Henry James and Henry Adams

BOOK REVIEWS of patient and skilful detective work of the kind that was put to good account with regard to literary sources in her last book, The Cosmopolitan World of Henry James, and again it must be said that her suggestions are usually persuasive and often Uluminating. Source-hunting can be sterile, mechanical or over-ingenious, but in these instances the uncovering of rich veins of intertextuality gives a fascinating insight into the creative processes of a mind that was exceptionally complex and weU-stored, and not a little devious. Tintner's method can be illustrated from a single chapter, that which connects the personality and work of Lord Leighton and James's story The Private Life." Leighton's role as the prototype of Lord Mellifont is already well known, and James was not the first to seize on the fictional possibUities of the charismatic President of the Royal Academy, praised by Ruskin and admired by Queen Victoria: Leighton had already put in appearances in Thackeray's The Newcomes, Disraeli's Lothair, and Adelaide Sartoris's roman à clef, A Week in a French Country House. The germ of James's story can be found in his Notebooks, where Leighton and Browning are conceived as a "pair of conceits." Tintner judiciously reassesses the evidence and concludes that James's hostility to the very successful artist has been exaggerated, and that "a careful reading of The Private Life' shows that Mellifont is not a malicious portrait"; she then proceeds to show that certain elements in the story—for instance, the description of Blanche—are literary equivalents of the kind of paintings by Leighton that James is known to have seen and admired. Her conclusion is that James "invoked the actual paintings of Leighton in creating the characterizations, landscapes, and other components of the tale." As this example suggests, Henry James and the Lust of the Eyes is a detaUed and closely argued study that throws sometimes unexpected light on famUiar texts. Although the central concern is with intertextual exegesis and reinterpretation, there is also an absorbing half-concealed biographical level as we observe James seeing, relishing and recording in his progress through the galleries, museums and country houses. Norman Page ------------------- University of Nottingham Henry James and Henry Adams The Correspondence of Henry James and Henry Adams, 1877-1914. George Monteiro, ed. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992. xxiii + 107 pp. $45.00 65 ELT 37 : 1 1994 THOUGH HENRY JAMES and Henry Adams saw and wrote one another infrequently, they maintained a life-long friendship. They met as young men in antebellum Cambridge; both were scions of notable New England famUies and part of the circle of Brahmin intellectuals later characterized by Adams, in a mordant 1903 letter to James, as the "[t]ype bourgeois-bostonien!" As students, each might have intuited in the other an impulse to free himself from the world of powerful fathers (and grandfathers) in order to fulfill a sensibility profoundly at odds with the dominant New England strain. Henry James made his vocational choice at an early age, and by the time he was thirty-three had bound his identity as an artist to physical exUe in Europe. Henry Adams, the historian, claimed to have been searching all his life for a vocation—a life which he depicts in The Education as an endlessly displaced inner exile. WhUe their life choices and qualities of mind made them congenial opposites, both were profound observers of society and both lived by the pen; neither would be termed a man of action. Given the extraordinary abUities of each, the reader might expect their correspondence to display a competition of brilliant effects, epigrammatic gems yielding signs of the times. Although this slim, elegantly produced volume of thirty-six letters does offer a few notable (and f amUiar) quotations, its overaU value lies in pleasures of a different sort. The rhythms of these letters, their allusive (and elusive) mix of artfully casual gossip and genuine personal concern, their social tact and humor —as in James's report of the curiosity abroad about the author of the anonymously published Democracy, who couldn't possibly be an American—offer a view of the...