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Chapter 8
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50 mortar poured into the divots each artist left behind. H’ry was left with a shelf of molds forever in easy reach. The Tragic Muse’s Peter Sherringham reminds Bridget Dormer “of a Titian,” and Nick Dormer later feels an ineffectual longing to have “a go” at Titian andTintoretto.TheWingsof theDove’sSusanShepherd recognizes that the story’s advancing intrigue has become “a Veronese picture, as near as can be.” In both novels,artbetraysconsciousness:MiriamRoothis“apt to drop” particular observations while “under the suggestion ”of TitianorBronzino,andMillyThealespeaks at one moment of her mysterious illness “almost as if under [the] suggestion” of a Bronzino, and at another findsherself surroundedbyTurnersandTitiansatLondon ’s National Gallery, which seem to “[join] hands” about her and trigger an ensuing reverie. .8. This last description seems almost to cite a plaintive remark Wm once made to H’ry as his career trajectory in science and academia began to take shape. Painting was slipping farther and farther away: 51 But I envy ye the world of Art. Away from it . . . we sink into a flatter blanker kind of consciousness, and indulge in an ostrichlike forgetfulness of all our richest potentialities—and they startle us now and then when by accident some rich human product, pictorial, literary, or architectural slaps us with its tail. Wm had always approached art more academically than H’ry, comparing works so as to plot the arc of art history, attempting to gauge whether it was the Germans or the Venetians who were the true brothers of Greeks, etc. In 1882, he planned an essay that would apply natural selection to competing schools of art—artistic Darwinism—but never executed it. By thetimeof thewritingof ThePrinciplesof Psychology,art had receded completely, becoming less overt subject matterthanconvenientmetaphor.“Thischapterislike a painter’s first charcoal sketch upon his canvas,” he wrote at the start of “The Stream of Consciousness.” A field of grass might appear green, he allowed a short time later, describing the complexity of subjective sensation , “yet a painter would have to paint one part of [44.215.110.142] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 15:48 GMT) 52 it dark brown, another part bright yellow, to give it its real sensational effect.” That art faded into Wm ’s background just as it climbed into H’ry’s foreground expressed figuratively what had once been expressed literally. In 1869, Wm offered H’ry invaluable criticism in response to a long, early story. “Gabrielle de Bergerac” employs a nowfamiliar Jamesian tool: a foreground “frame tale” in which a character somehow bequeaths a story to a notably H’ry-like narrator, and a background tale that is repeated for the reader. Wm objected to the ending of “Gabrielle de Bergerac,” which after a long dip into a background drama returns briefly to the foreground frame tale. “Very exquisitely touched,” Wm wrote, “but the denouement bad in that it did not end with Coquelin’s death. . . . The end is both humdrum and improbable.” What he meant was that the story could remain asymmetrical. H’ry didn’t need to return to the foreground—the story could simply fade into its backgroundandendthere.Asithappened,theinterest of backgrounds was a subject actually described in the background story of “Gabrielle de Bergerac”: a character recalls Gustave Doré’s illustrations of Charles Perrault’s Sleeping Beauty, in particular an image in 53 which three shadowed foreground figures gesture off to a foggy but better lit castle in the distance. It was the light and the vagueness, the story claimed, that drew the eye to the rear of the image and triggered the working of the mind: What does the castle contain? What secret is locked in its stately walls? What revel is enacted in its long saloons? What strange figures stand aloof from its vacant windows? You ask the question, and the answer is a long revery. ForH’ry,thecastlewaslikethecitadelof consciousness forever running in the background of human in- [44.215.110.142] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 15:48 GMT) 54 tercourse; it was the more compelling tale whirling behind whatever simple plots storytellers strung clumsily together. H’ry carefully applied Wm ’s advice whenever he employed the foreground frame tale in the future, most notably in The Turn of the Screw, which ends the harrowing account of the governess’s haunting with the dramatic death of a child, and never returns to the circle of friends who are listening to the story read aloud around a Christmas fire. While H’ry clearly benefited...