The Portraits of Henry James

The Portraits of Henry James J. A. Ward, Rice University I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his topic. —Henry James, Portraits of Places To Henry James the analogy between painting and fiction was always useful and appropriate. James commonly used the analogy to stress the representational as opposed to the didactic or moral purpose of fiction. Thus in "The Art of Fiction" he affirms his belief that "The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life. When it relinquishes this attempt, the same attempt that we see on the canvas of the painter, it will have arrived at a very strange pass. ... It is not expected of the picture that it will make itself humble in order to be forgiven; and the analogy between the art of the painter and the art of the novelist is, so far as I am able to see, complete" (PP 378).1 James's habit of drawing parallels between painting and fiction is more particularly evident in his frequent use of the term "portrait" interchangeably both as a literary concept and a type of painting. Almost from the beginning of his career, James regarded the portraiture of character as the main intent of his novels, as he also came increasingly to attribute the highest importance to portraiture in painting. In his essay on John Singer Sargent he wrote, "There is no greater work of art than a great portrait" (PE 277). His art criticism demonstrates his special attraction toward portraits, those of Van Eyck, Gainsborough, Reynolds, Romney, Copley and numerous others in addition to Sargent. In a relatively brief span of his career—1881 through 1888—James used the words "portrait" and "portraits" in the titles of three books: The Portrait of a Lady (1881), his earliest masterpiece of fiction; Portraits of Places (1883), a collection of travel essays; and Partial Portraits (1888), a collection of essays on literary artists. At the present time we may be inclined to find little importance in the similarity of titles of these works: the word "portrait" has come to be regarded as a genteel Victorian formula having little to do with the form or the substance of the work given such a bland title. But in each of these titles James employs his terms thoughtfully and literally. He means by "portrait" a visual, psychological, and dramatic rendering of a character. In The Portrait of a Lady he is clearly concerned with the internal as well as the external character of Isabel, as he is also concerned with those subtleties of personality that can be revealed only through a complex action that extends over a period of years. As James's preface to the novel emphasizes, the representation of Isabel Archer is his prime and exclusive purpose; the other characters and the plot itself are to 2 The Henry James Review be regarded as no more than the "heroine's satellites" (PL 11). When it appears in the titles of a book of travel writings and of a book of literary criticism, the term "portraits" obviously takes on a more metaphorical meaning. But in choosing Portraits of Places and Partial Portraits as the titles of his collections, James surely wishes to announce the unusual intentions of these works—the representation of geographical locations and literary works as human characters, or perhaps as non-human subjects to which the author responds as though they were, in some sense, human beings. I The concept of portraiture seems a useful approach to The Portrait of a Lady. It provides a convenient way of discussing that novel in relation to the fiction that immediately precedes it, as well as the nonfiction James wrote during the same period. Like subsequent critics, James well recognized that The Portrait of a Lady was the culmination of his apprentice fiction. He believed that he had discovered a rich subject in the international theme, especially in the stories of young American girls in Europe, but that he had nearly exhausted it. He also felt that it was time to prove himself with the achievement of what his letters refer to as his "big...