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Henry James' “Half-man”: The Legacy of Browning in “The Madonna of the Future”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
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Thomas Sergeant Perry, Who in 1858 was a schoolfellow of Henry James at Newport, recalls the fifteen-year-old future author “as an uninterested scholar…. I have not forgotten his amusement at seeing in the Manual of English Literature that we were studying, in the half page devoted to Mrs. Browning, that she had married R. Browning, ‘himself no mean poet.’ This compact information gave him great delight, for we were reading Browning.” Perry's comment is both intriguing and significant, in view of the close and enduring acquaintance, at first literary and later personal as well, that James was to establish with the husband of Elizabeth Barrett. Browning was, in fact, destined to play no mean part in the younger writer's artistic formation. James himself, however, in Notes of a Son and Brother (1914), attributes his introduction to Browning's poetry to the powerful influence of the young painter John La Farge, whom he came to know during the same period at Newport: “[La Farge] revealed to us Browning for instance; and this, oddly enough, long after Men and Women had begun (from our Paris time on, if I remember) to lie upon our parents' book-table.
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References
NOTES
1. Quoted in Le Clair, Robert C., Young Henry James (New York: Bookman Associates, 1955), p. 281.Google Scholar
2. James, Henry, Notes of a Son and Brother (London: Macmillan, 1914), p. 87.Google Scholar
3. The Complete Tales of Henry James, ed. Edel, Leon (Philadelphia and New York: Lippincott, 1963), V, 321.Google Scholar
4. Kelley, Cornelia P., The Early Development of Henry James, rev. ed. (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1960), p. 149.Google Scholar (The original edition of this work was published in 1930.)
Krishna B. Vaid, while confirming Kelley's identification of Balzac's story as a likely source for “The Madonna of the Future,” mentions also Hawthorne's “The Artist of the Beautiful” as another possible parallel, but adds that “there is not much more than a peripheral thematic resemblance between the two tales” (Vaid, , Technique in the Tales of Henry James [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1964], p. 26CrossRefGoogle Scholar).
5. James, unsigned review in the Nation of 20 Jan. 1876; reprinted in Litzinger, Boyd and Smalley, Donald, eds., Browning: The Critical Heritage (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970), p. 416.Google Scholar
6. James, “Browning in Westminster Abbey,” originally published in the Speaker of 4 Jan. 1891; reprinted in Litzinger and Smalley, p. 530.
7. James, , Notes on Novelists (London: Dent, 1914), pp. 317–18.Google Scholar
8. The Complete Tales of Henry James, III, 16. “The Madonna of the Future” is reprinted here as it first appeared in book form, a slightly revised version of the original text that was published in the Atlantic Monthly of March 1873. Further page references to this edition of the tale will be included within parentheses following each citation.
9. There is some circumstantial basis for identifying “that youth” of “Pictor Ignotus” at least tentatively with Raphael. Browning does, of course leave the “youth,” like the title character, purposely anonymous; but the superscribed date (“15—”) permits such an identification, and the resemblance in wording to references to Raphael in “Andrea del Sarto” (“that famous youth π The Urbinate who died five years ago”) seems suggestively close.
10. Complete Tales, III, 26.
11. Compare, for example, the lines: “All is silver gray π Placid and perfect with my art: the worse!” (ll. 98–99); and: “Let my hands frame your face in your hair's gold,' π You beautiful Lucrezia that are mine!” (ll. 175–76).
12. James, , “Florentine Notes,” in Transatlantic Sketches (Boston: Osgood, 1875), pp. 291–93.Google Scholar The essay bears the superscription, “February-April 1874.”
13. Ibid., p. 293. It is worth noting that James makes explicit reference to another of Browning's poems from Men and Women, “The Statue and the Bust,” later (p. 310) in the same essay.