Ethical Aestheticism in the Early Works of Henry James: The Shadow of John Ruskin by Tomoko Eguchi (review)

Henry James met John Ruskin (1819–1900) in London in March 1869 thanks to his mentor Charles Eliot Norton. Ruskin had already attained eminence as an art critic and the author of Modern Painters (1843), The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), and The Stones of Venice (1851–1853) and was increasingly inclined to voice his opinion on contemporary social and political issues in such books as Sesame and Lilies (1865), The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), and Time and Tide (1867). By the time of making this acquaintance, Henry James had published over fifty reviews and a dozen tales. Within days of attending the famous critic’s lecture, the young author could, on one hand, boast in a letter to his friend (John La Farge) about an invitation to dine at the home of Ruskin and, on the other, comment critically in a letter to his mother about “the fitful flashes” of Ruskin’s “beautiful genius” (qtd. in Gale 570).

In her comparative study of the two aesthetes, Tomoko Eguchi proves what is only to be expected: James did not follow uncritically any Cicerone, however celebrated he may have been. Perhaps it is this urge to step out of anyone’s shadow that makes him so endearing and his works so lasting to this day. Eguchi focuses on the attitudes of Ruskin and James to aestheticism and its interrelations with factuality, morality, and Christianity, as shaped by German Romantic philosophy. She seeks the roots in Ruskin’s and James’s biographies and the manifestations in their writing. The implied question throughout the book seems to be: If Ruskin was indeed “a Luther of the arts” (qtd. in Eguchi 4), who was Henry James? Certainly not a mouthpiece for the Counter-Reformation. While Ruskin serves as a point of reference, the study concerns primarily the works of Henry James, from his travel writing and selected tales to his critical essays and three novels: Roderick Hudson (1875), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), and The Tragic Muse (1890). The chronology of his publications is [End Page E-14] the guiding principle of the division into six chapters, in which discussion of the three novels in the light of Ruskin’s (and not only his) influence alternates with analyses of travel writing, tales, and critical essays by Henry James.

At the outset Eguchi addresses a number of crucial “isms,” arguing that both James and Ruskin had idealist and naturalist sides (5) and that James, though usually grouped with realists, is not quite a realist (7). His aesthetic standpoint has been placed by literary scholars within American realism, French realism, and German idealism (8). As Eguchi explains, James’s understanding of German philosophy was, however, second-hand knowledge and shaped by British and American Romantic writers (11). The main line of reasoning in her book concerns James’s gradual integration of realism and Romanticism and creation by 1890 of his own aesthetic “creed” (13). These two “isms” alone denote and connote such an abundance of tropes and offshoots that it is only too easy to get lost in this jungle, or else in an attempt to cut the most straightforward path, to pare down too much. Another strategic question is that of how late “early” could be. Eguchi refers to James’s letter to Charles Scribner’s Sons (July 30, 1905) in which the novelist points to The Tragic Muse as the last fiction of his early period (13, 164). If by his own account James’s literary apprenticeship stretched to his late forties, are we to assume that he was so very modest or so very coquettish?

Ethical Aestheticism in the Early Works of Henry James has all the virtues of a book that grew out of a Ph.D. dissertation: it is neatly structured, it contains quotations from most (if not all) relevant sources and comments on these quotations, too, and it...