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The Artist and the Man in “The Author of Beltraffio”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Viola Hopkins Winner
Viola Hopkins Winner*
Affiliation:
University or Virginia, Charlottesville
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Abstract

In the light of James's contemporary critical writings and of the precepts of the aesthetic movement, Mark Ambient emerges not as a Wildean aesthete but rather as James's spokesman on the art of fiction. In espousing a realistic theory of art, in stressing the artist's right to treat all of life without puritanical restrictions, and in his passionate concern for formal perfection, Ambient voices the ideals of the serious, literary side of the aesthetic movement. His sister represents its excesses and affectations; his wife, the Puritan- Philistine hatred and fear of art; and the narrator, the disciple who, until enlightened through his encounter with the artist, had naively subscribed to the art for art's sake formula. Though Ambient is artistically daring, in his personal life he is respectable and morally responsible. However, the fusion in the story between the aesthetic ideas and the moral, psychological conflict is imperfect. Though there is a suggestion that Ambient's imaginative openness to life has led to a culpable passivity in his role as husband and father, his responsibility for the child's death is inadequately related to his portrayal as an artist and the passages expounding his views on art seem incompletely assimilated to the action.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 83 , Issue 1 , March 1968 , pp. 102 - 108
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1968

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References

1 “Introduction: Henry James' Portrait of the Artist,” Henry James, Stories of Writers and Artists, ed. F. O. Matthiessen (New York, 1944), p. 2.

2 The American Henry James (New Brunswick, N. J., 1957), pp. 34–147 passim.

3 James's phrase quoted by Reiman, “The Inevitable Imitation: The Narrator in ‘The Author of Beltraffio’,” Texas Studies in Lit. and Lang., iii (Winter 1962), 503–509.

4 The Notebooks of Henry James, ed. F. 0. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock (New York, 1955), p. 57.

5 See Richard C. Harrier, ed., “Letters of Henry James,” The Colby Library Quarterly, Ser. iii, No. 10 (May 1953), p. 157.

6 The Novels and Tales of Henry James (New York, 1907–09), xvi, 4. Unless otherwise indicated, henceforth page references will be to this volume of the New York edition and included parenthetically in my text.

7 AJwyn Berland points out a similarity between James's description of William Morris' wife (Letters, I, 17–18) and the characterization of Gwendolyn. See “Henry James and the Aesthetic Tradition,” JHI, xxiii (July–Sept. 1962), 416.

8 “George Du Maurier,” Partial Portraits (London and New York, 1888), pp. 369–371 passim.

9 Selected Letters of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel (London, 1956), p. 56.

10 Phyllis Grosskurth, The Woeful Victorian: A Biography of John Addinglon Symonds (New York, Chicago, San Francisco, 1964), p. 3.

11 Though James knew about Symonds' homosexuality (according to Leon Edel), his response in a letter to Edmund Gosse, who thought there was an allusion to it in the story, implies that he did not intend Ambient to have the same propensities. (See Grosskurth, pp. 270–271. The page reference in James's letter was probably 571 of the English Illustrated Magazine, not 57 oi the manuscript as transcribed by Miss Grosskurth.) Ambient's suppression of “half his thought” because of “an extreme dread of scandal” is tentatively cited by Miss Grosskurth as the allusion Gosse spotted. Until fairly recently, however, self-censorship of the subject could hardly be taken as an “extreme” dread of scandal. Moreover, even if James's knowledge of this fact about Symonds unconsciously colored his portrayal of Ambient, the hint of deviation is so covert as to be imperceptible. Only by projecting the model's sexual preferences onto the fictional character's—a dubious critical procedure—could one deduce, for example, that Ambient's immediate sympathy for the narrator was an incipient sexual attraction.

12 The Letters of Henry James, ed. Percy Lubbock (New York, 1920), i, 106.

13 As Jerome Hamilton Buckley has pointed out (The Victorian Temper: A Study in Literary Culture, Cambridge, Mass., 1951), there were between the generations considerable differences in tone and personal style: the protest of the older men against bourgeois crassness expressed itself in the mildest Bohemianism; they did not strive to live the life of art as did their self-proclaimed and more radically alienated disciples. At least one contemporary commentator, however, did not make this generational distinction. Walter Hamilton in The Aesthetic Movement in England (London, 1882) named Browning, Whitman, and Tennyson as “fringe” aesthetes; he lumped together the Rossettis, Thomas Woolner, William Morris, Algernon Swinburne, Arthur O'Shaughnessy, and Oscar Wilde as the “Inner Brotherhood.” Interestingly, like James, Hamilton tried to distinguish between “real” aestheticism “based on real culture” and “pseudo-aestheticism” as satirized in Punch and Patience.

14 “George Moore and the Nineties,” Edwardians and Late Victorians, in English Institute Essays, ed. Richard Ellmann (New York, 1959), p. 14.

15 Partial Portraits, pp. 384–408 passim.

16 Partial Portraits, pp. 381–398 passim.

17 See Hough, “George Moore and the Nineties,” p. 14.

18 “Ivan Turgenieft,” Partial Portraits, p. 319.

19 The English Illustrated Magazine (June–July 1884), p. 630.

20 “Ivan Turgenidff,” p. 319.

21 “Gustave Flaubert,” The Future of the Novel, ed. Leon Edel (New York, 1956), p. 159.

22 Ibid., p. 153.

23 “Ivan Turgenieff,” p. 319.

24 “Gustave Flaubert,” p. 154.

25 Berland was referring here to James's works in general. While applicable to other works, the generalization does not cover this story without considerable qualification.

26 “The Inevitable Imitation,” p. 508.

27 E.g., “My ingenuous sympathy received at any rate a shock from three or four of his professions. … He couldn't help forgetting, or rather couldn't know, how little in another and dryer climate, I had ever sat in the school in which he was master; and he promoted me at a jump to a sense of its penetralia” (p. 29).

28 The English Illustrated Magazine, p. 630.