The Fiction of Art: Roderick Hudson's Pursuit of the Ideal

The Fiction of Art: Roderick Hudson's Pursuit of the Ideal Craig A. Milliman, Northwestern State University Readers of Henry James's first "acknowledged" novel, Roderick Hudson, have traditionally viewed its title character as a talented though naive artist who succumbs to the worldly temptations of European society. Maurice Beebe writes that in Roderick Hudson "the artist is destroyed as artist because of his submission to love" (18), and Leon Edel has added that the conflict in Roderick Hudson, like the ostensible conflict in "The Lesson of the Master," is between art and passion (Edel vii).1 Edel asserts that Paul Overt, by forsaking Marian Fancourt in order to write his new novel, chooses intellectual rather than personal passion, but that Roderick Hudson, in embracing his passion for Christina Light, reverses the paradigm, forsaking the intellectual for the personal. Instead of giving up love for art, Roderick gives up art for love. According to Edel, "the possibility of cultivating both is excluded from the Jamesian world" (vii). The artist must always choose between art and love. Such neat formulations, though they draw tempting parallels between James and his characters, seem to me problematic. Some Jamesian artists, often the most productive, do manage to balance family and work. Ralph Limbert of "The Next Time," for example, tries to prostitute his art in order to support his family but simply cannot manage it; he turns out one beauty after another. Mark Ambient resists his wife's worldly program, continuing to write despite her nearly hysterical opposition. Henry St. George blames a ten-year decline in the quality of his work on his wife, but Peter Barry points out that St. George "has been married for more than twenty years, so that the fact of his marriage alone cannot be sufficient an explanation of the decline" (388). Elsewhere I have argued that Henry St. The Henry James Review 15 (1994): 231-241. © 1995, The Johns Hopkins University Press 232 The Henry James Review George dupes Paul Overt into forsaking Marian Fancourt in order to marry her himself after the death of Mrs. St. George. Here I will try to show that Roderick Hudson, like several other works by Henry James, constitutes an attack on the popular romantic stereotype of the artist. As usual, James works obliquely, using one character as the foil for another in order to illustrate the true nature of art and artists. The great difficulty in reading James's stories of artists lies in determining which character is the artist and which is the foil. Roderick Hudson contains a number of foils, but few artists. One foil, of course, is Rowland Mallet. Mallet tells his cousin Cecilia that he feels "too young to strike [his] grand coup" and so is "holding [himself] ready for inspiration" (RH 4). He lives life by the popular romantic stereotype. During their conversation, Cecilia delineates the stereotype that is James's target in describing Roderick to Mallet: Roderick, Cecilia tells Mallet, "has had no education beyond what he has picked up with little trouble for himself....he had no guidance—he could bear no control; he could only be horribly spoiled...he broke off his connexion with a small college...where, I'm afraid, he had given a good deal more attention to novels and billiards than to mathematics and Greek....the boy's, as you say, an artist—an artist to his fingers' ends" (RH 29). Both Cecilia and Mallet accept the stereotype of the artist as a social rebel who rejects discipline, guidance, and even work. Unlike the stereotypical romantic of popular fiction, Mallet does seem to recognize the importance of hard work. He warns Roderick that he will have to work hard, and to Mrs. Hudson he explains that in Europe Roderick is "to study, to strive, to work—very hard, I hope," and that "after twenty years, a real artist is still studying" (RH 58-59). Mallet seems to realize that talent must be trained, and that seeming realization appears to link him with Roderick's bête noire, Barnaby Striker. Striker, the Yankee attorney, serves as a comic villain in Roderick Hudson's New England life, a provincial, puritanical antithesis...