Henry James and the Lust of the Eyes: Thirteen Artists in His Work. - book reviews

Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1994 by James W. Gargano

In The Museum World of Henry James, Adeline Tintner established herself as the most erudite and sensitive critic of James's use of imagery drawn from the wide world of art to enrich his short stories and novels. Although not so ambitious as its encyclopedic predecessor, Henry James and the Lust of the Eyes gives the reader the same sense that Tintner has entered fully into the Jamesian consciousness. In addition to her highly specialized knowledge as an art historian, she brings to her analyses and judgments a mastery of the Jamesian oeuvre unsurpassed by any critic except Leon Edel.

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Tintner's book contains 12 essays devoted to the 13 artists of her subtitle and a generous 98 illustrations designed to support her literary interpretations and to give necessary to readers unacquainted with artists like Pietro Longhi, Lord Leighton, Pintoricchio, and Alvise Vivarini.

Some brief comments on a few of the essays in The Lust of the Eyes will attest to the book's variety, literary acumen, and an ingenuity that often seems to rival James's own. From Mrs. Dolphin's characterization of English society in "The Siege of London" ("It's like the decadence of the Roman Empire"), Tintner concludes that James directs his sophisticated readers to Thomas Couture's The Romans of the Decadence as an artistic analogue to his novella. She adduces proof that Couture's painting was once widely acclaimed as a masterpiece, that James wrote about it enthusiastically and visited the artist. Tintner is at her best, however, in arriving at a new interpretation of the novella by pointing out the remarkable parallels between the personages in the work of art and James's characters.

The same probing intelligence can be observed in the third chapter, which examines with scrupulous minuteness the similarities between "A London Life" and Hogarth's Marriage a la Mode and The Rake's Progress. Tintner sees the 13 chapters of James's long tale as composing a Hogarthian "progress." She maintains that six scenes from the Marriage sequence provide the inspiration for six comparable scenes in James's narrative, and she challenges received opinions about the story by showing that four of its characters are nineteenth-century versions of Hogarthian prototypes.

Perhaps Tintner's critical acuteness and daring are best exemplified in her contention that the key to a full understanding of Roderick Hudson (1875) can be found in a slight but illuminating addition to the revised edition of the novel in 1907. Tintner contends that in having an important minor character compare Roderick to a "Pintoricchio figure" James implied that his protagonist's career should be seen as an ironic parallel to the successful career of Aeneus Sylvius Piccolomini (later Pope Pius II) as depicted in the famous frescoes by Pintoricchio in Siena, frescoes that James passionately admired.

Never superficial or impressionistic, Tintner subjects works of art to the same rigorous and lively scrutiny that she brings to James's fiction. For example, although some of her analogies between The Reverberator and the sculpture of Goujon and Pilon may appear recherche to the layman, her presentation of evidence in support of her thesis is solidly documented but never outlandish. At one point in chapter five, in which she discovers similar themes in Vivarini's Madonna and Child and James's "The Chaperon," she counters the almost inevitable complaint against her ingenuity by citing James's caveat to a correspondent that she must expect one of his tales to be "of an ingenuity." To her credit, the Jamesian ingenuities Tintner uncovers not only seem plausible but also enrich the texture of the works on which she comments. Even casual readers cannot overlook the reversal of roles between mother and daughter in "The Chaperon," but Tintner is the first critic to notice the repetition of this reversal in Vivarini's portrait of an "aged" child and a subdued, adoring Madonna. Interpreting "The Private Life" from a novel perspective, Tintner shifts the focus from Clare Vawdrey, a stand-in for Robert Browning, to Lord Mellifont, a portrait of the eminent painter Lord Leighton, whom James admired and whose worldly acclaim he envied. The five works by Leighton reproduced in The Lust of the Eyes offer strong evidence, if not proof, that James "invoked the actual paintings of Leighton in creating the characterization of [his] tale." A final example of Tintner's subtlety that almost matches James's own can be discerned in her carefully documented conjencture that after James had observed a close relationship between Holbein's The Ambassadors and his still untitled novel, he adopted Holbein's title for the first masterpiece of his "Major Phase."

The Lust of the Eyes is a seminal book that will compel critics to examine James's references to art not as the overflow of a "precious" sensibility but as deliberate strategies to achieve meaning and resonance.

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Henry James and the Lust of the Eyes: Thirteen Artists in His Work. - book reviews

Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1994 by James W. Gargano

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