 Tintoretto, p. 62.

Note 47 in page 573 The Future oj the Novel, Essays on the Art oj Fiction, ed. Leon Edel (New York, 1956), p. 156.

Note 48 in page 574 Italian Hours (Boston and New York, 1909), pp. 49–50.

Note 49 in page 574 Giorgio Melchiori, The Tightrope Walkers: Studies of Mannerism in Modern English Literature (London, 1956), p. 23. Melchiori considers James a precursor of a twentieth-century Mannerist style.

Note 50 in page 574 James's taste was eclectic, but it is apparent from letters and essays that the two artists who meant the most to him were Tintoretto and Michelangelo of the Medici chapel. In an unpublished letter to Charles Eliot Norton, dated 9 August 1871, he said that he felt, more so than was true of any other art works, except perhaps those of Michelangelo's, that Tintoretto's aroused emotions which had worked themselves permanently into the substance of his mind. On his second visit to Italy, he “still found Carpaccio delightful, Veronese magnificent, Titian supremely beautiful and Tintoretto altogether unqualifiable” (Transatlantic Sketches, p. 90). This evaluation, indicating that his was not merely a youthful enthusiasm for this Mannerist painter, appeared in an essay first published in 1892: “The plastic arts may have less to say to us than in the hungry years of youth, and the celebrated picture in general be more of a blank; but more than the others any fine Tintoret still carries us back, calling up not only the rich particular vision but the freshness of the old wonder. Many things come and go, but this great artist remains for us in Venice a part of the company of the mind. The others are there in their obvious glory, but he is the only one for whom the imagination, in our expressive modern phrase, sits up” (Italian Hours, p. 49). Further measure of his feeling for Tintoretto can be taken by the order he gave in 1901 to the Venice bound Edmund Gosse: “Go to see the Tintoretto Crucifixion at San Cossiano [Cassano] —or never more be officer of mine” (Letters, I, 378). Apparently he had not disavowed his earlier opinion that in this Crucifixion Tintoretto had “advanced to the uttermost limit of painting; that beyond this another art—inspired poetry —begins, and that Bellini, Veronese, Giorgione, and Titian, all joining hands and straining every muscle of their genius, reach forward not so far but that they leave a visible space in which Tintoret alone is master” (Transatlantic Sketches, p. 90).

Note 511 in page 574 am grateful to the American Association of University Women for a National Fellowship (1957–58) enabling me to work on a study of which this article is one result.