Abstract
The connecting of literature with contemporary movements in the visual arts demands at times a leap of the imagination, a perception of affinities between the media even where the writer himself may have been by nature apathetic towards painting and sculpture, and ignorant of current trends in those arts. Henry James, in contrast, not only invites such investigation, rendering justification for it redundant, but throughout his work insists, with unqualified verve, upon the intimate correlation between the craft of the author and the principles governing the kindred arts of painting, architecture, and sculpture. Although all three artistic media were referred to frequently in his writings, whether as fictional elements within his stories or as authorially evoked exemplifications of the literary techniques he was employing, it was especially to the art of painting that he resorted in his critical work, employing it as a paradigm for the creative processes relating to his own profession of letters. He claimed categorically that ‘… the analogy between the art of the painter and the art of the novelist is, so far as I am able to see, complete.’1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes and References
Henry James, Partial Portraits (London, 1888), p. 378.
Preface to The Portrait of a Lady, written for the New York edition of 1908 (3:x–xi). All subsequent quotations are from the same edition. James’s image of the house of fiction is interestingly examined in Ellen E. Frank, Literary Architecture: essays towards a tradition (Berkeley, 1979), pp. 172f. On tike author’s reservations concerning the Dutch artists, cf. his review of the 1871 acquisitions by the Metropolitan Museum, describing the Dutch works among them as being pleasant but lacking the intellectualism and stimulation of the imaginative faculty which were to be found in the finest paintings.
Notes of a Son and Brother (New York, 1914), pp. 81 and 97, and A Small Boy and Others (New York, 1913), p. 364. Another edition of the latter volume was published in New York in the same year, but with different pagination, the reference there being p. 361.
Edwin T. Bowden, The Themes of Henry James: a system of observation through the visual arts (New Haven, 1956); Viola H. Winner, Henry James and the Visual Arts (Charlottesville, 1970); Marianna Torgovnick, The Visual Arts, Pictorialism, and the Novel: James, Lawrence, and Woolf (Princeton, 1985); and Adeline R. Tintner, The Museum World of Henry James (Ann Arbor, 1986), a book-length study developed from her article. ‘The Spoils of Henry James’, Publications of the Modern Language Association, 61 (1946), 239. Laurence B. Holland, The Expense of Vision: essays on the craft of Henry James (Princeton, 1964) effectively applies to the novels Gombrich’s conception of representationalism in art.
A Small Boy, p. 328 (318 in the variant pagination).
In a letter to Edmund Gosse in 1894, in Letters (edited by Leon Edel) (Cambridge, Mass., 1974–84), 3:492, where he adds a grudging admission that Pater ‘… is not of the little day — but of the longer time.’ James’ resistance to Pater is discussed in Adeline R. Tintner’s subsequent study, The Book World of Henry James: appropriating the classics (Ann Arbor, 1987), especially pp. 146f.
Quoted in E.V. Lucas, Edwin Austin Abbey, Royal Academician: the record of his life and work (New York, 1921) 1:416. The letter to Abbey, dated 1906, is not included in Edel’s collection. In a letter to his mother in 1869 (Letters, 1:103), James recorded that his meeting with Ruskin confirmed the impression obtained from the latter’s writings that Ruskin, ‘… has been scared back by the grim face of reality into the world of unreason and illusion, and that he wanders there without a compass and a guide…’
The Author of Beltraffio, 16:24.
Letters, 9:372.
James’s comments on Beardsley appear in the New York preface to The Lesson of the Master, 15:vi and in Letters, 4:691–2, while his comment on the Yellow Book is in Letters, 3:482. Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: art and decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (New Haven, 1990), p. 619, perceives only the negative qualities in James, castigating him for the Decadent aestheticism of his imagery whereby, she maintains, he joins ‘… Late Romantic sexual perversity to English high comedy of Carrollian absurdity…’ Some years ago, Giorgio Melchiori, The Tightrope Walkers: studies of Mannerism in modern English literature (London, 1956), pp. 13f., suggested similarities between Henry James and Gerard Manley Hopkins in terms of their complex syntactical structures and artificial language. Melchiori’s assumption that Mannerism is a recurrent phenomenon, the modern era representing a later phase of the seventeenth-century version, was argued more fully in Arnold Hauser, Mannerism: the crisis of the Renaissance and the origin of modern art (trans. E. Mosbacher) 2 vols (New York, 1965). Persuasive as it may first seem, since both the seventeenth-century version and the modern employ convoluted and contrived forms, the theory is ultimately no more than a recognition of the so-called ‘grandfather effect’, whereby a generation rebelling against the ideas of its elders resembles in some respects, by process of oscillation, the ideas against which those elders had once rebelled.
F.O. Matthiessen, ‘James and the Plastic Arts’, Kenyon Review, 5 (1943), 535; Charles R. Anderson, Person, Place, and Thing in Henry James’s Novels (Durham, NC, 1977), pp. 238f.; and Winner, pp. 88–9. The parallel is questioned by Tintner, pp. 108–9 and by Torgovnick, pp. 178–9, but has recently been mildly re-approved in Millicent Bell, Meaning in Henry James (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), pp. 4–7.
Cf. H. Peter Stowell, Literary Impressionism: James and Chekhov (Athens, Ga., 1980), especially pp. 48–9, and Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction (New York, 1921), pp. 161f. Viola Winner, sceptical towards the influence of the Impressionists on James, suggests (p. 89) that such indebtedness applies only to his sense of the momentary and transitory nature of phenomena. But, as Morse Peckham argued long ago, that concern with ephemerality or changeability is no less characteristic of the Romantic imagination, and James would therefore have required no further guidance on that point from the Impressionists. Cf. Morse Peckham, ‘A Theory of Romanticism’ (1951) reprinted in his The Triumph of Romanticism: collected essays (Columbia, 1970) and, for an elaboration of that idea, Thomas McFarland, Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and modalities of fragmentation (Princeton, 1981), especially pp. 276f.
The Painter’s Eye: notes and essays on the pictorial arts by Henry James (selected and edited by John L. Sweeney) (Cambridge, Mass., 1956) reprints the comments on Whistler on p. 143, and on the Impressionists in general on pp. 114–15. Sargent, although a declared admirer of the Impressionists, was in practice only partially within that movement. Although his rougher brushwork revealed certain affinities, the portraits, brilliant as they are, remain comparatively conventional in their treatment of their subjects. This conservatism is rightly noted in Barbara Novak, American Painting of the Nineteenth Century: realism, idealism and the American experience (New York, 1979), p. 243.
In his essay, ‘New England: an Autumn Impression’ (1905), reprinted in The American Scene, he writes of ‘… wondrous examples of Manet, of Dégas, of Claude Monet, of Whistler, of other rare recent hands…’ By then, however, he had completed all his novels, including The Golden Bowl (1904).
The Reverberator, 13:35 and 40–1, Roderick Hudson, 1:362, and The Tragic Muse, 8:113.
Robert L. Gale, The Caught Image: figurative language in the fiction of Henry James (Chapel Hill, 1964), p. 120, notes that the artists most frequently referred to in the imagery of the novels are Titian and Holbein, followed by Veronese, Gainsborough, Van Dyck, Michelangelo, Raphael and Velasquez. But that listing does not seem to reflect James’s own preferences, as Tintoretto, the artist he most admired, emerges very low in this statistical listing.
Jonathan Freedman’s Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and commodity culture (Stanford, 1990), which appeared after this chapter was completed, has at last acknowledged James’ close relationship to the aesthetic movement, expressing a surprise similar to my own at the way that relationship has been ignored or suppressed in the otherwise exhaustive critical studies of James’ sources during the past twenty years. Freedman analyses with admirable sophistication the philosophical subtleties of the movement, the socio-political implications of its response to an emergent commodity culture, and James’ uneasy adoption and rejection of certain of its principles. But our approaches are very different, his study concentrating upon the political, philosophical and socio-economic aspects of Aestheticism as they affected James’ writing, where my own interest is in the art works themselves, the specific paintings and artefacts produced by Art Nouveau and their relationship to James’ stylistic and thematic innovations.
Alexander Pope, ‘An Essay on Criticism’, 68f., in Poems (edited by John Butts) (New Haven, 1963), p. 146.
George J. Romanes, A Candid Examination of Theism (Boston, 1878), p. 171, which he published under the pseudonym ‘Physicus’. Thomas Huxley, who retained his optimism somewhat longer, wrote in his essay ‘Science and Morals’ (1886) of ‘… the order which pervades the seeming disorder of the world; the great drama of evolution, with its full share of pity and terror, but also with abundant goodness and beauty…’ There is a perceptive discussion of the impact of Darwinism in that period in Peter Morton, The Vital Science: biology and the literary imagination, 1860–1900 (London, 1984).
Historians such as Aslin have warned against confusing Art Nouveau with the Aesthetic movement that preceded it, and I am aware of the important distinctions to be made between them. But both movements are, I would argue, clearly related in their shift away from the idealization of Nature to the idealization of the artefact. It is in that sense that I am comparing them here. See Elizabeth Aslin, The Aesthetic Movement: prelude to Art Nouveau (New York, 1969).
Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist’ in Complete Works (New York, 1923) 5:185. He remarks there (5:236) that the nineteenth century was a turning point in history ‘… simply on account of the work of two men, Darwin and Renan, the one the critic of the Book of Nature, the other the critic of the books of God.’ Adeline Tintner, in her important essay of 1946 cited above, cursorily mentions the possible relationship of James’s early fiction to the Art-for-Art’s-sake movement but examines the point no further, claiming moreover that The Portrait of a Lady marks the end of any such indebtedness. James’s love-hate sentiment towards Pater’s aesthetic philosophy is discussed in her article ‘Pater in The Portrait of a Lady and The Golden Bowl, including some unpublished Henry James Letters’, Henry James Review, 3 (1982), 80. Interart relationships in this period are examined in Lothar Hönnighausen, The Symbolist Tradition in English Literature: a study of Pre-Raphaelitism and Fin de Siècle (trans. Gisela Hönnighausen) (Cambridge, 1988).
G.B. Tennyson’s essay on The Sacramental Imagination’, in U.C. Knoepflmacher and G.B. Tennyson (eds), Nature and the Victorian Imagination (Berkeley, 1977), pp. 370f., notes the abandonment of unqualified faith in pantheism, and links that shift with the revived interest in Catholicism and the rituals of Christianity, exemplified by Coleridge’s remark in Anima Poetae: ‘Every season Nature converts me from some unloving heresy, and will make a Catholic of me at last.’ See Carl Woodring, Nature into Art: cultural transformations in nineteenth-century Britain (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), p. 248, and Karl Beckson (ed.), Aesthetes and Decadents of the Eighteen-Nineties (London, 1981). There is a hint of all this in the attraction that the public ecclesiastical ceremonies and processions in Rome held for James during his earliest visit there, before the establishment of the Vatican city restricted such public rituals to its confines. His strong interest in those ceremonies is mentioned in Letters, 1:160.
Linda Dowling, Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (Princeton, 1986). The quotation from Max Müller is from his ‘Comparative Philology’, Edinburgh Review, 94 (1851), 310. Suzanne Nalbantian, Seeds of Decadence in the Late Nineteenth-century Novel: a crisis in values (London, 1983), devotes one chapter to examining James in that context (pp. 37f.), but disappointingly assumes that the term Decadence is to be equated with structures or ‘poetics’ of postponement in his novels, that is, instances of a character’s inability to seize opportunities. That is too narrow a focus to serve as an effective criterion. John R. Reed, Decadent Style (Athens, Ohio, 1985) provides a general survey of the movement in the various media, while the continental art forms are perceptively examined in Debora L. Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France: politics, psychology, and style (Berkeley, 1989).
Henry Sweet, ‘On the Practical Study of Language’ (1884) in Linguistics in Great Britain (edited by Wolfgang Kühlwein) (Tübingen, 1971), p. 125. Bernard Shaw restricted his altered spelling to the insistence that such abbreviations as ‘don’t’ and ‘didn’t’ should be printed in his works without an apostrophe, on the grounds that flexibility of common usage should prevail over the attempt of traditional philologists to petrify language in its inherited forms.
George Eliot, Letters (edited by G.S. Haight) (New Haven, 1954–78), 4:8 and Oscar Wilde, The Truth of Masks’, appended to his ‘Critic as Artist’. Frederic W. Farrar’s ‘Philology and Darwinism’, Nature, 1 (1870), p. 529, ventured to show how ‘… Mr Darwin’s hypothesis may be confirmed and verified by the entirely independent researches of the comparative philologist.’
Tiffany experimented with this medium from 1875, patenting his Favrile glass in 1880. He employed the technique of exposing it when hot to various metallic fumes and oxides in order to produce the iridescent effect for which it became famed.
Quoted without source in Lara-Vinca Masini, Art Nouveau, translated from the Italian by Linda Fairbairn (Secaucus, 1976), p. 38.
Cf. Earl Miner, The Japanese Tradition in British and American Literature (Princeton, 1966); Aslin, The Aesthetic Movement, pp. 79f.; and Siegfried Wichmann, Japonisme: the Japanese influence on Western art in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (New York, 1980). The Japanese element in Van Gogh’s work is not, perhaps, as obvious as in Whistler’s, with the exception of a few canvases such as his Bridge at Arles; but he himself was conscious of its centrality, remarking in a letter to his brother dated 1886: ‘In a way, all my work is founded on Japanese art.’ See his Complete Letters (New York, 1958), no. 520.
Christopher Dresser, from his caption to this illustration in The Technical Educator (London, 1870).
See my Milton and the Baroque (London, 1980), pp. 90f.
Cf. Mario Amaya, Art Nouveau (London, 1966), p. 37.
The famous embroidered wall-hanging. Cyclamen by Hermann Obrist, received the sobriquet ‘The Whiplash’ after it was described in an article in the German magazine Pan: ‘Its frantic movement reminds us of the sudden violent curves occasioned by the crack of a whip; now appearing as as a forceful outburst of the elements of nature, a stroke of lightning: now as the defiant signature of a great man, a conqueror.’
Arthur Symons, Studies in Prose and Verse (London, n.d. [1904]), p. 291. Symons’s statement: ‘I affirm that it is not natural to be what is called “natural” any longer’, and his search, like his friend Yeats, for a mask with which to hide his identity are discussed in Barbara Charlesworth (later Gelpi), Dark Passages: the decadent consciousness in Victorian literature (Madison, 1965), pp. 96f.
The Portrait of a Lady, 4:15. His comment to H.G. Wells is recorded in Letters, 2:490.
As Donald D. Stone rightly notes in his Novelists in a Changing World: Meredith, James, and the transformation of English fiction in the 1880s (Cambridge, Ma., 1972), pp. 224–45, the moral danger of James’s artistheroesis ‘that they move on a plane where conscience is replaced by artistic propriety’.
The moral ambiguity of James’ novels has been examined in Sallie Sears, The Negative Imagination: form and perspective in the novels of Henry James (Ithaca, 1968). The switch in narrative ‘reflectors’ in this novel, the first half cultivating the Prince’s perspective while the second half favours Maggie’s, discourages, Sears points out, any unified moral viewpoint, balancing one against the other. With regard to the events in the story, it has been argued, in John Clair, The Ironic Dimension in the Fiction of Henry James (Pittsburgh, 1965), pp. 79f., that Prince Amerigo and Charlotte merely pretend to commit adultery in order to awaken Maggie from her dangerous complacency; but that interpretation has not received general acceptance.
From a letter written in 1878 and published in his The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (London, 1890), pp. 127–8.
The Golden Bowl, 23:210.
On the concern with wealth in James’s novels, see Jan W. Dietrichson, The Image of Money in the American Novel of the Gilded Age (New York, 1969), especially chapters 1 and 2; and Donald L. Mull, Henry James’s ‘Sublime Economy’: money as a symbolic center in the fiction (Middletown, 1973).
The Golden Bowl, 2:3.
Portrait of a Lady, 4:194 and 4:397. Isabel’s continued respect for Osmond’s civilized deportment is not the sole justification for her return to Rome, which involves the final scene with Goodwood as well as her own sense of moral commitment to the consequences of her choice. But the passage quoted here does suggest on the credit side the importance in Isabel’s mind of Osmond’s unfailing refinement. For a general assessment of the reasons for her return, see Dorothea Krook, The Ordeal of Consciousness in Henry James (Cambridge, 1967), pp. 357–62.
The Princess Casamassima, 5:22–3.
The Spoils of Poynton, 10:31. James’s sympathy with Mrs Gereth, quite apart from the evidence provided by the text, is indicated by her having been modelled on his friend Isabella Gardner, who was at that time plundering Europe for the art works that were to form the basis of the museum now bearing her name.
Gerald Reitlinger, The Economics of Taste: the rise and fall of the picture market, 1760–1960 (New York, 1961) locates the golden age of such artistic remuneration in the Victorian period. The sense of discomfort at the award of such honours is discussed in Paula Gillett, Worlds of Art: painters in Victorian society (New Brunswick, 1990), especially p. 17. The quotations here are from Walter Pater, Appreciations (London, 1889), p. 18, and from Wilde’s ‘Critic as Artist’, Complete Works, 5:211–12. Pater’s aesthetic standards have been interestingly discussed in Wolfgang Iser, Walter Pater: the aesthetic moment (translated by D.H. Wilson) (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 46f. and in Paul Barolsky, Walter Pater’s ‘Renaissance’ (London, 1987).
Frank Colebrook in a lecture entitled William Morris, Master Printer delivered in November 1896 and recently republished (Council Bluffs, Iowa, 1989). The conflict between Morris’s socialist principles and the élitist aspect of his art is discussed in E.P. Thompson, William Morris: romantic to revolutionary (New York, 1976), pp. 655–67.
Portrait of a Lady, 4:197 and 3:271.
The author’s preface to the New York edition of The Princess Casamassima. For somewhat generalized studies of these figures, cf. Ora Segal, The Lucid Reflector: the observer in Henry James’ fiction (New Haven, 1969); and Sister M. Corona Sharp, The Confidante in Henry James: evolution and moral value of a fictive character (Notre Dame, 1963).
The Sacred Fount, which was not included in the New York edition. The passage appears at the end of Chapter 2.
Cf. Peter K. Garrett, Scene and Symbol from George Eliot to James Joyce: studies in a changing fictional mode (New Haven, 1969), pp. 141–4; and Ruth B. Yeazell, Language and Knowledge in the Later Novels of Henry James (Chicago, 1976), pp. 13f.
Portrait of a Lady, 3:377 and 3:87.
The Golden Bowl, 23:383–84. The theme of art collecting is as pervasive in the imagery of this novel as it is in his other writings, the Prince being informed: ‘You’re at any rate part of his collection… one of the things that can only be got over here. You’re a rarity, an object of beauty, an object of price’ 23:12. Daniel Brudney, ‘Knowledge and Silence: The Golden Bowl and Moral Philosophy’, Critical Inquiry, 16 (1990), 397, makes out an interesting case for the moral ambiguity of the novel, seeing each protagonist as trying to behave well but prevented from doing so by his or her treatment of others as mere surfaces on which to aestheticize.
Torgovnick, pp. 76–80 and 84. James’s use of the artist as observer and as central character is perceptively discussed in Maurice Beebe, Ivory Towers and Sacred Founts: the artist as hero in fiction from Goethe to Joyce (New York, 1964), pp. 197f.
Roland Barthes discusses the need for ‘healthy’ signifiers in The Pleasure of the Text (London, 1976), following the semiotic approach of Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language (The Hague, 1956), p. 81 and Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books (New York, 1965), pp. 104–9, as well as E.H. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion: a study in the psychology of pictorial representation (Princeton, 1960). The fact that Friedrich Nietszche, in his The Will to Power, paragraphs 515 and 521–2, had anticipated many of their ideas on the factitiousness of art strengthens the view that it is not a modern problem. See George Levine, The Realistic Imagination: English fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley (Chicago, 1981), especially pp. 16–17.
That search for the symbolic essence rather than the reality was exemplified in the widespread interest in this period in one of the most evanescent forms of art, the dance, seemingly divorced from the physical world of nature while yet dependent upon it for its existence. Artists and sculptors vied with each other in attempting to recapture the sensational effects created by the famous dancer Löie Fuller, swirling her long coloured scarves about her — an interest which prompted Yeats’ musings on Platonic beauty and its transcendence of reality in ‘Among Schoolchildren’, with its concluding lines: ‘O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,/ How can we know the dancer from the dance?’ The centrality of the dance image in Yeats’s work is discussed in Frank Kermode, Romantic Image (London, 1966), pp. 62–106. For sculpture inspired by Löie Fuller, cf. Agathon Léonard’s remarkable bronze figure of 1900 entitled Le jeu de l’Echarpe.
Details of the precious stones and jewels incorporated in these ornamental creatures, plants and eggs are listed in the appendix to A. Kenneth Snowman, The Art of Carl Fabergé (London, 1968), pp. 144–66.
The Author of Beltraffio, 16:42–3. Leon Edel, The Life of Henry James (Harmondsworth, 1977), pp. 190–1, records James’s acknowledgment that J.A. Symonds was the model for Ambient, but that does not, of course, exclude the possibility of authorial self-projection as Ambient discusses the task of the novelist.
F.O. Matthiessen, Henry James: the major phase (New York, 1944), pp. 27 and 31. A more conventional account of James’s preference for the European continent is offered in Christof Wegelin, The Image of Europe in Henry James (Dallas, 1958). Byzantium functioned also as a model of decadence and corruption for the Symbolist writers and artists of the late nineteenth century. That aspect is explored in Philippe Julian, Dreamers of Decadence: symbolist painters of the 1890s (London, 1974), but to the exclusion there of the more positive inspiration Byzantium offered, representing, as for Yeats, the sacredness and eternity of art. Elizabeth B. Loizeaux, Yeats and the Visual Arts (New Brunswick, 1986) examines his relationship to painting primarily in terms of Pre-Raphaelite influences, despite the lengthy gap in time.
Preface to Roderick Hudson, 2:1049.
Frederick C. Crews, The Tragedy of Manners: moral drama in the later novels of Henry James (New Haven, 1957), p. 56, argued that Strether heroically declined Miss Gostrey’s offer through a desire for greater life fulfilment. But Richard Poirier, in The Comic Sense of Henry James: a study of the early novels (London, 1960), pp. 252–4, has challenged that view, perceiving in Strether’s act a reflection of James’s own tendency to withdraw from active participation in life. The conclusion of the novel reveals, he maintains, as so often in James’s fiction, a ‘curious discontinuity between the significances that are finally evoked and the dramatic life that has been precedently created.’
F.R. Leavis, The Great Tradition: a study of the English novel (New York, 1954), especially pp. 202–3; Edmund Wilson, ‘The Ambiguity of Henry James’, first published in Hound and Horn, 7 (1934), 385; and Mary Cross, Henry James: the contingencies of style (New York, 1993), p. 3. Cf. Seymour Chatman, The Later Style of Henry James (Oxford, 1972), and David W. Smit, The Language of a Master: theories of style and the late writing of Henry James (Carbondale, 1988).
The Ambassadors, 22:238–9.
The Wings of the Dove, 19:221, and The Ambassadors, 22:247. The cartoon by George du Maurier appeared in Punch, 30 October, 1880, the caption based upon a remark attributed to Oscar Wilde; see Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York, 1988), p. 45.
The Tragic Muse, 8:117–18.
Torgovnick, pp. 75–6. Brooke K. Horvath, ‘The Life of Art, the Art of Life’, Modern Fiction Studies, 28 (1982), 93, discusses the artists and writers in James’s fiction. James’s shorter tales devoted to that theme were gathered by Matthiessen in the collection Stories of Writers and Artists (New York, 1965). Sara S. Chapman, Henry James’s Portrait of the Writer as Hero (London, 1990) examines only the authors in his fiction.
The Lesson of the Master is, of course, gentle comedy, mocking at Paul’s assumption that Miss Fancourt will wait for him while he travels abroad for two years to mature as a writer, without his having even informed her that he was leaving. But there is a serious side to the story too, as Paul sacrifices wife, home and children to the strict demands of his art. Shlomitt Rimmon, The Concept of Ambiguity — the Example of Jantes (Chicago, 1977), pp. 79f., examines this duality. I am indeed aware of the theory that James may have become impotent as a result of a childhood accident, and also that he may have been a homosexual, but both theories are mere conjecture, as Leon Edel and others have pointed out.
Oscar Cargill, ‘Mr James’s Aesthetic Mr Nash’, in Nineteenth Century Fiction, 12 (1957), 177, first drew attention to the possibility that Gabriel Nash may have been modelled on Oscar Wilde. He notes in his The Novels of Henry James (New York, 1971), pp. 190–3, that James seems not to have wished the identification to be too exact. That reservation on James’s part accords very closely with the theme of this present chapter, that he admired the basic principles of the movement (Nash’s views are accorded considerable respect in the novel), while wishing to dissociate himself from the flamboyance and exhibitionism of Wilde himself.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1996 Murray Roston
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Roston, M. (1996). The Art of Henry James. In: Victorian Contexts. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-13986-6_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-13986-6_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-13988-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-13986-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)