The Painterly James

ELT 37 :1 1994 century theatre is healthUy alive. Just one or two residual doubts about certain aspects of conference essay publication remain. J. P. Wearing ------------------- University of Arizona The Painterly James Adeline R. Tintner. Henry James and the Lust of the Eyes: Thirteen Artists in His Work. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993. xviii + 265 pp. Cloth $39.95 Paper $11.95 THIS VOLUME, the latest in Adeline R Tintner's admirable series of detailed studies of James's Uterary and artistic sources, is attractively jacketed and contains almost one hundred mainly fuU-page ulustrations. To describe it as a handsome volume is no empty gesture, for its starting-point is the conviction that seeing was for James the most important of aU sensory activities. Not only was he knowledgeable about the history of art (his art criticism embraces both "a superior kind of journalism" and "a handful of serious critical essays," including long studies of Sargent and Daumier): looking at pictures and statues was an important part of his intellectual, aesthetic and emotional life, and his awareness of works of art was a major ingredient in the creative process. Hence "the reader of James must be an experienced reader, not only of words but of art, as James himself was." The title-phrase is James's own and may suggest a curious displacement and sublimation of sexual desire onto art-works that, unlike human beings, have the advantage of being brought fuUy under control, not proving unfaithful, and not growing old. (The book's blurb-writer surely goes too far, however, in claiming that James's "only lust in life was a metaphoric one.") Whereas Tintner's earlier The Museum World of Henry James provided a survey of his artistic sources, the method here is intensive rather than extensive, so that the two books complement rather than duplicate each other. A series of thirteen case-studies relates specific stories and novels by James, from The Siege of London" (1883) to The Outcry (1911), to particular painterly and sculptural sources, the artists considered ranging from Hogarth to Lord Leighton, Holbein to Daumier, Vermeer to Gérôme. Tintner argues that not only does James drop often subtle hints as to the works of art that he has in mind as sources or analogies, but bis themes and characters sometimes derive from elements in a painting or sculpture. These explorations involve the critic in a good deal 64 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...