James and the Lesser of Two Modernisms

Obviously, literary critics and art historians ply different trades. When art historians discuss Henry James, readers trained in literary studies, lacking tradecraft and knowledge of art history, can misinterpret the significance of key words—“modernism,” “impressionism”—common to our two disciplines. The notion of aesthetic modernity freed of historical moorings emerged in the nineteenth century. Stressing the opposition between tradition and the present, both disciplines identify modernism with a specific approach to excerpting canonical literature and art, which disregards fixed historical reference. We also agree that avant-garde modernity inheres in the creative individual’s rebellion against convention, generally, against the institutional conventions of the recent past. In some cases, the avant-garde recuperates and legitimizes past models as part of the grammar of modern art by illustrating the organic and dynamic connection between the two. Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe reprises Titian’s Fête champêtre; in literature, Joyce’s Ulysses employs the peripatetic schema of Homer’s Odyssey. Here is where the two disciplines part company: while literary scholars date modernism’s onset from the early 1900s, art scholars look back to 1863 or 1848, even to the eighteenth century. Literary critics need to be reminded that the history of art is not an unbroken linear progression favoring Gallic invention. As I will show, those who dismiss James’s tastes and writings on the visual arts as “conservative” or “anti-modernist” ignore competing and changing valuations of what constituted “modern” art between 1869–1897.

Critical estimations of James’s art writing on Pre-Raphaelitism and impressionism place James at the cusp of modernism, struggling to distinguish the new painting he admired from that which left him cold. This task is complicated by the fact that, in cultural memory and the annals of art, Pre-Raphaelitism ¹ was outpaced in novelty by the next European style, French impressionism, and largely dismissed as a modern mode. The devaluation of Pre-Raphaelitism as a vanguard brand, in response to its enamel finish and medieval trappings, obscures the fact that Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (P.R.B.) artworks (created between 1848–1856) gave James a jolt of frisson from his youth to late middle age. Recorded in A Small Boy and Others, James’s initial exposure to Pre-Raphaelitism was an emotional initiation: “Momentous to us again was to be the academy show of 1858, where there were, from the same wide source, still other challenges to wonder, Holman Hunt’s Scapegoat most of all, which I remember finding so charged with the awful that I was glad I saw it in company” ( AU 178). Capturing his adolescent “thrills” at Pre-Raphaelite “intensity of meaning,” James never acquired the technical vocabulary to explain how such effects were created. Painting in thin layers of pure pigment over wet white ground, Hunt and Millais created a luminous stained-glass effect, as if the colors were lit from behind. Defying renaissance perspective by blurring the relations of near and far through overall focus, in which a blade of grass looks as important as a tree, first generation Pre-Raphaelites “shocked the eye” with acid and bold color. In fact, the Pre-Raphaelites were technical trailblazers. They flattened the picture plane over a decade before the impressionists did so. The Pre-Raphaelites were also first to paint en plein-air, demonstrating a novel understanding of how reflected hues created pigmented shadows, an innovation contributing to the modern look of French impressionist canvases in the 1860s–1870s.

In the 1960s, Pre-Raphaelitism reemerged from late-Victorian obscurity as the calendar art of nostalgia, whereas impressionism constituted the calendar art of the perennial springtime of modernism. Consequently, we accede with a shrug to the claim that James’s taste for British aestheticism marked him as a traditionalist or reactionary: “A consciousness of the visual arts surrounds all of James’s life and career, but, as we shall see, that consciousness was more circumspect, less radical, less Modern, than that of either Lawrence or Woolf” (Torgovnick 37). It would be more accurate to say that James backed an incipient English modernism that was left...