England in the 1890's: Literary Publishing at the Bodley Head (review)

Book Reviews 221 Venice, Pietro Longhi, and Henry James" new ground is broken by Adeline Tintner in her analysis of James's relation with the eighteenth century, and new information is given about some art objects admired by James (e.g., die Brastolon carved chairs at Mentmore). Bonney Macdonald, in "The Force of Revelation: Receptive Vision in Henry James's Early Italian Travel Essays," analyzes the essays as exhibiting "a theoretical probing of aesthetic experience—an exploration of visual perception and thought" (131). The essay on Alice ("Alice James and Italy") by M. A. Saracino explores the extension of Alice's education through Henry's letters and, finally, her direct experience of Italy in 1872, which caused a "true and proper revelation" (156), allowing Alice to expand her comments to contemporary Italian life and politics. William James's pragmatism and its influence on Italy are examined by G. E. Myers and C. Gorlier, widi particular reference to G. Papim and his group, and to Papim's journal, Leonardo (1903-1907). L. H. Powers discusses in "Henry James and the Literature of Italy" die novelist's essays on Matilde Serao and D'Annunzio. Denis Donoghue, in "William Wetmore Story and his Friends: die Enclosing Fact of Rome," takes us back to the world tiiat was for a while the world of Margaret Fuller. He discusses the genesis of the book, which was undertaken by James only out of a sense of duty and of keeping one's promises, but became fascinating exactiy because of the underlying principle highlighted by Donoghue: "die act of remembrance." Also, this work can be seen "as an elaborate reconsideration and recovery of old experience" (214), as can much of James's later work. Because of this "act of remembrance," tiie Fuller presence in this book seems to be more significant. The book closes with Agostino Lombardo's essay "Italy and the Artist in Henry James," a rich, ample treatment of the subject that one regrets having to summarize in a few lines. Lombardo analyzes the central idea of Italy as "a metaphor of art which all elements—natural, artistic, historical, human—contribute to form" (231), a metaphor that James "attempts on one side to represent... on the page, giving it form, body, reality," while attempting "on the other, deeper side, to unveil its meaning" (232). Lombardo connects this process to the great American forbears of the novelist, Melville and Hawdiorne, and to Shakespeare. Because of this masterful and trying effort to render the substance of art, to probe its significance, Italy cannot be an Arcadia for James. "Identified as it is witii the artistic experience, and even witii the artistic text, the relationship widi it produces all die anxiety, the strenuous effort, the struggle which the artist's job itself produces" (234). The "reality" of Italy in James's novel thus becomes irrelevant: "Its reality lies in another sphere, which is that of the artistic experience, of the drama of the artist," the drama to which James devoted his whole life. Rosella Mamoli Zorzi Universitá degli Studi di Venezia Margaret D. Stetz and Mark Samuels Lasner. England in the 1890's: Literary Publishing at the Bodley Head. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown U P, 1990. x, 94 pp. $18.50 This is the second in what one hopes wUl turn out to be a series of catalogues of books and materials involving late nineteendi-century literature and art in England, a period in which die two authors are immersed. It contains only half as much material as does their previous catalogue, England in the 1880's: Old Guard and Avant Guard (Charlottesville, 1989), previously reviewed in this journal. Although there are fewer Henry James items in this catalogue, their relevance to James's fiction seems to be 222 The Henry James Review greater. The catalogue reviews work published by John Lane of the Bodley Head, which includes the Yellow Book. We know that that periodical, under Henry Harland's editorship, allowed James complete license as to length for die three stories he published there. The section of the catalogue that describes William Rothenstein's lithograph of James (1898) contains an interesting comment on the featured James tale...