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The art of memory in James's "The Tone of Time" - Articles - Henry James

Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1998 by V. John Vacca

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For Mary Tredick, the portrait represents a recapturing of her power as an artist and the intensity of a love from her past. In this respect, the portrait revitalizes and transforms her. At the beginning of the story, Mary is "a little tired, a little old" (306). Her "renunciation" is seen in her unattractive paint-splattered apron and in her life: "she had given up everything but her work" (306). Hesitant at first about the project, Mary is soon smiling "with a light distinctly new" (310). The narrator is surprised that she is not working from sketches; he asks, "So that it's all memory?" Her reply is even more surprising: "It's all hate!" (314). To the narrator Mary reveals her relation to the man of the painting and her apparent connection to Bridgenorth, who she claims she does not know personally: "She tried to make him marry her, and he was very near it. Death, however, saved him.... She was the reason he failed me" (323). She is also the reason Mary will finally refuse to sell the painting: "I had so blindly and strangely given him back to her" (324). Mary denies that she is jealous, and the narrator decides not to pursue the matter; her look "placed her quite on the other side of the gulf of time. She was firm there; ... I couldn't get at her now" (324). Despite acknowledging that pain and bitterness propelled the creation of the portrait, she clings to the contradiction: "I shall keep it in joy" (325).

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For the narrator, the portrait represents what he asks Mary to invest it with: the tone of time. At the end of the story, the narrator sits looking at the painting and telling his story. The portrait "has a charm that ... still stirs my imagination" (313). Part of that charm is its image of youth, "the joy and pride of life" (313). Part of it, too, is the portrait's reminder of the artist. If Bridgenorth recalls the quest "for propriety, the real thing" (308), Mary herself remains the real thing. Bridgenorth, even with her carriage and "very good lace," is nevertheless "vague" and "without credentials" (308). For Mary, struggling bravely, with her card "manfully on the door" (306) of her studio, the narrator becomes the merchant of art as he encourages Bridgenorth's increasing generosity. At the end, he is left to confront Mary's anguish embedded in the portrait: "I have inherited the picture, in the deep beauty of which, however, darkness still lurks" (325). He acknowledges in his remark that no one has ever recognized the subject of the portrait, but his statement also recalls his earlier surmise that Mary's creation of the tone of time grew out of "smothered passion" and "remembered wrong" (313).

If Bridgenorth and Mary see the portrait as something other than what it is, the narrator sees it primarily as a flawed but beautiful work of art. The narrator's realism makes him the most balanced of these three characters in the story and the right intermediary between two passions. He can respect Bridgenorth's privacy while getting the best price for Mary. He can recognize the illusions of these two women without passing judgment. He is also at home with his own limitations. He thinks of Mary to do the portrait because his art is the craft of the concrete: "What am I good for in the world but just the impression of the given, the presented case: I can do but the face I see" (307). Seven years after the publication of "The Real Thing," James gives us a character who receives from Bridgenorth the sort of request that the narrator of the earlier story expects to receive from the Monarchs. The narrator of "The Real Thing" derides the work he is doing, dismissing his illustrations as "pot boilers" (34) and art that amounts to a "second-rate trick" (57). Although he thinks that he is better than the work he is doing, he does admit that there were times when "it was a comfort to have the real thing under one's hand" (50). Presumably, the narrator of "The Tone of Time" would take these words as his credo.

The art of memory in James's "The Tone of Time" - Articles - Henry James

Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1998 by V. John Vacca

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