Henry James in the Dial (And Elsewhere)

Forgotten Jamesiana continues to crop up in the periodicals, and while one can sympathize with the bibliographers of the secondary material on James who failed to list Desmond MacCarthy’s review of The American Scene in the Albany Review, it is puzzling and worrisome that a few James items in The Dial have been overlooked. The Albany Review ran for only three volumes, from April 1907 through September 1908, having succeeded the Independent Review, the twelve volumes of which will also repay study. And while Henry McBride’s name may very well be known to historians of art, he is surely almost unknown to Jamesians. Incidentally, he was one of the most prolific contributors to The Dial in the 1920s, the list of his contributions running to some thirteen pages. ¹ Jamesians will certainly know the name of Desmond MacCarthy and possibly that of Gilbert Seldes, for the first is credited with ten pieces on James, and the second with an article in the Harvard Monthly. ² Seldes should be represented in Ricks by at least one more item and possibly two. He reviewed Percy Lubbock’s edition of The Letters of Henry James and Henry James, Notes and Reviews, edited by Pierre de Chaignon la Rose, along with an edition of Master Eustace. Seldes, equally incidentally, ran a close second to McBride in the number of his contributions to The Dial, though a number of Seldes’ pseudonymous contributions put him in the lead. ³

From the named to the unnamed, however, for there is an anonymous review of James’s “A Landscape Painter” in the Briefer Mention section of The Dial. It is but one paragraph; the work “is a collection of stories, early flowerings of the portentous genius of their author. They are superior stuff; but the fashion of believing that James corrected his style in his later years is proved silly enough by the fact that intensely passionate and fine as they are, they do not quite come off. For any one else they might be called little masterpieces; for him they are but the grammar of novelettes” (Review of “A Landscape Painter” 664).

Henry McBride’s piece is titled “The American Shyness,” its first sentence setting out the theme of the essay: “Painters in America have grievous cause for quarrel with the writers of America and are strangely patient under it.” The “direct occasion” for the essay was McBride’s recent reading of Lubbock’s edition of James’s letters, “letters which reveal that writer to have been as mute in the presence of a good picture or a good building, as the least of his contemporaries.” He went on, and I quote only the most relevant parts: “James saw Pope Clement VII and the estimable Cenci family in Rome but not Michelangelo; he saw Savanarola in Florence but not the equally worthy Peruzzi; and do you suppose, had he felt any ecstasies before works of art he would have blurted them out with the freedom of a Stendhal or a Shelley? Not he! It appears that in spite of the famous expatriation, he was too American for that.” McBride contrasted the reactions of Stendhal and Shelley to works of art with those of James, concluding that “Henry James’ nearest attempt at a crise de nerfs over art came when he sat for his portrait to Sargent, but he was as cautious as possible when approaching the emotions” (McBride 506).

McBride quotes the pertinent passage in James’s letter about his portrait by Sargent, a passage that includes the information that he was told the portrait was good. He then remarks that “the only two other pronouncements of note in the two huge volumes of letters picture his wroth at the bombardment of Rheims Cathedral and his ‘joy at the success of Gaudens’s’ bronze relief to the memory of Colonel Robert Shaw for the Boston Common, both of them in sufficiently Jamesian accents though both as evidently ‘told to him.’” The passage of abhorrence at the bombardment is quoted, and McBride then concludes, “which as passion is early-Florentine, but as art-stuff...