The Illustration of the Master: Henry James and the Magazine Revolution

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The Illustration of the Master

The Illustration of the Master Henry James and the Magazine Revolution

Amy Tucker

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2010 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tucker, Amy. The illustration of the master : Henry James and the magazine revolution / Amy Tucker. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8047-6874-0 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. James, Henry, 1843–1916—Illustrations. 2. James, Henry, 1843–1916—Criticism and interpretation. 3. Magazine illustration—United States—19th century. 4. Art and literature—United States—History—19th century. 5. Periodicals—Publishing—United States—History—19th century. 6. Books and reading—United States—History—19th century. I. Title. ps2124.t83 2010 813´.4—dc22 2009045988 Typeset at Stanford University Press in 11/15 Bell MT

For Steve

Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

Preface

xv

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Chapter 1

Henry James and the Rise of the Illustrated Magazines

Chapter 2

xxiii xxv

1

“Double Discourse” in the Illustrated Tales of the 1890s

24

Chapter 3

Stepping out of the Frame: James’s “Holbein”

85

Chapter 4

“The Business of Art”: Essays on Illustration

122

Chapter 5

James, Pennell, and the Art of the Travelogue

168

Epilogue

208

Notes

213

Works Cited

227

Index

243

Illustrations

Chapter 1 Headpiece for “Broken Wings” in the Century Illustrated Magazine 1. Headpiece for “Greville Fane” in the Illustrated London News 2. Running headpiece for The Other House in the Illustrated London News

1 17 23

Chapter 2 Headpiece for “Brooksmith” in Black and White 3. Gaston Fay, frontispiece for “The Story of a Masterpiece” in the Galaxy 4. W. J. Hennessy, illustration for “Osborne’s Revenge” in the Galaxy 5. W. J. Hennessy, illustrated pages from “Nona Vincent” in the English Illustrated Magazine 6. Eric Pape, halftone illustration for “The Turn of the Screw” in Collier’s Weekly 7. Title sketch for “Brooksmith” in Harper’s Weekly 8. John H. Bacon, illustrations for “Brooksmith” in Black and White 9. Pictorials and cover from Harper’s Bazar 10. William Glackens, illustration of Christmas Eve games in Harper’s Bazar

24 28 28 29 30 34 35 43 43

x

Illustrations

11. William Glackens, illustration of a toy-shop window in Harper’s Bazar 44 12. Albert Herter, title-page illustration for “The Faces” in Harper’s Bazar 47 13. Albert Herter, illustration for “The Faces” 47 in Harper’s Bazar 14. Albert Herter, illustration for “The Faces” in Harper’s Bazar 48 15. Fashion plates by Caroline Love Goodwin and Ethel Rose for Harper’s Bazar 50 16. Promotion for Collier’s Weekly 52 17. Promotion for Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly 53 18. John La Farge, headpiece for “The Turn of the Screw” 54 in Collier’s Weekly 19. “Ambushed in Luzon,” cover art for Collier’s Weekly 57 20. “Sport—Travel—Adventure” feature in Collier’s Weekly 57 21. Howard Pyle, headpiece for “The Real Right Thing” in Collier’s Weekly 58 22. Howard Pyle, illustration for Oliver Wendell Holmes’s The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table 59 23. Howard Pyle, woodcut for William Dean Howells’s 59 “Stops of Various Quills” in Harper’s Monthly 24. Howard Pyle, woodcut for his poem “Love and Death” in Harper’s Monthly 59 25. Layout of “The Real Right Thing” with facing page of advertisements 61 26. Pearline and Sapolio promotions in Harper’s Monthly advertising section 62 27. Howard Chandler Christy, two vignettes for “Paste” in Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly 65 28. Advertising pages from Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly 66–67 29. Advertising page from Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly 68 30. Advertising page from Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly 69 31. Maurice Greiffenhagen, illustration for “Broken Wings” in the Century 73 32. Maurice Greiffenhagen, An Idyll 78

Illustrations

33. Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Phyllis and Demophoön 34. Maurice Greiffenhagen, Dawn 35. Maurice Greiffenhagen, poster for the Pall Mall Budget 36. Sir Edward Burne-Jones, The Mill: Girls Dancing to Music by a River 37. Cartoon by Sir Edward Burne-Jones

xi

78 78 79 80 80

Chapter 3 Hans Holbein the Younger, woodcuts from Dance of Death 85 38. Lucius Hitchcock, illustration for “The Beldonald Holbein” in Harper’s Monthly 86 39. Lucius Hitchcock, illustration for “The Beldonald Holbein” in Harper’s Monthly 87 40. Lucius Hitchcock, illustration for “The Beldonald Holbein” 87 in Harper’s Monthly 41. “Holbein” cartoon in Punch 88 42. Hans Holbein the Elder, self-portrait with two sons (detail from San Paolo fuori le mura) 89 43. Hans Holbein the Younger, The Merchant Georg Gisze 96 44. Hans Holbein the Younger, Madonna of Mayor Jacob Meyer (“Darmstadt Madonna”) 97 45. Hans Holbein the Younger, Portrait of Bonifacius Amerbach 102 46. Hans Holbein the Younger, Erasmus of Rotterdam Writing 104 47. Hans Holbein the Younger, Nikolaus Kratzer, Astronomer to King Henry VIII 105 48. Lucius Hitchcock, illustration for Mark Twain’s A Double Barrelled Detective Story 110 49. Lucius Hitchcock, illustration for Booth Tarkington’s The Conquest of Canaan 110 50. Hans Holbein the Younger, Portrait Study of Elizabeth Dauncey 111 51. Hans Holbein the Younger, Sir William Butts 112 52. Hans Holbein the Younger, Margaret Bacon, Lady Butts 112 53. Hans Holbein the Younger, The Artist’s Wife and Children 113 54. Hans Holbein the Younger, Double Portrait of Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve (“The Ambassadors”) 114

xii

Illustrations

55. Elizabeth Shippen Green, illustration for Richard le Gallienne’s “An Old Country House” in Harper’s Monthly 56. F. Luis Mora, illustration for Elizabeth W. Champney’s “The Madonna of the Ermine Mantle” in Harper’s Monthly 57. Albert Sterner, sketch for a story by Eleanor Hoyt in Harper’s Monthly 58. “Sargent” cartoon in Harper’s Monthly

118 119 120 120

Chapter 4 Alfred Parsons, “The Village Green, Broadway” in Picture and Text 59. Cover of Picture and Text 60. Frontispiece of Picture and Text 61. Portraits from Picture and Text 62. Portrait of Edwin Austin Abbey on the cover of Harper’s Weekly 63. Portrait of Charles S. Reinhart in Harper’s Weekly 64. Promotion for Harper’s books in Harper’s Weekly supplement 65. Portrait of Sir Frederick Leighton in Cosmopolitan 66. Photograph of William Merritt Chase 67. William Merritt Chase, James Abbott McNeill Whistler 68. Sir Frederick Leighton’s studio, pictured in Cosmopolitan 69. Contemporary photograph of William Merritt Chase’s In the Studio 70. Alfred Parsons, “Back of ‘The Priory,’ Broadway,” in Picture and Text 71. George Boughton’s studio in Campden Hill, pictured in the Century 72. George Du Maurier, Punch cartoon featuring “Maudle” 73. George Du Maurier, Punch cartoon featuring “Prigsby” 74. George Du Maurier, illustration for Washington Square 75. Charles S. Reinhart, illustration for “Louisa Pallant” in Harper’s Monthly 76. Charles S. Reinhart, illustration for “Two Countries” in Harper’s Monthly

122 134 134 135 136 137 138 139 139 140 141 141 142 142 154 154 155 158 158

Illustrations

xiii

77. Charles S. Reinhart, illustration for William Dean Howells’s “A Little Swiss Sojourn” in Harper’s Monthly 159 78. Charles S. Reinhart, illustration for “Cousin Maria” in Harper’s Weekly 160 79. A two-page layout of “Cousin Maria” in 162–163 Harper’s Weekly 80. Mathew Brady, daguerreotype of Henry James Sr. and Jr. 166 81. Illustrated letter by William James reproduced in 166 Notes of a Son and Brother

Chapter 5 Joseph Pennell, “Carcassonne” for A Little Tour in France 82. Joseph Pennell, “Piccadilly” for “London” in the Century 83. Joseph Pennell, “Sunset in Oxford Street” for “London” in the Century 84. Joseph Pennell, “Wet Evening, Parliament Square— House Sitting” for “London” in the Century 85. Joseph Pennell, “Peterborough Cathedral” for Mariana Van Rensselaer’s English Cathedrals 86. Charles S. Reinhart, original pen-and-ink drawing for William Dean Howells’s A Little Swiss Sojourn 87. Cover of William Dean Howells’s A Little Swiss Sojourn 88. Joseph Pennell, “Herculaneum” for William Dean Howells’s Italian Journeys 89. Alvin Langdon Coburn, photograph of “The Dome of St. Paul’s” for the New York Edition 90. Joseph Pennell, “Narbonne: The Washing Place” for A Little Tour in France 91. Joseph Pennell, “Hospital in Beaune” for A Little Tour in France 92. E. C. Peixotto, “By the Port of Lovere” for Edith Wharton’s Italian Backgrounds 93. E. C. Peixotto, “Mermaid Street, Rye” for “Winchelsea, Rye, and ‘Denis Duval’” in Scribner’s 94. Joseph Pennell, sketch of Mermaid Street for English Hours 95. Joseph Pennell, “Salisbury Cathedral” for English Hours

168 175 175 175 180 182 182 183 184 190 191 194 195 195 196

xiv

Illustrations

96. Joseph Pennell, view of St. Paul’s for English Hours 97. Joseph Pennell, view of Green Park for English Hours 98. Joseph Pennell, an industrial scene for English Hours 99. Illustration of St. Mark’s for “Venice” in the Century 100. Illustration of the Rialto Bridge for “Venice” in the Century 101. Alexander Zezzos, illustration of the Rialto Bridge for “The Grand Canal” in Scribner’s 102. Alexander Zezzos, “A Retired Boatman” for “The Grand Canal” in Scribner’s 103. Joseph Pennell, etching of the Rialto Bridge in the Heinemann edition of Italian Hours 104. Joseph Pennell, etching of the Riva Schiavoni in the Heinemann edition of Italian Hours 105. Joseph Pennell, pastel drawing of “St Mark’s” in Italian Hours 106. Joseph Pennell, pastel drawing of “A Narrow Canal” in Italian Hours

196 196 197 198 199 200 200 201 201 206 206

Epilogue 107. W. T. Smedley, illustration for “Julia Bride” 108. W. T. Smedley, illustration for “Julia Bride”

209 209

Preface

The Illustration of the Master: Henry James and the Magazine Revolution examines the crucial role of the illustrated press in the formation of the reading public and the writing profession during Henry James’s lifetime. The book rereads a significant portion of James’s oeuvre in light of the explosive growth of the magazine industry in the United States and abroad during the final decades of the nineteenth century—a revolutionary period in publishing history when the rise of the pictorial challenged the primacy of the written text. My project began several years ago with an inquiry into the original publication of one of James’s late tales of the artist, “The Beldonald Holbein.” The story appeared in 1901 in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine with three mediocre illustrations by a staff artist, Lucius Hitchcock. The fact that these pictures were hackwork at best and contradictory to the text at worst did not lessen their significance for me as telling glimpses into the literacy practices of James’s contemporary audience. I searched out other periodical stories by James that had first been seen with illustrations (according to James’s bibliographers, these numbered twenty-six, roughly one-quarter of his output of short fiction for the magazines) and along the way encountered nonfiction pieces by James that had been lavishly illustrated. So began the archeological phase of my research, which entailed recovering hundreds of pictures that accompanied James’s writing for the periodicals, including drawings, paintings, photographs, and advertising images. The fact is that these nineteenth-century contexts are disappearing from the public record. Drawings that introduced magazine readers to

xvi

Preface

the work of James and his colleagues have generally been expunged from literary anthologies and authoritative editions. Copies of the tales and essays as they first appeared are often difficult to come by, since relatively few libraries have runs of some of the more obscure or shortlived turn-of-the-century periodicals. Holdings of journals like Truth (N.Y.) and Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly Magazine are likely to be incomplete, the remaining issues often perilously preserved. Advertisements, publishers’ notices, and other ephemera were typically removed from library volumes throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when the periodicals were rebound. As a result, these revealing bits of realia are also missing from the scanned issues of selected pre-1900 journals available on Web sites such as Cornell University’s otherwise indispensable Making of America project. ProQuest’s American Periodicals Series Online to 1900 does catalogue advertisements, but the reproductions, having been taken for the most part from microfilmed copies, are often of poor quality. In each case, the reader comes away with at best a fragmentary impression of the way a given piece of writing fits into the larger scheme of its original presentation. My first goal has been to provide an overview of the periodicals scene in James’s time. In this cultural context I reexamine James’s considerable production for the magazines, concentrating on areas of his oeuvre that have received comparatively scant critical commentary: his travel articles, a selection of short stories from the 1890s, and numerous essays on the topic of modern illustration. My analysis of James’s negotiations with illustrators, agents, and editors for the venues in which his writing appeared draws as well on unpublished archival material from a variety of sources, including the Papers of Henry James in the Barrett Library at the University of Virginia; the Joseph and Elizabeth Robins Pennell Collection at the Library of Congress; the Charles S. Reinhart Papers at Columbia University; the James Papers (particularly his correspondence with James Brand Pinker, his agent) at Yale; the company files for Harper & Brothers at the Library of Congress and Columbia University; and the records of Pinker and Son, A. P. Watt and Son, and the Century Company in the Berg Collection and the Manuscripts and Archives division of the New York Public Library. In the past several decades, research by Michael Anesko, Philip Horne,

Preface

xvii

Fred Kaplan, Marcia Jacobson, Anne T. Margolis, and Richard Salmon has amply documented how James persistently sought a wider audience in both quality journals and mass-circulation magazines. Yet relatively little attention has been given to the rich visual material surrounding James’s writing for the popular press, or, more generally, to the complex interplay of word and image that helped define print culture for James’s contemporaries. The omission is all the more puzzling given the roster of celebrated artists who illustrated James’s work, including W. J. Hennessy, Joseph Pennell, George Du Maurier, Charles S. Reinhart, Howard Chandler Christy, Howard Pyle, and John La Farge. With few exceptions, scholarship on the subject has focused more narrowly on two examples of James’s illustrated texts: the frontispieces he commissioned for the New York Edition of his collected works and the drawings that accompanied his short story “The Real Thing” in Black and White magazine. Alvin Langdon Coburn’s photographs for the New York Edition have been discussed at length, beginning with Joseph Firebaugh’s early appreciation (1955) and continuing with studies by Charles Higgins (1982), Mike Weaver (1986), Carol Shloss (1987), and Stanley Tick (1993). In an influential collection of essays (edited by David McWhirter, 1995) on the New York Edition, McWhirter, Stuart Culver, and Ira B. Nadel examine the frontispieces, along with James’s extensive instructions to the photographer, in terms of James’s careful “construction of authorship.” Charles Harmon (2002) demonstrates how Coburn’s pictures advanced James’s “implicit evangelization for the cause of literary ambiguity” (300). Wendy Graham (2003) considers the art of Coburn and another of James’s illustrators, Joseph Pennell, in the context of the decision to omit pictorials from The American Scene. Building on earlier notes by Robert Gale (1963), Valerie Shaw (1983), and Stuart Burrows (2002), Adam Sonstegard (2003) maintains that “The Real Thing” as it has come down to modern readers “is only half of the story’s original text,” for James’s contemporary readers would have seen the story’s metafictive references reflected in the “singularly bad” illustrations for the tale. Apart from these examples, research has not significantly expanded on the insights of two seminal books of the 1980s, Ralph F. Bogardus’s Pictures and Texts: Henry James, A. L. Coburn, and New Ways of Seeing in Literary Culture (1984) and Adeline Tintner’s The Museum World of Henry James (1986).

xviii

Preface

The present study takes a more comprehensive look at what literary historian Cathy N. Davidson describes as “the contingencies that influence the fluctuating evaluations of given authors or works and the mechanisms by which literature is brought before the reading public” (5). The project of historicizing James’s work for the magazines begins in Chapter 1 with a survey of key developments in the periodicals industry on both sides of the Atlantic in the latter half of the nineteenth century, focusing on the impact of the graphic arts on readers, authors, and publishers during James’s lifetime. Chapter 2 presents four “case studies” of James’s illustrated tales of the 1890s, examining the original publications for the ways in which written and visual texts work in tandem to shape reader response. For instance, several stories from this period appeared simultaneously in English and American journals, both with and without—or with markedly different—pictorial accompaniment. As Nancy Glazener observes, “Through page layouts, announcements and advertisements, illustrations and typography, addresses to readers, and a variety of other signals, a periodical provokes certain kinds of attention and creates certain interpellating identifications for its readers” (189). Chapter 2 demonstrates how the same work of fiction can make varying and even contradictory appeals to different subsets of implied readers. As consumer-oriented editorial policies began to dictate the terms in which his work was presented in mass-market periodicals around the turn of the century, James grew increasingly preoccupied with the question of who controlled the literary property. Chapter 2 reveals the extent to which the author’s anxieties about his more commercial venues and newer constituencies came to be reflected in his short fiction. Indeed, for evidence of James’s serious and sustained consideration of the competitive relationship of image and text, we need look no further than the author’s repeated thematizing of the subject in the tales of authors and artists he took up with renewed intensity through the 1890s. James’s theme is variously expressed in terms of the opposition of journalism and “serious” literature, illustration and fine art, society portraiture and the uncompromisingly “authentic” portrait. Together these stories form an extended meditation on the complex fate of the modern artist seeking popular recognition from an often unappreciative public.

Preface

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Chapter 3 continues the work of the preceding chapter by focusing exclusively on one of James’s later tales of the artist. “The Beldonald Holbein” (1901) appeared after two frustrating years of editorial delay in Harper’s Monthly along with three disastrously misconceived illustrations by Lucius Hitchcock, a Harper’s regular. More than a century after its publication, the story has yet to attract much critical notice, and the significance of its multiple allusions to the sixteenth-century painter Hans Holbein the Younger, forming the most intricate skein of reference to an actual artist in all of James’s fiction, has for the most part gone unexplored. Taking as its starting point the question of how and why Hitchcock’s drawings contradict James’s narrative, the chapter argues that the “Holbein” story depends for its success on the reader’s ability to supplement the narrative with appropriate mental “illustrations” and inferences drawn from the historical Holbein’s oeuvre. To this end, I look at the numerous commentaries James offered in the course of his career on the work of Holbein the Younger. I consider the relevance of these nonfictional statements to “The Beldonald Holbein” and, more broadly, to James’s methods as a fiction writer working to redefine the realist mode at the beginning of the new century. Chapters 4 and 5 examine two substantial categories of nonfiction James produced for the magazines: his essays on illustration and his travelogues. For all his ardent objections to illustration, the truth is that James himself, more than any other fiction writer of his time, repeatedly and at length made the case for a serious consideration of “the art of illustration in black and white.” Besides paying affectionate homage in his memoirs to the picture books of his youth, he wrote several articles on the work of his friend George Du Maurier and provided catalogue notes for illustrators such as Edwin Abbey and Alfred Parsons. He devoted the greater part of an essay for Literature magazine (1898) and a considerable portion of his final Preface for the New York Edition (1909) to the topic of modern illustration. James’s most significant body of writing on the subject is a group of papers on contemporary illustrators published in Harper’s Monthly and Harper’s Weekly between 1886 and 1890 (and subsequently collected in Picture and Text, 1903). In these essays, analyzed in Chapter 4, James highlights similarities between the illustrator and the writer of short

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stories—both, in Baudelaire’s phrase, painters of modern life. He maintains that “abundant, intelligent, interpretive work in black and white is, to the sense of the writer of these lines, one of the pleasantest things of the time, having only to rise to the occasion to enjoy a great future” (PT 64). James characteristically hedges his praise in the essays with provisos of this kind, and Chapter 4 focuses on the carefully cultivated ambiguities of his critical appreciation. My argument is that in his commentaries on the modern illustrators with whom his work was often linked in the periodicals, James continues the critical project begun in 1884 with “The Art of Fiction,” namely, to create a discriminating readership for his fiction. In the Harper’s essays, he specifically addresses the audience for his shorter fiction in the magazines. The chapter shows how James deploys a series of rhetorical strategies for “containing” the magazine pictorials and for subtly promoting the view that “‘quiet,’ psychological, conversational modern tale[s]” like his are not amenable to illustration. Chapter 5 looks at another category of James’s prolific output of nonfiction for the periodicals, the illustrated travel essay. Like many prominent writers during the 1870s and 1880s, James routinely turned out the kind of travelogue that was, next to fiction, the most popular fixture of the upscale American monthlies. Again, comparatively little critical analysis has been devoted to James’s travel pieces, still less to the role of the artists who illustrated them. Yet here was a genre that James considered companionable with the art of illustration, once he found an artist who shared his views. In the first decade of the new century, James gathered his travel essays, most written years earlier, and repackaged them in the form of several books and deluxe editions. Joseph Pennell made literally hundreds of drawings and etchings for these volumes. Chapter 5 shows how James’s project of authorial re-presentation was buttressed by the lavish illustration that attended republication. Of particular interest here is the behind-the-scenes story of the production of the travel books, told through hitherto unpublished letters preserved in the Pennell Collection at the Library of Congress. In his prefaces to the travel volumes, James was quick to point out how much his “re-titivated” essays benefited from Pennell’s participation. Chapter 5 backs up his claims with archival evidence that illuminates James’s working rela-

Preface

xxi

tionship with Pennell and reveals the pivotal role the artist assumed in getting the books published. On the basis of the pieced-together publication history of the travel books, as well as of the demonstrably close ties between the pictures and texts, I maintain that James sustained a collaboration with Pennell extending over two decades and multiple volumes in large part because he found the artist’s “impressionistic” experiments with viewpoint, technique, and medium consonant with his own literary objectives. Pennell contributed to the Jamesian image of the worldly and aesthetically keen American traveler abroad, a persona that can be seen as a stand-in for the kind of ideal reader James posited in his fiction. It is of no small significance that James released his refurbished travel essays in the years preceding and during his work on the New York Edition. In his Prefaces for the New York Edition he systematically revisited his oeuvre and laid out his aims and methods for what he hoped was a wider audience. His collections of travel essays can be seen as a pendant to the major critical project of the New York Edition, and Pennell’s illustrations, like the frontispieces James and A. L. Coburn created together for the New York Edition, as an integral part of that effort. The illustrated magazine format by its very nature foregrounds intertextuality and the collectivity of authorship. Nicholson Baker has made the case for considering the periodical publication as a whole, its advertisements, feature stories, cartoons, and drawings all contributing to our understanding of the historical moment. “Reading a paper like this,” Baker maintains, “is not the only way to understand the lost past life of a city, but no other way will enclose you so completely within one time-stratum’s universe of miscellaneous possibility. Nothing makes an amateur historian of you with more dispatch” (39). Henry James would agree. Writing about George Du Maurier’s illustrations for Punch, he asserts, “The accumulated volumes of this periodical contain evidence on a multitude of points of which there is no mention in the serious works— not even in the novels—of the day. The smallest details of social habit are depicted there, and the oddities of a race of people in whom oddity is strangely compatible with the dominion of convention” (Partial Portraits 333–34). Evidence drawn from the range of James’s venues—beginning

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with “elite” belletristic journals and culminating with the advertisingsponsored “slicks” founded during the technology-spurred “magazine revolution” of the 1890s—reveals the surprising extent to which James’s writing both influenced and responded to the conditions of publication and readership in the mass marketplace.

Acknowledgments

It gives me great pleasure to acknowledge the generosity and expertise of colleagues who read versions of the manuscript and guided it through multiple drafts: Leonard Barkan, Fred Kaplan, Steven Kruger, Wendy Martin, and Donald Stone, friends all. Heartfelt thanks as well to Donald McQuade, John Weir, Glenn Burger, and Charles Molesworth for their encouragement and counsel. The team at Stanford University Press has been superb to work with through each stage of production. All thanks to Emily-Jane Cohen for her sponsorship of the project and to Sarah Crane Newman for miraculously keeping track of permissions, art logs, captions lists, and authorial slip-ups. In Carolyn Brown and Cynthia Lindlof I found the ideal production editor and copyeditor: both are as tactful and upbeat as they are meticulous. I was fortunate to work with a number of research librarians who deserve special commendation for their assistance with the project. At the New York Society Library, my thanks go to Mark Bartlett, to Ingrid Richter for hours spent scanning images, and to my friend Arevig Caprielian for her work on the index. Katherine Blood and Martha Kennedy of the Library of Congress were unstintingly helpful with images for the book, as was Jodee Fenton of the Seattle Public Library. The project proceeded by the grace of staff members at the Beinecke Library; the Rare Book and Manuscript Collection of Columbia University; the Berg Collection and the Manuscripts and Archives division of the New York Public Library; and the Barrett Library of the University of Virginia. Special thanks go to Joan Tomczyk and Marlene Tanzer for their contributions and camaraderie.

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Acknowledgments

A PSC-CUNY Research Award underwrote permissions and production costs for the book’s visual materials. I’m particularly indebted to Tamara Evans, Dean of Arts and Sciences at Queens College, as well as to the Alumni Fund of the English Department and to English Department Chair Nancy Comley for providing additional subvention funds in a time of financial austerity. I’m more than grateful to Gil, Lucy, Jeff, and Miriam Tucker for their support throughout this project, which could never have been completed without the help of my husband, Steve Tanzer. The book is dedicated to him.

Abbreviations for Frequently Cited Sources

CS 1–5 CT 1

James, Complete Stories of Henry James James, Collected Travel Writings, vol. 1: The Continent James, Collected Travel Writings, vol. 2: Great Britain and America Anesko, “Friction with the Market” Kaplan, Henry James: The Imagination of Genius James, Literary Criticism, vol. 1 James, Literary Criticism, vol. 2 Edel, Henry James: Letters Edel, Henry James Horne, Henry James: A Life in Letters Mott, A History of American Magazines Edel and Powers, The Complete Notebooks of Henry James James, Autobiography: Notes of a Son and Brother James, Picture and Text James, Autobiography: A Small Boy and Others Henry James Papers, Beinecke Library

CT 2 Friction IG LC 1 LC 2 Letters 1–4 Life 1–5 LL Mott 1–4 Notebooks Notes PT SB Za James

The Illustration of the Master

Chapter 1

Henry James and the Rise of the Illustrated Magazines

H

remarked in later life that the “illustration of books, even more of magazines, may be said to have been born in our time, so far as variety and abundance are the signs of it,”1 for he and the modern illustrated press had come of age together. The Illustration of the Master reconsiders a significant portion of James’s oeuvre in light of the explosive growth of the periodicals industry in Europe and the United States during the final decades of the nineteenth century. This was a pivotal moment in the history of publishing, a period before “popular entertainment” and “high art” parted company, when literature figured in the public imagination as an overwhelmingly visual experience. The technology-driven “magazine revolution” of the late nineteenth century offers striking parallels to the digital revolution in publishing during our own era, and its impact was just as dramatic, with far-reaching consequences for the future of print culture and the practice of authorship. James and his colleagues witnessed the beginning of mass-information services and the democratization of the literary circuit. They saw an earlier generation of “genteel” and attentive editors superseded by corporate managers who adapted texts for niche markets of consumers with shorter attention spans and lower expectations, who promoted genre franchises over high-literary experimentation, and who favored media hype over plain text. The present study examines the ways in which these elements of the contemporary publishing milieu exerted pressure on James’s production—on its composition and themes as well as its reception. By way E N RY JA M E S

2

James and the Rise of Illustrated Magazines

of introduction, this chapter shows how the rise of illustrated periodicals in the United States and abroad redefined the reading public and the writing profession in the second half of the nineteenth century. “If you want to understand Henry James”—so J. Hillis Miller frames an underlying tenet of cultural studies—“study the conditions of the publishing industry during the period in which James wrote.”2 In James’s case we need to begin a bit farther back, by considering the formative influence of popular print culture on his earliest memories. The art of illustration in England and on the Continent reached its apogee during the 1850s and 1860s, and the engraved images in the foreign books and magazines to which the James family subscribed in New York left their deep impress on James’s childhood. In later years James repeatedly evoked the enchantment of journals like Charivari (in his essay on Honoré Daumier), Cornhill Magazine (in English Hours), and Punch (in his several essays on George Du Maurier). The pictures he pored over in his youth illuminate page after page of his memoirs, where (as he said of his fictional methods in the Preface to What Maisie Knew) the child’s “still expanding consciousness” is presented “as a register of impressions.” The boy lingers over steel engravings by Gavarni and lithographs by Nash. He discovers “England” in drawings by Leech and Du Maurier in Punch. He considers Oliver Twist “more Cruikshank’s than Dickens’s.” When he is packed off with his brother William to school in Geneva and later Bonn, he finds solace in the issues of Once a Week—then in “the prime of George Meredith and Charles Reade and J. E. Millais and George Du Maurier”—sent by the boys’ father “to bridge our separation from him.” Seen in the context of an emergent mass-print medium, James’s celebrated recollection of himself in A Small Boy and Others, hiding in the shadows of the family library and bursting into sobs as an elder cousin reads aloud from an installment of David Copperfield, reveals more than simply the child’s susceptibility to fiction. Information about the literacy practices of the era comes to us primarily through anecdotes like these.3 During the 1850s and 1860s, the periodical series was beginning to replace “three-decker” volumes as the vehicle through which novelists reached their wider audience. Reading fiction became a communal activity: contemporary letters and memoirs written by readers


3

in every social stratum attest to the tradition of “parlour literature” and the habit of “reading out” texts at family or group gatherings.4 Novels were made available to American audiences through serials imported (and promptly pirated, in these precopyright days) from England. The enforced intervals between periodic installments were freighted with emotional investment and charged with discussion.5 These were “large arrivals,” James would recall, the serials by Dickens, Thackeray, and Eliot assuming “a command of the permeable air and the collective sensibility, with which nothing since has begun to deserve comparison” (Notes 252). With the stories inevitably came illustrations, which helped sustain readers’ retention of plot details and characters over time.6 The fateful installment of David Copperfield that so moved the infant James was the first in a series of nineteen, each of which was to contain two illustrations by “Phiz.”7 For the precocious child who felt himself thus “born to a rich awareness,” as well as for the adults around him, pictures led the way into literature. It was during James’s childhood that American versions of the European literary magazines began to take shape, launched in a period of economic prosperity following the Civil War. Improvements in public education and literacy rates, along with the creation of public libraries, brought a new and rapidly expanding audience to literature. Fiction developed into a national pastime, with American illustrated magazines, conceived as flagships and feeders for book-publishing firms, its chief means of dissemination.8 Between 1865 and 1870, the number of magazines published in the United States rose from 700 to 1,200 and doubled again in the following decade (Tebbel and Zuckerman 57). The transcontinental railway opened up culture markets for a growing middle-class audience that found itself with more leisure time and greater mobility. Expansion of the roadway and rail infrastructures and mail services (particularly with the Postal Act in 1879, which lowered delivery rates for journals) made national distribution of periodicals cheaper and more efficient. Technical innovations in paper manufacture and printing, especially in the mid-1880s with the introduction of the high-speed rotary press and photomechanical engraving processes, enabled the production of more copious and impressive graphics in response to public demand, and at affordable prices. At twenty-five to

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thirty-five cents an issue, the magazines offered readers what Harper’s Weekly called “A Journal of Civilization”—a miscellany of fiction and nonfiction, including art reviews, literary criticism, social commentary, and essays on history, science, and travel. Subsequent chapters of this study will document James’s significant contributions to the development of these magazine genres. Although a few American journals like the Atlantic Monthly (issued in 1857) and the Nation (1865) remained resolutely committed to unadorned text, the age would overwhelmingly belong to illustrated publications like Harper’s (Harper’s Monthly began in 1850; the Weekly in 1857; Bazar in 1867),9 Scribner’s Monthly (inaugurated in 1870 and renamed Century Illustrated Monthly in 1881), and Scribner’s Magazine (1887). The illustrated “quality” journals reached upwards of two hundred thousand subscribers at the peak of their popularity in the final decade of the nineteenth century, when they were outstripped by cheaper, advertising-based publications like the Ladies’ Home Journal, with circulations approaching one million. James’s memoirs bear witness to all these changes in the publishing business, and in his looking back at the age of seventy to the periodicals of “the charming time,” his purpose is polemic as much as tributary. He contrasts his intense response to the first slim issue of the English Cornhill Magazine in 1860 with the smothered discrimination of succeeding generations of magazine readers, their senses numbed by the sheer quantity of illustrated offerings and their muscles strained “round a circular ton of advertisement.” Twenty years before Walter Benjamin defined the loss of “aura” for the art object in the age of mechanical reproduction, James commemorated in similar terms the passing of an era when “a given product of the press might have a situation and an aspect, a considerability, so to speak, a circumscription and an aura” (Notes 250–52). The last quarter of the century saw momentous shifts in what Pierre Bourdieu calls the “field of cultural production”—not only advances in printing and the corresponding growth of a mass audience but the beginnings of market-oriented patronage, the standardizing of copyright laws and reconfiguration of international markets, and the creation of a professional class of editors, writers, art directors, illustrators, and


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literary agents. Early on, as Scribner’s editor J. G. Holland observed in 1873, “hardly one author in one hundred” in the United States could live solely on earnings from publication (qtd. in Burlingame 204). With the proliferation of home-grown journals (and the increasing pressure of the international copyright debate, although legislation was not enacted until 1891), writers like James had a national vehicle that could provide the top authors with a living wage and professional recognition. The success of the periodicals also signaled the waning of the anonymous, unsigned article: the Nation and Harper’s, for example, both began printing contributors’ names after 1879. In his early study Magazine Writing and the New Literature (1908), Henry Mills Alden, a longtime editor for the house of Harper, reasons that “when fiction of the higher order became an important element in magazines . . . the prizes of periodical literature rapidly increased—more rapidly in America than in England. The names of prominent writers, because they represented essential worth, had also, and legitimately, a corresponding commercial value” (88). At the same time, the stock of the magazine illustrators was rising. Through the 1870s and 1880s, printed matter increasingly took on the “‘picture-book’ quality,” as James was to complain, “that contemporary English and American prose appears more and more destined, by the conditions of publication, to consent, however grudgingly, to see imputed to it.”10 Publishers established in-house art departments, each cultivating a roster of regular contributors with recognizably individual styles. The Century atelier, supervised by Alexander Drake, published work by A. B. Frost, Ernest Peixotto, Joseph Pennell, Edward Penfield, and Maxfield Parrish. Harper’s, under art superintendent Charles Parsons, nurtured Edwin Abbey, F. D. Millet, C. S. Reinhart, Alfred Parsons, and William Merritt Chase. The superior quality of American illustration soon attracted the attention of readers in Europe, prompting the Harper’s company to introduce a London edition of its monthly magazine in 1880. American publishers so vastly improved on European models for engraving and printing the artists’ work that by 1882 a writer for the London Times declared of the Harper’s Christmas issue: “The workmanship is really beyond praise. The labor expended in producing these prints is amazing. Such is the

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delicacy of the work that it imitates the freedom and subtle shades of a chalk drawing, and seems at times almost to reach the power of color. . . . No English illustrated paper has, so far as we know, produced engravings of such remarkable excellence as are to be found here” (qtd. in Harper, House of Harper 493). From the start, the industry on this side of the Atlantic promulgated illustration as part of its mission to educate and elevate the tastes of a burgeoning middle-class readership. Writing about French and English illustrated magazines in the Atlantic Monthly in 1870, in the period just before the American journals began to eclipse their forebears, Eugene Benson puts the case rather floridly: “I consider the illustrated magazine one of the essentials of a beautiful home life; while we sit by the fireside, the pictured page lets us see the art and science, the habits and customs, of all the historic ages, and at the same time represents to us the remarkable or beautiful things scattered over our contemporary world” (687). Benson argues that the democratization of pictorial content is particularly important “for vast populations compelled to forego the liberating experience of travel, and out of the reach of museums and art galleries” (686). In his magisterial four-volume history of American periodicals, Frank Luther Mott notes the impact of traveling art exhibits, and in particular the blockbuster Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, on the American public’s desire for fine-art reproductions (3: 181). According to Tebbel and Zuckerman, most of the visitors who packed the galleries of the 1876 Exposition “were seeing famous pictures for the first time and partaking of a world they knew little about. The magazines served to spread that influence more widely by reproducing hundreds of these pictures in their pages” (63). Public discourse on the evolution of American illustration thus came to be framed within a larger narrative of national progress. A writer for the American Arts Review concludes in 1880 that largely owing to technical developments in fine-arts reproduction, “the arts are no longer regarded as comparatively unimportant to our national growth and dignity” (qtd. in Mott 3: 181). In May of that same year, George William Curtis asks in his editorial column for Harper’s New Monthly, “Now that the resources of [the illustrator’s] art have been so wonderfully increased, and the demand for fine wood-engraving has become so universal, is it


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not clear that the progress is largely due to the perception that it is essentially an art, and peculiarly the pictorial art[,] which can do most for general enlightenment and refinement?” (940). Their ameliorative rhetoric aside, editors and publishers found that they ignored the craze for pictures at their fiscal peril. Sales declined appreciably after the Galaxy eliminated engravings in 1872 (John 77). Ellery Sedgwick observes of the Atlantic Monthly’s refusal to print illustrations, “After 1880, as the technology for reproducing illustrations and the public taste for them developed, this policy became an increasing liability that limited the Atlantic’s appeal” (38). Little wonder that William Dean Howells, who served as editor of the Atlantic between 1871 and 1881, vented his frustration with the magazine’s policy in his novel of the publishing business, A Hazard of New Fortunes (1889–90).11 In a much-cited passage from the novel, Howells’s fictional entrepreneur, Fulkerson, proclaims that only a “lunatic” would start a magazine in the twilight of the nineteenth century without illustrations. Fulkerson’s editor-to-be (and Howells’s frequent fictional alter ego), Basil March, asks, “And will they—the artists—work at a reduced rate too, like the writers, with the hopes of a share in the success?” Fulkerson replies, “Of course they will! And if I want any particular man, for a card, I’ll pay him big money besides. But I can get plenty of first-rate sketches on my own terms. You’ll see! They’ll pour in!” (Hazard 13). We can gather just how far the pictures drove the magazine business by reading through a letterbook of early Harper’s correspondence, one of the few nineteenth-century records in the Harper files at the Library of Congress.12 Literary historians Joshua Brown and James L. W. West have noted the dearth of evidence concerning the everyday operations and editorial practices of publications like Frank Leslie’s and Harper’s (Brown 5; West 49), but the letterbook gives a fair picture of the day-to-day practice of Henry Mills Alden, who edited Harper’s Weekly and subsequently the Monthly from 1869 until his death in 1919. A surprising portion of Alden’s correspondence is devoted to arranging for illustrations, and often as not the visuals take precedence over the written text. It is not unusual to find Alden informing an author that he will accept an article “providing you can obtain effective illustrations”

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(March 4, 1874). To Rose Terry Cooke he suggests that if her proposed article “isn’t susceptible of illustration, it is not worth your while to undertake it” (August 14, 1874). He writes to Celia Thaxter, “I enclose a list of sketches of the Isles of Shoals, made last summer, by Mr. Chas. Parsons, the sup’t of our Art Department—I need not tell you—if you have noticed engraving after his drawings in our Magazine—that pictures from these sketches will have the highest degree of excellence. In order to make use of them in the Magazine we shall need an article on the Isles of Shoals of a character that will make the inclusion of these sketches natural” (May 16, 1874). Alden advises authors that the processes of making and engraving illustrations require extensive lead time. “We should have the article [on the ‘Fight at Concord’] in December,” he tells an author in April 1874, “in order to insert it in the April No, 1875. But it is advisable that the illustrations should be made during the coming summer, and we will send an artist to make sketches whenever it will be more convenient to you.” The editor typically has a particular staff artist in mind for a given project: in April 1883, for example, he instructs William Laffan, the Harper’s agent in England, to commission a “light story” from Howells for the coming Christmas issue, adding, “as soon as you get [the manuscript] please arrange with Mr. Reinhart to do one or more of his best illustrations at once.” Alternatively, the artist might suggest his own project: “Mr. Reinhart writes me that he has seen you and suggests two subjects for you to treat for our magazine,” Alden tells Mrs. G. Humphries in July 1883. “You will, of course, understand what pictures Mr. Reinhart will make and will accommodate your articles to them.” Either way, “first-rate sketches” were crucial to the publishing enterprise. Prominent writers like Howells, James, and Wharton acceded to as well as molded the literary and visual tastes of their mass audience. In Criticism and Fiction (1891), a collection of his “Editor’s Study” columns for Harper’s Monthly, Howells comments acerbically that the success of the American magazines stems not only from the courage to decide which ought to please, but from the knowledge of what does please; and it is probable that, aside from the pictures, it is the short stories which please the readers of our best magazines. The serial novels they must have, of course; but rather more of course they must have short stories,


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and by operation of the law of supply and demand, the short stories, abundant in quantity and excellent in quality, are forthcoming because they are wanted. By another operation of the same law . . . the demand follows the supply. (131–32; italics added)

Regarding what he, too, characterized as “the adjusted nature of the ground on which the demand and the supply thus meet,”13 James was perfectly realistic about the requirements of magazine work. Although reluctant to break up his novels into installments, for instance, he did so throughout his career to secure publication and advance payment as well as possible further dividends when the novel was issued in book form. Privately James continued to maintain a preference for the “lump production” over the serialized version. He writes to Howells, his devoted friend and correspondent, about The Awkward Age (1899) that “it’s only as a book that it compactly exists—that it isn’t read at all unless so read” (Anesko, Letters 351). A decade earlier he had confided to Howells “how little the habit of writing in the serial form encourages one to read in that odious way, which so many simple folk, thank heaven, think the best” (James, Letters 465). Like most “simple folk,” however, Howells found seduction on the installment plan irresistible. He confesses to James in April 1898, “In spite of your instructions Pilla [Howells’s older daughter] and I have been reading your Turn of the Screw week by week, and simply jumped up and down between times in our impatience” (Howells, Life in Letters 2: 89). All this was part of a gradual transformation, as Fred Kaplan observes, “of the nature of magazines and of the relationship between magazines and their readers from the high-Victorian concentration on serial fiction to the shorter economic and literary attention span of late Victorian readers” (IG 367). Howells had noted in Criticism and Fiction that audiences and editors were now calling for shorter stories. Acknowledging brevity as yet another “bribe to the public patience,”14 James assiduously counted his words. And just as James and his colleagues accommodated the serial, the censor, and the ever-shrinking word count, so they accepted illustrations (“however grudgingly,” James would add) as a market imperative. “That the magazines are, above all, copiously ‘illustrated,’” James concluded in 1898, “expresses portentously, for better or worse, their character and situation; the fact, by itself, speaks volumes on the

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whole subject—their success, their limits, their standards, their concessions, the temper of the public and the state of letters.”15 Influential editors at the major firms continued to promote the pictorial agenda for fiction and nonfiction through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Richard Watson Gilder of the Century insisted against Howells’s objections that the noted (and notoriously difficult) artist Joseph Pennell accompany the author to Italy to draw illustrations for his travel essays. It was also Gilder’s idea to publish Maxfield Parrish’s series of plummy Italian watercolors, for which he invited Edith Wharton to write the accompanying commentary in the magazine. In her memoirs Wharton recalls that she was thrilled to receive the commission for what would become Italian Villas and Their Gardens (1904) (Backward Glance 129); and although she apparently did not much care for the results (Lee 111–12), finding the artwork incompatible with her scholarly text, Parrish’s paintings undeniably helped account for the book’s success.16 Wharton subsequently corresponded at length with William C. Brownell of Scribner’s concerning the pictures for Italian Backgrounds (1905), proposing to use her own photographs for the book (Lewis and Lewis 86–92), but in the end the volume was furnished with plates by Ernest Peixotto, a respected Scribner’s contributor. The same year brought Scribner’s publication of her novel The House of Mirth, whose drawings, by A. B. Wenzell, Wharton had agreed to, although afterward she exclaimed to Brownell, “Oh, I wish I hadn’t now!” (Lewis and Lewis 94–95). Joseph Henry Harper neatly conveys the spectrum of authors’ responses to the illustrations appearing with their fiction in Harper’s publications: When we published Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Anne, illustrated by C. S. Rein hart, she complained that her conception of the heroine was not in accordance with his illustrations, and that Anne would doubtless be remembered as he had depicted her, rather than from her description. In another case, Mrs. Humphrey [sic] Ward was so pleased with Albert Sterner’s portrayal of the hero in one of her novels, that she modified her description so as to conform with his drawings. (I Remember 207)

In short, we have scores of witnesses to the fact that readers of the time saw periodical stories and essays differently, that literacy practices were inflected by visual cues, and that authors routinely adapted their


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work to the changing demands of audience and medium. Readers and writers alike testified to the impact of the illustrations on their reception of books and magazines. In his “Editor’s Easy Chair” columns, George William Curtis quoted subscribers’ praise for “the abundance of exquisite illustration” in Harper’s Monthly (July 1880: 306) and saw the development of “the art of wood-engraving in these pages” as “evidence of the adaptation of the Magazine to the varying and progressive literary taste of the last quarter of a century” (January 1881: 304). Thomas Hardy confessed to being roused by “a wild illustration” to begin a novel by H. Ryder Haggard nearer the end than the beginning (Waller 988). Arnold Bennett professed a preference for the illustrations over the fiction published in Pall Mall magazine, and declared himself “charmed” by the pictures for a serial of his that ran in the Golden Penny in 1901: “To read the instalments each week does me good,” he said, “they are so exactly what they should be” (Bennett 129, 147). Joseph Conrad praised Maurice Greiffenhagen’s “fidelity to my vision” in the artist’s illustrations for Typhoon, serialized in Pall Mall in 1902, while excoriating another illustrator’s work for him as “false enough to set one’s teeth on edge” (Conrad 328). Critics, too, were apt to judge the pictures as well as the prose in reviews of novels like James’s Washington Square (with drawings by George Du Maurier) and Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles—whose illustrator, according to Charles Dudley Warner’s dry critique, “put the milkmaid on the wrong side of the cow” (June 1892: 152).17 Despite this overwhelming evidence to the contrary, present-day readers have come to think of the pictorial features of publications— tailpieces and historiated initials, line engravings and “processed” halftones, photographed portraits, advertisements, and so on—as irrelevant, somehow outside the text. Why have succeeding generations of readers so consistently overlooked the visual elements surrounding the work of James and his peers? Michele Bogart dates the shift in public and academic attitudes toward the art of illustration from the rise of the advertisingdominated mass-market magazines, the so-called magazine revolution of the 1890s (20). Roger Burlingame observes that after World War I, “magazines seemed to be more definitely screened into categories: ‘illustrated’ and ‘literary,’” with illustrators increasingly moving over to the million-circulation ad-heavy “slicks.” He concludes, “The public had

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become—and how Burlingame [Edward Burlingame, Scribner’s founding editor] would shudder to hear his son use the depraved word!—too ‘sophisticated’” (245–46). Having inherited the critical assumptions of a later era, modern-day editors and researchers tend to privilege the written text over its visual accompaniment. As a consequence, David C. Miller tells us, contemporary scholarship typically “fails to perceive the many ways in which the rich visual culture of nineteenth-century America actually served to undermine and transform the established hierarchy of the verbal over the visual” (279). Then too, the magazine oeuvre of a canonical figure like James troubles an established, monolithic concept of authorship by presenting written work in the context of a variety of decisions made not only by the writer but by editors, publishers, compositors, printers, illustrators, and other participants in what Robert Darnton calls the “communications circuit.” John Sutherland, citing arguments advanced in Jerome McGann’s Critique of Modern Textual Criticism, maintains that scholarship on the history of publishing has been slow to develop because it runs counter to the orthodoxy of textual criticism, with its emphasis on definitive editions and originary texts “intended” by the author. “The fetishization of final authorial intention,” Sutherland concludes with McGann, “has led to a doctrinal preference for the manuscript as copytext. This stage alone finds the author quarantined from subsequent contaminating processes of material production and transmission” (273). Doubtless James’s commentators have been put off as well by the author’s own career-long screed against the hegemony of the pictorial, a lament that grew more insistent as his work met with resistance from editors and readers, and, at the same time, as the art of illustration gained prominence. In a frequently cited letter to Howells in January 1895, James admits, “I’m utterly out of it here—& Scribner, the Century, the Cosmopolitan, will have nothing to say to me—above all for fiction. The Atlantic, & H. & M., treat one like the dust beneath their feet; & the Macmillans, here, have cold-shouldered me out of all relation with them.” He concludes, not altogether convincingly, “I am, incongruously, not at all sorry. I am indeed very serene. I have always hated the magazine form, magazine conditions & manners, & much of the magazine company. I hate the horrid little subordinate part that one plays in the


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catchpenny picture book—& the negation of all literature that the insolence of the picture book imposes” (LL 278). James’s objections should be read in the wider context of a critical backlash against illustration and its overuses, a counterdiscourse conducted in literary journals and the popular press during the final decades of the century. “Why should [visual artists],” asks an irate reader in a letter to the Critic, be “given the right of way above their fellow artisans who labor with letters and words?” (qtd. in Harris 340). Charles T. Congdon makes the case against “over-illustration” for the North American Review (1884): “A scene, an action, an event vividly described by the writer, ought of itself to make a picture in the mind of the reader, and each ought to make his own. . . . But here the illustrator steps in and makes originality of impression impossible. He takes the work out of the hands of the writer, and dictates to the reader what he shall see” (486–87). In an “Editor’s Study” column for Harper’s in 1893, Charles Dudley Warner lambastes the cheap illustrations glutting the newspapers as well as their fancier counterparts in the magazines: “New and wonderful processes . . . have permitted the attempt to be made by the use of colors, and prophets expect great things from these methods. The general effect so far is to vulgarize art and to diffuse false standards of taste” (476). The following year, Warner adds that although illustrations may contribute useful information to nonfiction articles on travel, history, and science, when it comes to fiction they represent a rivalry, an interference, “usually an impertinence” (315–16). For his own part, James had plenty of reasons to complain. He saw the graphic features of the magazines, which grew larger and more invasive on the page with each development in printing techniques, as so much space lost to his text—and, perhaps, remuneration to the author. He resented the lag time—months that could lengthen into a year or more—between his submission of a piece and its illustration by an artist whose drawing would then have to be “translated” by the engraver (later, via a more efficient photoengraving process) to a plate or block for printing. He minded still more that the written word had to compete with pictures for the reader’s attention, an already dwindling resource. As Howells’s Basil March explains to the art editor of his magazine in A Hazard of New Fortunes, “I find that I look at the

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pictures in an illustrated article, but I don’t read the article very much, and I fancy that’s the case with most other people. You’ve got to doing them so prettily that you take our eyes off the literature, if you don’t take our minds off ” (122). James famously described this competition for the reader’s wandering gaze when he responded to the mixed critical reception of his novel The Wings of the Dove in a letter to Howells in December 1902. Two months earlier, James’s brother William had written him to complain of reading “innumerable sentences twice over to see what the dickens they could possibly mean.” James knew all too well that William was not alone in his impatience with the Master’s mature style. He must have sensed, too, the frustration of editors like William C. Brownell, who privately let loose in an in-house memo to Charles Scribner regarding the manuscript of The Sacred Fount in 1900: “It is surely the n + 1st power of Jamesiness. . . . It is like trying to make out page after page of illegible writing. The sense of effort becomes acutely exasperating. Your spine curls up, your hair-roots prickle & you want to get up and walk around the block.” Scribner’s went ahead with its plans to publish The Sacred Fount, but as Roger Burlingame remarks, “When Brownell couldn’t follow James, it was news” (36–37). James’s letter to Howells from December 1902 can thus be read as a cri de coeur in which “the picture” has obviously come to stand for the increasingly vexed relation of the author to his readers: The faculty of attention has utterly vanished from the general anglosaxon mind, extinguished at its source by the big blatant Bayadère of Journalism, of the newspaper & the picture (above all) magazine, who keeps screaming “Look at me, I am the thing, & I only, the thing that will keep you in relation with me all the time without your having to attend one minute of the time.” . . . But we live in a lonely age for literature or for any art but the mere visual. Illustrations, loud simplifications & grossissements, the big Building . . . the “mounted” play, the prose that is careful to be in the tone of, & with the distinction of, a newspaper or bill-poster advertisement—these, & these only, meseems “stand a chance.” (LL 376n, 377–78)

Still, however emphatically James remonstrated in his private correspondence against the proliferation of pictures, the fact remains that he actively participated in the placement of his writing in the illustrated


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magazines,18 particularly following the public’s repudiation of his work for the theater in the mid-1890s. We have persuasive evidence, gleaned from James’s letters to friends, editors, and publishers, that as his old venues became closed to him, James repeatedly turned to mass-market periodicals—to journals, that is, whose policies virtually ensured that his work would be accompanied by plentiful illustrations and advertising pictorials. James typically rationalized his cooperation with the practice of illustration as motivated by financial exigency. He told Theodore Child in 1888, “The American picture-books pay far better—but they are such a damnable unliterary medium” (Letters 3: 227). He explained to Howells in 1908 that he had undertaken with the artist Joseph Pennell a second collection of “re-titivated” and reillustrated travel sketches on the basis of the “quite vulgar” sales of a similar collaboration with Pennell a few years earlier (Anesko, Letters 427, 433). But James profited in less tangible ways from the association of his work with illustration. Marcia Jacobson observes of the general reading public of the late 1880s and 1890s: “That audience, seeking, and finding in much popular writing, reassurance in an age of rapid social change, could hardly have found palatable James’s persistent refusal to provide comfort” (139). The author’s experiments in technique, his muchparodied complications of diction and syntax, were perhaps more easily broached through images familiar to an audience clamoring for the kind of historical romances and sentimental fictions that cosseted James’s stories in the magazines. Well-known artists conferred their distinctive imprimatur; and even when their pictures had little to contribute to the text, they served to “domesticate” James’s fiction, making strange and difficult narrative strategies somewhat less daunting. In an essay for Harper’s Weekly on Edwin Austin Abbey (1886), his favorite among the contemporary illustrators, James identified the reader’s response to Abbey’s pictures as “the expectation of familiarity in variety.” As James’s style became increasingly knotty, the illustrations would remain comfortingly recognizable and comprehensible. The evidence offered in the following chapters, which examine James’s complex connections to the marketplace and to his illustrators, suggests that these relationships were often more reciprocal professionally and

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artistically than James was apt to acknowledge. The chapters take up in turn James’s efforts, as he worked more or less simultaneously in a variety of magazine genres, to attract a wider audience at key moments in his career, beginning in the mid-1880s with the doubts he voiced to Howells after the tepid public response to the serial installments of The Bostonians in the Century and The Princess Casamassima in the Atlantic Monthly, and continuing into the new century. True, he still preferred to publish in belletristic journals like the Atlantic. But as he began to encounter resistance from the quality publications (he was particularly stung when Horace Scudder turned down “The Pupil” for the Atlantic in 1890) and especially following his deeply wounding misadventure in the theater, James stepped up his efforts to reach the broader public through the medium of the mass-circulation periodicals. Soon after the failure of his play Guy Domville in 1895, for instance, James converted his old notes for another play into a serialized novel in the hope of gaining the popular recognition denied him on the stage. His friend Lucy Clifford had pitched the idea to the editor of the Illustrated London News, Clement Shorter, to whom James expressed his desire “to capture the public” of the London tabloid. “I should be very glad to write you a story energetically designed to meet your requirements of a ‘love-story’—and to let you have it at the time and of the dimension that you mention,” he wrote, adding puckishly, “I shall endeavor to be thrilling” (Letters 4: 30–31). The Other House ran in installments from July through September 1896. Walter Paget, a house illustrator, made numerous drawings for the series, the most striking of which was a headpiece that appeared at the top of each number, showing a temptress proffering a poison cup and behind her the gloating apparition of the Devil himself. Paget’s headpiece (reproduced at the end of this chapter) is as misleading as it is silly, referring as it does to an earlier version of the story that James discarded as he frantically wrote to deadline. In the final version of the novel the murderer drowns rather than poisons her four-year-old victim. The lurid illustration, as well as James’s uncharacteristically sensationalistic material, reveals “the other story” behind The Other House, that of the author’s hurried ad hoc adaptation of his play to this particular publication and its audience.19 James tried to discourage Clement Shorter from


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illustrating the serial, with the characteristic demurral that the artist “won’t find in my situations a great deal of suggestion for variegated or panoramic pictures” (Shorter 8). But he could scarcely have been surprised by his novel’s eventual visual presentation, for he had several years earlier, in 1892, placed “Greville Fane” in the same publication, and that story had been abundantly illustrated by another staff artist, A. Forestier, in the same overheated house style (Figure 1).20 Edel speculates that James placed The Other House where he did because he sensed that his artistry had failed him: “Some instinct told him that he had [faltered]; for he published the novel, as we have seen, amid the pictured sensationalism of a journal he disliked” (Life 4: 168).21 Louis Begley attributes the strange violence of James’s subject to two traumatic circumstances preceding its publication: the suicide of his friend Constance Fenimore Woolson and the debacle of Guy Domville (vi). But a third, slightly revised scenario is worth considering, one in which the sensational nature of the illustrated paper exercised its influence over the development of a story that was, judging from the earlier sketch recorded in James’s notebook, already on its way to melodrama. Certainly the language of the letter James wrote to his friend Edmund Gosse a few days after finishing the novel bears traces of Paget’s influence and imagery. James writes that he had paid the penalty for committing to

Figure 1. Headpiece for “Greville Fane” in the Illustrated London News, September 17 and 24, 1892.

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a serial “when I was too little ahead of it,” in consequence of which “the printers and illustrators overtook and denounced me.” He tells his friend that “the most lurid thing in my dreams has been the glitter of your sarcastic spectacles”; that he can send Gosse no “news of the world and the devil—no throbs or thrills from the great beating heart of the thick of things”; and that the only thing he has read recently is a piece by Alphonse Daudet of “demoniac tack and skill and of taste so abysmal” (Letters 4: 33–34). Who is to say that in composing his fiction during the course of serial production, James did not look about him and, taking the measure of his audience, stitch back into his narrative the remnants of images and events featured in the tabloid alongside the installments of his novel?22 After all, James was to write to William of his bid for popular success in The Other House, “If that’s what the idiots want, I can give them their bellyfull” (Skrupskelis and Berkeley 2: 416). We can be thankful he did not. In a privately published limited edition of James’s letters to him, Shorter testified that the story “was clearly not one of Mr. James’s popular successes. It belongs to the period in which he had broken away from the style of such charming stories as Daisy Miller and did not prove easy reading for the lover of serial stories” (Shorter 3). Undaunted, James subsequently offered the English serial rights for The Awkward Age to the Illustrated London News (Shorter did not take him up on the offer). And he began courting new audiences in comparable mass-market journals, enlisting a full-time agent in the effort. In 1898, with a view toward meeting financial obligations incurred with the eventual purchase of Lamb House, James hired James Brand Pinker, formerly an editor of the English illustrated magazine Black and White (begun in 1891), who had only recently set up as a literary agent, a fairly new profession at the time.23 At first dismayed by Pinker’s inability to sell his stories, James wrote to him that “the episode has been, for me, a horrible unprecedented scare, the effect of which on my nerves, as it were, is—with the vision of my things declined on every side, unfavourable to work, & it seemed to me desirable to put an end to the suspense connected with the whole magazine question” (October 23, 1898; LL 310). With a little encouragement, however, he set about writing shorter fiction for the popular press at a prodigious rate.


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His letters to Pinker (in the Pinker-James correspondence at Yale) show the author obsessing over his nemesis the word count, inquiring closely into the details of payments and timetables, weighing the suitability of a given story for an English or an American audience, and diving headlong into untried markets. Through the correspondence, much of it unpublished,24 we can trace the rather bumpy publication saga of the tales he produced during a fiercely productive stretch between late 1898 and 1900. When turned down by the quality monthlies, James and his agent pursued cheaper start-ups as well as older, less prestigious periodicals that were looking to refurbish their shopworn images with contributions by an esteemed author. Ultimately Pinker placed a number of the tales in second- and third-tier publications like Truth (N.Y.) and Collier’s, ten- and fifteen-cent magazines geared to a less literary-minded audience and heavily subsidized by advertising revenues. Far from disdaining these commercial venues, James vigorously campaigned for them. On December 12, 1899, he forwarded to Pinker the New York address of the editor of Truth (N.Y.), a publication founded in 1881 but just then being outfitted as a more “literary” monthly (Mott 4: 85). On December 17, James writes that he is “glad” that young Collier, who had recently begun to revamp Collier’s magazine, is printing his story “The Real Right Thing” so promptly; upon which he asks hopefully, “Don’t you think he’d do another?” (Collier’s Weekly would publish four illustrated tales by James between 1898 and 1900.) In several letters James indicates that he has tailored a story to his understanding of the editorial policies and audience of a particular magazine: on December 26 he tells Pinker he has written “The Third Person” “with [the Atlantic] in my eye” and that he is sending along “the short thing I said I could prepare in response to the N.Y. Truth” (this was the Daisy Miller–derived “Miss Gunton of Poughkeepsie”). In the same letter, he mentions a note from Bliss Perry, Scudder’s successor as editor of the Atlantic, “from which I learn that he lately returned you a short thing of mine, The Faces—which somewhat mystifies me, as he expresses great admiration of it. However,” he continues with self-bolstering bravado, “on reflection, I dare say that I understand, and, though I’m disgusted with him, shall profit by it. The Third Person is in a totally other key.” (“The Third Person” was not accepted for magazine publication and

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first appeared in James’s collection The Soft Side [1900]). The following week, on January 3, 1900, James writes, I am at any rate doing, now, 3 or 4 short (more or less similar) things one after another, in the hope that something may come of your proposal, in that general sense, to Collier or to Truth, N.Y.—though, at the same time, I begin to find myself sceptical at not hearing from either quarter, especially as, I gather, Collier appears not yet to have paid for The Real Right Thing. I wish Scribner were intelligent enough to order a “set”—or Harper or The Century: they ought to be!

The stories still weren’t selling as he had hoped, but he pressed on. On March 29, 1900, James sent Pinker “The Tone of Time” and “Flickerbridge,” adding that the agent now had five unpublished stories, including “The Faces,” “The Story in It,” and “The Special Type” (this last, sent to Pinker on September 24 of the previous year, James had described to his agent as “one of the very best short tales I’ve ever written: the best, in fact, I think of any equally brief ”). He considers “Flickerbridge” better adapted for the American market than the British—and perfectly adapted, say, to Scribner. These things are of 7 to 8 thousand words—for I find making them of 5000 (with great difficulty,) for the London market leads to nothing— since The Faces has so gone a-begging—and since the best American periodicals will print more and thereby pay for more. (Of course, none the less, I shall be glad to do a five-thousand worder for any sheet making that a condition.)

His letter to Pinker of April 12 finally notes payment for “The Faces,” which, accompanied by three illustrations by Albert Herter, an artist of note, would at last see the light of day in the glossy Christmas 1900 issue of a Harper’s publication—not in the Monthly nor even in the less prestigious Weekly but in the women’s fashion magazine Harper’s Bazar. This torrent of promotional activity led to some unsettling, even concussive juxtapositions of story and venue. For instance, when “The Faces”—a story that portrays haute couture as a vicious high-stakes competition—appeared in the pages of Bazar, it was surrounded by fashion plates showing models overwhelmed by chic frippery. Unforeseeably, these editorially featured fashions were cut from the same cloth, visually speaking, as the overwrought fictional outfit mockingly described by James and drawn by Herter. Thus the story in this particular setting


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(as opposed to its placement in Cornhill, the English literary journal, where it appeared unillustrated six months later as “The Two Faces”) represented a biting critique of the American venue and its subscribers. The placement of James’s tale in a specialty fashion magazine like Bazar virtually ensured an ambivalent reception from American readers. On the other hand, in general-interest commercial ventures like Truth and Collier’s, James’s stories were frequently “elbowed,” as he would say, to the margins, relegated to the category of window dressing for the copious advertisements that underwrote publication. In the mass-circulation vehicles, “culture was organized so that literature was put to the service of commodities and used to draw readers through pages framed with advertising copy” (Price and Smith 7). Truth (N.Y.) reduced “Miss Gunton” to quarter-page snippets sandwiched between ads and chromolithographs. Collier’s did nearly the same with “The Real Right Thing,” minus the novelty of tricolor processing. In the hectic populist environment of Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, with its whopping 121 pages of ads touting corsets and depilatories and quack cures for drug addiction, James’s “Paste”—his “revision” of a tale by Maupassant—sticks out like a frock coat at a Shrin ers’ convention. The carnivalesque surroundings surely compromised the author’s well-known objections to Maupassant’s vulgarity. The present study addresses the question of how print contexts affect readers of James’s magazine oeuvre—not just his contemporaries, about whose responses we can only speculate, but modern-day audiences as well. Roger Chartier makes the point that readers “never confront abstract, idealized texts detached from any materiality. They hold in their hands or perceive objects and forms whose structures and modalities govern their reading or hearing,” so that “even a fixed text is invested with new meaning and being when the physical form through which it is presented for interpretation changes” (48). The following chapters demonstrate how a consideration of the material circumstances of publication opens up the critical conversation to a reengagement with both familiar and noncanonical examples of James’s literary production. such as “Collaboration,” “Sir Dominic Ferrand” (both of 1892), and “Broken Wings” (1900) James imagines satisfying partnerships between the arts. The ideal of ut pictura poesis—a theme to which he repeatI n st o r i e s

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edly returns in his critical essays, letters, and memoirs—is figured by the balancing of the inkwell and the palette in the original headpiece for “Broken Wings,” an image I have appropriated for the headpiece of this chapter. Chapters to come consider James’s efforts to expand and educate his audience, to explore in fictional terms the problem of patronage and the contemporary artist, to position himself as an expert commentator on the “modern illustrative form,” and to redefine the experience of the American traveler as an aesthetic and imaginative journey. It is the premise of this book that together these efforts constitute a kind of collaboration, albeit an attenuated and conflicted one, between the writer and his “brothers of the brush,” culminating in three major productions for which James actively engaged in the process of matching picture and text: his collected works, his travel books, and the second volume of his autobiography. But whether the images paired with his work were chosen by the author or editor; whether they were discrete frontispieces or intrusive midpage illustrations, simple line engravings, naturalistic halftone drawings, or photographs; whether they were apt or at odds with James’s text, they were in any case a parallel or intertext that James’s audience received along with the tales and essays. For this reason I have used Paget’s singularly inappropriate headpiece for The Other House as the coda to this introduction, signifying the usefulness even of misconceived images to our understanding of the influence of publishing conditions on James’s work (Figure 2). “Images are readings,” Mieke Bal reminds us, “and the rewritings to which they give rise, through their ideological characters, function in the same way as sermons—not a retelling of the text but a use of it: not an illustration but, ultimately, a new text. The image does not replace the text; it is one.” A contextual study of James’s writing for the periodicals considers the editorial policies and target audience of the journal, other works of fiction and nonfiction printed alongside the piece in question, and the way the written texts are embedded in increasingly elaborate layouts of letterpress, drawings, photographs, and advertising images. In the case of an author as various and prolific as James, we also need to keep in mind the range of his pieces appearing concurrently in different periodicals. Howells describes the revelatory nature of reading James’s output this


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way across magazine venues in his “Editor’s Study” column for Harper’s Monthly in October 1888: “With ‘The Aspern Papers’ in The Atlantic, ‘The Liar’ in The Century, ‘A London Life’ in Scribner’s and ‘Louisa Pallant’ and ‘Two Countries’ in Harper’s, pretty much all at once, the effect was like an artist’s exhibition. One turned from one masterpiece to another, making his comparisons, and delighted to find that the stories helped rather than hurt one another, and that their accidental massing enhanced the pleasure in them” (800). The visual presentation of James’s stories and essays merits our attention as part of the larger critical project to determine how the author’s work was shaped by, and in turn influenced, publication and readership in the mass marketplace. My purpose is to examine the ways in which the illustrations that proliferated in late nineteenthand early twentieth-century magazines speak to a given text as well as to its past and present-day readers. “It is by variety and numerosity that [the illustrator] commends himself to his age,” James tells us in Picture and Text, and it is for these qualities that his age commends him to the next. The twentieth century, the latter half of it, will, no doubt, have its troubles, but it will have a great compensatory luxury, that of seeing the life of a hundred years before much more vividly than we—even happy we—see the life of a hundred years ago. But for this our illustrators must do their best, appreciate the endless capacity of their form. It is to the big picture what the short story is to the novel. (67)

Figure 2. Running headpiece for The Other House in the Illustrated London News, July 4–September 26, 1896, illustrated by Wal Paget.

Chapter 2

“Double Discourse” in the Illustrated Tales of the 1890s

J

lifelong “fanaticism” for the art of illustration. In his autobiography he cast over the picture books of his youth a kind of prelapsarian charm of the irrecoverable. “To turn back to [Rodolphe] Toeppfer’s pages today,” he recalled of a treasured adventure book, “is to get the sense of a lost paradise, and the effect for me even yet of having pored over them in my childhood is to steep in sweetness and quaintness some of the pictures” (SB 166). He wrote about contemporary illustrators with equal fervor, claiming kinship with the visual artist and confessing good-natured “envy” of the draftsman’s skill, just as he would admit to adolescent envy of his brother William’s artistic talent. In an essay for Harper’s Weekly on Edwin Austin Abbey (1886) he explains, am e s p r o f e ss e d

Such a hapless personage, who may have spent hours in trying to produce something of the same result by sadly different means, will measure the difference between the roundabout, faint descriptive tokens of respectable prose and the immediate projection of the figure by the pencil. A charming story-teller indeed

“Double Discourse”

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he would be who should write as Mr. Abbey draws. However, what is style for one art is style for another, so blessed is the fraternity that binds them together, and the worker in words may take a lesson from the picture-maker of “She Stoops to Conquer.” (PT 14–15)

Ultimately, we know, James’s admiration would yield to a “general jealousy of any pictorial aid rendered to fiction from outside,” as he put the case in an essay written after the death of his cherished friend, illustrator George Du Maurier, in 1897 (LC 1: 898). Much of his growing antipathy to the illustration of fiction, his own fiction especially, can be attributed to the development of literary realism and the particular part he played in shaping its methods and objectives in the final decades of the century. Early Victorian authors, at the prompting of their publishers, had written with illustration in mind. The installment format of their serialized novels required a series of climactic scenes for which the public came to expect pictorial enhancement. As a result, writers and illustrators forged memorable partnerships, with currents of influence flowing both ways, so that for readers in the 1850s and 1860s Dickens became indissolubly linked with Hablot K. Browne (“Phiz”) and George Cruikshank, Trollope with John Everett Millais, Thackeray with Frederick Walker (and Thackeray with Thackeray; James would recall both Walker’s drawings and those by the author’s own “expressive hand”). By way of contrast, in his essays on literature James took pains to distinguish the plot-driven “pictorial” novels of his predecessors from contemporary “psychological” tales or narratives of consciousness. As his own fiction grew more inward and complex, which is to say antimimetic, its “descriptive tokens” increasingly “faint,” it surely seemed to him less adaptable to or needful of visual accompaniment. But James’s admission of “jealousy” was equally a reaction to the radically altered conditions of publication in an era when periodicals were dramatically extending their reach. While his art was coming to maturity, the pictures themselves—engravings and woodcuts, news photographs, advertising images, and the like—were growing up, so much so that their quality and ubiquity posed a far greater challenge to fiction than in the preceding generation. In his essay on the phenomenal success of the American illustrated periodicals for Literature magazine (June 11, 1898), James maintains that “pictures, in that mild

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age, besides being scant, were, blissfully, too bad to do harm—harm, I mean, of course, to the general or particular air of literary authority.” Nowadays, however, the “attraction of the picture” has “immitigably led to the reduction of the text. In the distribution of space it is the text that has come off worst.” For James the “extraordinary expansion” of the pictorial also signaled the contraction of public expectations for more serious and demanding literature. The real threat to literary authority, over and above a general improvement in the illustrator’s art, was the audience’s growing appetite for a more vivid and immediate reading experience and the publishing industry’s increasingly sophisticated and aggressive means for satisfying it. This chapter considers how periodical publication in the final decade of the century left its mark on James’s short stories, not just on their material appearance but on their content and composition. To convey the scope of technological advances in print culture during James’s time, I begin with a sampling of illustrations for James’s short fiction from the late 1860s through the early 1890s, at which point the preeminence of the elite magazines gave way to the advertising-based economy of newer publications. Then, to explore the hermeneutic implications of this “magazine revolution” for our reading of James’s short fiction, I offer four case studies of his illustrated tales of the 1890s, starting with a comparison of visual treatments for a story that was issued simultaneously in English and American journals in 1891. Succeeding case studies examine tales published around the turn of the century in widely divergent venues: Harper’s Bazar, a specialized-audience magazine; Collier’s Weekly: An Illustrated Journal and Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, both mass-market periodicals; and the Century Illustrated Magazine, an established belletristic journal. Each case focuses on a specific interpretive issue raised by the given publication: the various ways in which magazines imagined their reader-spectators, the uneasy relationship of James’s fiction to the editorial practices of the specialty venues and advertising-sponsored forums in which it appeared, and the collective effects of these circumstances on the subjects and structures of James’s later stories about artists and authors. Consideration of the contemporary publishing milieu points us toward a reevaluation of the tales and their place in his oeuvre. As one


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scholar has recently noted, “Brooksmith,” one of James’s briefest stories, “has been reported among the least complex” (Drummond 70). Critical analysis of “Paste” tends to focus on James’s elaboration of plots borrowed from Maupassant. “The Real Right Thing” is usually read in terms of James’s objections to journalistic invasions of the private lives of celebrated authors. Yet when these fictions are viewed in their original settings, we can also see how and why, whatever other themes and concerns they articulate, James’s stories of the period betray his anxieties regarding the attenuated relationship of the author to his audience and the imperiled position of belles lettres in the heterogeneous, commercialized, and visually oriented space of the new magazines. Improvements in the production of visual materials for the magazines during the final decades of the nineteenth century can easily be gauged by comparing the illustrations for James’s earliest stories with those published further along in his career. Three of his stories appeared in the Galaxy (1866–78), “An Illustrated Magazine of Entertaining Reading” that had been launched as New York’s answer to the New England coterie of genteel literary publications like the Atlantic (Chielens 139). Each issue of the Galaxy featured at least one wood engraving, and Gaston Fay’s frontispiece for “The Story of a Masterpiece” (January–February 1868) is representative, a bland affair that neither disrupts nor contributes to the text. Illustrators of the time depended on engravers to reproduce facsimiles of their designs on wood blocks, inevitably at the expense of the artist’s individual style. To delineate contour, Estelle Jussim explains, the engraver must rely on showing “the outer edge of objects as determined by cross section or profile at their maximum extension in space, rather than on the illusionistic definition of either surface textures, surface undulations, or light and shade” (23). Due in part to the limitations of black-line engraving, Fay’s illustration does little more than suggest the two-dimensional outline of figures against a generalized backdrop (Figure 3). The next two stories James published in the Galaxy that year, “A Problem” (June) and “Osborne’s Revenge” (July), were illustrated by another house artist, W. J. Hennessy. Hennessy’s work for the American publication (he was to move back to his native England in 1870), at least as it was interpreted by engravers, drew mixed reviews from contributing authors: Mott quotes Fannie Kemble’s “disgust” at Hennessy’s portrait

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Figure 3. Gaston Fay’s frontispiece for “The Story of a Masterpiece” in the Galaxy, January 1868.

of her for the Galaxy and Rebecca Harding Davis’s enthusiastic praise of his illustration for one of her poems (3: 379). Hennessy’s illustrations for James, although more elaborate than Fay’s, are unremarkable apart from a certain stiffness of execution and design (Figure 4). In the following decades, viewers’ expectations for more “scientific,” naturalistic representations of the world, along with readers’ tastes for more “realistic” repre sentations in literature, were nurtured by improvements in printing techniques that enabled the replication of images in larger runs and on the same page as the letterpress. Figure 4. “And she tore the letter twice across, and threw the scraps into the sea.” W. J. Hennessy’s illustration for “Osborne’s Revenge” in the Galaxy, July 1868.


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Compare Hennessy’s earlier drawing with those he made for James’s “Nona Vincent,” published in the English Illustrated Magazine in February–March 1892 (Figure 5). The later story is profusely illustrated, one might say intrusively so. In the years between these projects, Hennessy’s draftsmanship had evolved: the figures are slightly suppler, the backgrounds more elaborate. Even so, in themselves the drawings are only of moderate interest, contributing little to one’s sense of narrative development or differentiation of character. The real strength of their visual impression derives from nonmimetic features: their frequency, size relative to the text, and placement,1 all of which were made possible by the new techniques for combining images and letterpress. “Nona Vincent,” a tale composed in the thick of James’s involvement with the stage, concerns a struggling playwright who embraces the “scenic idea” of dramatic composition, as did James himself at this time.

Figure 5. From W. J. Hennessy’s illustrations for “Nona Vincent” in the English Illustrated Magazine, February–March 1892.

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The young writer comes to perceive the dramatic form everywhere he looks: “If he stopped, in the London dusk, before some flaring shop window, the place immediately constituted itself behind footlights, became a framed stage for his figures.” Hennessy’s stream of illustrations provides a visual enactment of the “scenic method.” Placed midpage and often on facing pages, the images form a continuous visual scenario, connecting the three parts of the serialized story with a distinctive pictorial rhetoric.2 The captioned sequence moves along with the story in ways that recall experiments in moving pictures around this time. By the mid-1880s most magazines were adopting an array of photographic “process” techniques for transferring the artist’s drawing directly onto a metal plate. Ink was rolled onto the treated plate, adhering to the lines of the photographed image, after which the plate was dipped in a chemical agent that ate away the uninked portions, biting the drawing in relief on the plate. By eliminating much of the work of the engraver, mechanical processes coupled speed and economy of production with greater fidelity to the artist’s line. Toward the end of the decade, with the introduction of photographic “halftone” processes, printers could reproduce the shadows and tonal gradations of an artist’s modeling techniques as well as the textures of diverse media like gouache and watercolor (Figure 6).3 The pictures reproduced in the following pages illustrate the technical and graph ic means by which drawings, Figure 6. Eric Pape’s chiaroscuro halftone for the “frame tale” of “The Turn of the Screw” in Collier’s Weekly, January–April 1898. The caption is loosely drawn from the story’s prologue: “The next night by the corner of the hearth, in the best chair . . . Douglas began to read.”


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paintings, news photographs, and advertising images competed with the written text in increasingly importunate terms. As Michael Camille observes of medieval illuminated texts, “Once the manuscript page becomes a matrix of visual signs and is no longer one of flowing linear speech, the stage is set not only for supplementation and annotation but also for disagreement and juxtaposition” (21). So when James spoke out at the end of the century against the incursion of the pictorial, he was commenting not only on the greater competence and proliferation of the illustrations but on a vast array of other visual elements that dominated the magazines from the mid-1890s onward, from bold typefaces and color printing to photojournalism and the “circular ton of advertising” that became “a condition attached” to modern periodicals. Just as important, he was responding to a dramatic change in styles of communicating and reading images during the final years of the century. The development of halftone reproduction signaled a perceptual shift that later commentators like Jussim and Harris would characterize as the visual orientation toward verisimilitude, toward more seemingly “objective” and authoritative pictorial representation. More than simply a technological innovation, according to Harris, this was “an iconographical revolution of the first order” (307), a paradigm shift that would have profound consequences for the work James produced during this, his most prolific period of magazine publication.

The Transatlantic Faces of “Brooksmith” This first case study contrasts two simultaneously published versions of “Brooksmith” (1891) to show how differing visual presentations of the same material at once reflected and molded different interpretive stances for James’s readers. Such discrepancies, and their implications for the reception of his fiction, were not lost on the author as he pursued periodical venues in England and the United States. Ever since Daisy Miller had been pirated in the States, James had taken pains to protect the sale of his work on both sides of the Atlantic. The publication of “Brooksmith” marked an especially intense phase in his cultivation of international venues, partly the result of disappointments James had recently experienced at the hands of his American and English publishers and editors. In March 1890 Frederick Macmillan

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informed him that he could offer only modest financial terms for The Tragic Muse because “the commercial result of the last few books we have published for you has been anything but satisfactory,” prompting James to reply, “Unless I can put the matter on a more remunerative footing all round, I shall give up my English ‘market’—heaven save the market! & confine myself to my American. But I must experiment a bit first—& to experiment is of course to say farewell to you” (Moore 159–61). A reconciliation of sorts was soon effected by Alexander P. Watt, the literary agent James had hired in 1888 to deal with the English periodicals, but the rebuff had been galling, as were two encounters later that year with editorial censorship. In the summer of 1890 James wrote to Henry Mills Alden, the editor of Harper’s Monthly, charging Alden with “mutilating” his translation of Alphonse Daudet’s novel Port Tarascon by cutting a chapter the editor feared magazine readers would find “blasphemous.” In his history of the company, J. Henry Harper quotes Alden’s response to James’s letter of protest: We have never for a moment thought of omitting the chapter from the volume. As to the omission from the magazine, it must have occurred to you that we would not have sacrificed matter and illustrations for which we had paid so much without some weighty reason for doing so. . . . Readers choose their books; but the magazine is pledged against offense to any of its patrons. (House of Harper 620)

Then in November James learned that Horace Scudder of the Atlantic had turned down “The Pupil,” a tale the author regarded as “a little masterpiece of compression.” Sensing another instance of censorship, whether in response to his depiction of a family of American ne’er-dowells or to the central relationship between the young pupil and his tutor, James replied, “I could not see that it was a performance that the Atlantic ought to have declined—nor banish from my mind the reflection that the responsibility, in any case, as regards the readers of the magazine, the public, should, when it’s a question of an old and honorable reputation, be left with the author himself ” (Letters 3: 338–39). Following this contretemps James decided not to submit “Brooksmith” to the Atlantic as planned and instead sought out alternative venues in England with the help of Alexander Watt. As West observes,


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the diversification of the literary market during the period leading up to the Anglo-American copyright agreement of 1891 gave rise to the creation of a new professional class of literary agents, and James was among the first to avail himself of these services. Existing letterbooks for Watt’s firm give us some sense of how the author and his agent worked in tandem on the publication of James’s short fiction during April and May 1891.4 It was James’s suggestion that Watt try placing one of his stories with Black and White, an illustrated literary magazine that had recently debuted in London. According to subsequent correspondence, Watt arranged for publication of “Sir Edmund Orme” (appearing in November 1891) and “The Real Thing” (April 1892) in Black and White, and of “Greville Fane” in the Illustrated London News, both magazines having requested shorter stories (the latter, according to Watt, specifying nothing longer than seven thousand words). It is likely that Watt also brokered the placement of “Brooksmith,” which appeared in Black and White on May 2, 1891. On the same day, “Brooksmith” appeared stateside in Harper’s Weekly, the general-interest tabloid that Harper & Brothers had modeled on the Illustrated London News. Although Watt had dealings with James Osgood, the London representative for Harper & Brothers, concerning the negotiation of American rights under the new copyright agreement, James was also in touch with Osgood at the time and might have made his own arrangements with Harper through him. Letters from James to Osgood in 1889–90 concerning other Harper’s business show that although the author much preferred publication in Harper’s Monthly, he was willing to settle for the less prestigious Weekly magazine.5 In Harper’s Weekly, “Brooksmith” was illustrated with a single unsigned title drawing by Charles Howard Johnson. Contained within a decorative cartouche, the eponymous figure of the butler is shown frowning slightly and gazing downward at the tray he bears, a caricature of dour civility (Figure 7). The headpiece for the same story in Black and White (reprinted at the beginning of this chapter) displays a photograph of the famous author alongside a sketch of a scale balancing Cupid and a pile of coins.6 John H. Bacon, a staff artist, provided three additional illustrations for the story, each occupying the middle third of the textual page. The illustrator has

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Figure 7. Title sketch for “Brooksmith” in Harper’s Weekly, May 2, 1891.

selected points in the story for emphasis, and the art editor has enlarged these moments of recognition for the reader by wrapping the text around the picture, literally suspending the narrative. Suzanne Lewis describes how interpolated images collectively shape and supplement reader response: “By construing for the eye a configurative meaning in the sense of ‘putting things together,’ gaps between written and unwritten texts that would conventionally be worked out in the reader’s mind are ‘pictured for the imagination’” (15). Where Harper’s offers a stereotypical image of the butler, the Black and White drawings collectively present an individualized portrait through the modeling of facial expression, the portrayal of distinctive figural attitudes, and the mutual orientation of the figures within plausibly rendered spaces. As a visual ensemble, Bacon’s illustrations imply that Brooksmith’s connection to his employer is, more than simply a matter of service, a sign of correspondence and sympathy between the two men. Consider how meaning accrues in the gaps between the three fictional moments foregrounded by the illustrator (shown seriatum in Figure 8). The story’s unnamed narrator—one of the circle of devotés to literature and conversation that regularly convenes at Oliver Offord’s home—tells us that Offord used to read passages to his butler out of Montaigne and Figure 8 (opposite). John H. Bacon’s illustrations for “Brooksmith” in Black and White, May 2, 1891: Offord reading to Brooksmith (top); Brooksmith in Offord’s sickroom (middle); Brooksmith convalescing (bottom).

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Saint-Simon, “for he read perpetually when he was alone—when they were alone, I should say—and Brooksmith was always about” (CS 3: 763). The first drawing in Figure 8 shows master and servant together: the butler, leaning over a table lamp, turns attentively toward his seated employer, who reads aloud and gestures toward the listener. In the second scene Brooksmith appears among the select group admitted to Offord’s sickroom, although he stands somewhat deferentially apart, as if still arranging for the dying man’s now “sadly shrunken little salon.” The third drawing depicts a moment that occurs well before the conclusion of the tale. Bacon might just as logically have illustrated the narrator’s last glimpse of Brooksmith, in service at an anonymous host’s dinner party, looking fit but expressionless—something like the figure in the Harper’s headpiece. (James’s narrator observes, “If I had not known him I should have taken him, on the showing of his countenance, for an extravagant illustration of irresponsive servile gloom.”) Instead, the artist refers us to the moment when the narrator visits the unemployed butler, convalescent after an illness in his rooms in a “sordid street” in Marylebone. In this scene in the story Brooksmith’s mother and aunt are also in attendance, but neither the narrator nor the women are pictured here. The solitary invalid, propped in a chair with a blanket over his legs, glances up with furrowed brow toward a point beyond the frame, as if to note the entrance of his visitor. His position mirrors the seated figure of Offord in the first picture of the sequence, and this subtle doubling underscores the fact that the butler, far from being cared for as his employer had been, is now abandoned by the members of the circle that had flourished under his artful ministrations. By contrasting the fates of the two characters, one ensconced in the cozy domesticity of the first two pictures and the other confined to the shallow and sketchy space of the last vignette, the illustrations bring to the fore the inequities of a social hierarchy that is taken for granted by the narrator and reinforced by the other characters in the story.7 This is not to conclude that the story printed under the cartoonish banner in Harper’s necessarily made American readers less sympathetic toward the subject, nor even that English readers paid close attention to the pictures that figured prominently in the pages of Black and White. What we can observe in these contrasting treatments is the distance


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between the two venues with regard to the readership each posits and cultivates. Nancy Glazener points out that every periodical “provokes certain kinds of attention and creates certain interpellating identifications for its readers. It is perfectly possible, therefore, to make inferences about the reading formation created by any given periodical, with the understanding that because readers can be familiar consumers of various periodicals as well as of other kinds of texts, reading formations can overlap or even interpellate the same reader in conflicting ways” (189). The English publication of “Brooksmith” supposes a reader with a more nuanced view of the class structures represented in the story, a perspective that is reflected in and in turn inflected by the selection, expressivity, placement, size, and sequence of the drawings. J. Hillis Miller characterizes the relationship of a text and its illustration as “a continual back and forth movement which is incarnated in the experience of the reader as his eyes move from words to picture and back again, juxtaposing the two in a mutual establishment of meaning” (Victorian Fiction 2n3). With the reciprocal heuristic of image and text, the presentation of “Brooksmith” in Black and White brings to the surface a submerged theme in the narrative, that of the radical disruption in the nature of readership during the heyday of illustrated periodicals. James’s text repeatedly refers to authors and scenes of reading: to Offord reading aloud from volumes by Montaigne and Saint-Simon; to celebrated authors like Byron and the “dying Voltaire,” whom Offord resembles in his sickbed; to the companionable match of speakers and listeners “breathing the very atmosphere of criticism” in the salon. Reading and literary discussion are portrayed as leisurely activities conducted within a genteel circle of like-minded peers gathered “round the fine old last century chimney-piece” in the “somewhat superannuated house”—pursuits, that is, preserved by the deliberate pace of a privileged life that seems to pass with the death of Offord. At that point Brooksmith must relinquish the “struggle for the poetry” at Offord’s side for “the mercenary prose of butlerhood” in other people’s houses. By highlighting James’s sympathetic pairing of reader and listener (and even interpolating a figure of his own, perhaps a clergyman, reading aloud at Offord’s bedside in Figure 8), the illustrator calls our attention to the bond between texts and readers or listeners held together

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by a commonality of values and habits—a relationship for which James expressed a certain longing in his letters and memoirs and whose passing he commemorates in stories like this one. If James’s narrative is ambiguous regarding Brooksmith’s understanding of the literary texts mentioned in the story, a matter complicated by the alternately sympathetic and condescending attitude of the narrator toward the butler, it is perfectly clear as to Brooksmith’s “intense” if silent receptiveness to what is being read and discussed. In his Preface to the story in the New York Edition, James singles out Brooksmith’s “habit of quiet attention, his faculty of appreciation.” These are the same qualities the author ascribes to his ideal reader in the Preface for the final volume of the Edition. It is the “reciprocity” between Mr. Offord, the “Master,” and his attendant, who is more “intimate friend” than servant,8 that the artist emphasizes in the Black and White illustrations. The scattered members of Offord’s salon note when they meet in passing, “Yes, you too have been in Arcadia”—the narrator’s thriceinvoked term for the carefully tended “garden” of intellectual fellowship over which Brooksmith once presided. The narrator glimpses the butler in service at large and indiscriminate gatherings where “there was plenty of beef and beer, but there was no reciprocity”: “It was the world of cheerful commonplace and conscious gentility and prosperous density, a full-fed, material, insular world, a world of hideous florid plate and ponderous order and thin conversation. There was not a word said about Byron. . . . We were in intellectual sympathy—we felt, as regards each other, a kind of social responsibility. In short we had been in Arcadia together, and we had both come to this!” (771). Howard Pearce discusses James’s use of the Arcadian reference in the story to signal the intrusion of death in the salon, which has served as an idealized retreat from the urban maze beyond Mansfield Street (Pearce 839). I would subjoin that with this reference, James—like Poussin painting “et in Arcadia ego” on the tomb of the shepherd—projects into the fictional milieu his own presence as well. 9 By this I mean to emphasize the personal resonance of the classical topos for James, who would use it again in his autobiography to convey his elegiac sense of the sympathetic community that had been lost in the expanses of the modern literary forum. In Notes of a Son and Brother, James invokes


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the Arcadian metaphor to recall the “collective sensibility” of readership that had evolved with the slow sovereign progress of serial fiction during the early years of the periodicals. He looks back to the “mild age” that witnessed “the prolonged ‘coming-out’ of the Newcomes, yellow number by number,” when readers could “take the great generalized participation in the process for a sort of basking in the light of distinction.” Succeeding decades, he concludes, have brought a “merciless change” in the periodicals, “so that through whatever bristling mazes we may now pick our way it is not to find them open into any such vales of Arcady” (Notes 252). In the “tales of the author” he published in the periodicals after “Brooksmith,” James revisited several times over the intimate scene of what might literally be termed “close reading,” similarly valorizing the activity as a conversation in which an author reads to, or together with, an appreciative audience of one. In “Nona Vincent,” the aspiring writer reads his play aloud to his sympathetic muse. In “The Middle Years” (Scribner’s Magazine, May 1893), Dencombe and Dr. Hugh are both reading Dencombe’s new novel when they meet by the sea at Bournemouth. The narrator of “The Death of the Lion” (Yellow Book, April 1894) listens spellbound as Neil Paraday reads his projected scheme for a new book: “His reading of the epistle, at any rate, made me feel as if I were, for the advantage of posterity, in close correspondence with him—were the distinguished person to whom it had been affectionately addressed” (CS 4: 860–61). The loss of this “close correspondence” haunts the characters of “Brooksmith” as it would their creator, who was to recall the autobiographical scene of his cousin reading Dickens aloud in the James family parlor with equal intensity. Charles Johanningsmeier observes that the newspaper syndication of two stories by James in 1884 “almost certainly created a wide disparity between what James . . . intended to say with these stories, what modern readers make of them, and how contemporary newspaper readers interpreted them.” He maintains that James left no written record of how he felt about the welter of ads, news items, and headlines surrounding his work in the popular press (37). On the contrary, the record is in the fiction. In “The Death of the Lion,” Paraday’s sequestered garden is invaded by the representative of “‘a syndicate of influential journals,

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no less than thirty-seven’”—and in consequence, the distinguished author is swept up, fatally, in the train of fashionable society. The writer’s unread “epistle” passes from one careless hand to another until it disappears, probably left behind in a railroad compartment. The narrative of “Brooksmith” similarly moves from the Arcadia of intellectual community to an impersonal milieu of “prosperous density” and “thin conversation” and thence into the urban maze, where the title character of this brief story ultimately vanishes, his fate unknowable, from the storyteller’s purview. As Barbara Hochman has noted, James was hardly alone in his apprehension of the dispersal of the literary salon or in his anxious uncertainty as to whom he addressed in the expanding culture of the periodicals. Christopher P. Wilson observes that by the turn of the century, other writers were detecting “the beginnings of a transformation in the reading process itself ” and decrying “an impending demise in the traditionally conceived ‘gentle reader’” along with the disappearance of literary conventions like the author’s direct address of that assumed reader (41). James, we know, applauded the passing of the intrusive narrator, arguing in his essays that the noisy authorial presence had no place in the realist project. All the same, in “Brooksmith” he gave allegorical form to what he perceived as the displacement of more leisurely reading practices in the bristling new publishing milieu, along with a lamentable decline in the fellowship that had been implied in the author’s direct and personal address of his gentle reader. Amy Kaplan’s description of William Dean Howells’s reactions to these same changes in the publishing industry brings James’s allegory in “Brooksmith” into sharper focus: Rather than converse with a known community of “gentle readers,” new editors of cheaper magazines actively created both their product and audience through aggressive managerial and marketing techniques. Upon leaving his editorial position [at the Atlantic], Howells still tried to keep a foot in both publishing worlds . . . [writing] a regular column for Harper’s Monthly from 1886 to 1892 entitled “Editor’s Study.” The first column describes “the study” as a gentleman’s library, a retreat from the exigencies of the business world—“the Grub Street traditions of literature.” Howells envisions the activity of criticism as polite conversation with a reader invited “to sit at fine ease, and talk over . . . such matters of literary interest as may come up from time to time.” This conversation, however, becomes


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a monologue, as the reader is not “allowed to interrupt” and “is reduced to silence.” . . . In the “Editor’s Study” the desire for an intimate yet silenced reader attests to Howells’s fears of losing control over a recognizable audience. (18–19)

With the growth of the mass-circulation press, the commonality of interests and values implied by the fictional “conversation” between earlier generations of writers and their readers could no longer be assumed.10 In Matthew Schneirov’s apt summation, the reading process had moved out of the private space of the parlor and into the unstable public sphere. James’s anxieties about the fraying bond between the author and his audience flickered like revenants about his tales of the early 1890s. As the decade progressed, fictional references to his experiences with the magazines became increasingly explicit, to the extent that they might be said to constitute James’s subtler version of the direct authorial intrusions he had forsworn. Within the narrative frame of literary realism he thus managed to convey his aims, methods, and frustrations as a high-literary writer working in a mass-print medium, and on this metalevel of discourse he attempted to approach nearer the public even as he felt it slipping farther away.

“The [Two] Faces” in the Specialty Magazine This case study and the one that follows are offered in corroboration of James’s perception of the widening gaps between the author, the audience, and the text. In August 1899 James arranged to purchase Lamb House; between September 1899 and March of the following year, feeling low on cash and approbation, he turned out more than a dozen short stories, brokering most of them through his newly hired agent, James B. Pinker, to periodicals ranging widely in audience, format, and quality. The publication of the story originally called “The Faces” demonstrates the mixed results of their efforts, for this tale, too, wound up in both American and English periodicals—in the former with pictures and in the latter as plain text. As noted in Chapter 1, “The Faces” had been rejected in December 1899 by Bliss Perry, Horace Scudder’s successor at the Atlantic. For the next three months Pinker must have tried without success to place the story in England, because James’s letter to his agent at the end of March 1900 complains that cutting his stories down to five thousand words for the London

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market “leads to nothing—since The Faces has so gone a-begging” (Za James, Box 1). After protracted wanderings, the story improbably landed in the Christmas issue of Harper’s Bazar, then as now a women’s fashion magazine, perhaps because of the story’s ostensible theme of fashionable dress, and likely owing to the intercession of James’s friend Howells, who was at the time contributing a series of essays to Bazar. Six months later, Pinker having negotiated the British rights to the story,11 an unadorned version of the tale, renamed “The Two Faces,” appeared in the more staid surroundings of Cornhill Magazine between articles on Brighton by Mrs. Richmond Ritchie and rook shooting by C. J. Cornish. Harper’s Bazar had been launched by the firm in 1867 as a weekly “Repository of Fashion, Pleasure and Instruction,” becoming over time more specialized in its appeal and notably upgrading its literary offerings when Elizabeth Jordan assumed editorship following the financial reorganization of Harper & Brothers in 1899. An advertisement for the “NEW BAZAR” under different editorial management as of May 5, 1900, announces that the reconfigured magazine “will contain the best short stories, the best pictures, the best essays, and the best fashions to be found in any woman’s journal in the world.”12 Although more recent competitors in the women’s market like the Ladies’ Home Journal addressed a broader, middle-class audience, Bazar, the industry’s doyenne, continued to target an elite readership, even as it maintained a weekly cover price of ten cents (the magazine would become a monthly in 1901). Its European fashion plates, columns on “the servant question,” otiose do-it-yourself projects, and works of fiction generally projected an idealized version of this up-market, largely urban, female audience.13 For the December 15 issue in which “The Faces” appeared, F. Luis Mora’s cover, printed in color, envisions Woman as Pre-Raphaelite demiurge (Figure 9). Within, one finds handicrafts and holiday recipes clearly designed for a woman who has servants to prepare and serve Christmas dinner for twelve. Halftone wash drawings by noted artist William Glackens depict New York at Christmastime in suitably posh visual terms: “Christmas Eve Games” played in an elaborately furnished parlor (Figure 10); a “White Christmas on the Upper East Side”; and “A Typical Toy-Shop Window,” with well-dressed tots transfixed before the display of bounty (Figure 11).

Figure 9. Christmas issue of Harper’s Bazar, December 15, 1900, cover by F. Luis Mora and illustrations for do-it-yourself projects.

Figure 10. “Christmas Eve Games.” William Glackens’s illustration in Harper’s Bazar, December 15, 1900.

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If the general objec tive of the illustrated magazines was to promote a world, as Jennifer Scanlon writes, where “both pleasure and leisure were linked to consumer pursuits,” women’s magazines in particular sought “to naturalize women’s link to the marketplace through consumption” (12–13). Just as the do mestic novel in late Victorian England “legitimatFigure 11. “A Typical Toy-Shop Window.” William ed female consumption Glackens’s illustration in Harper’s Bazar, December by advancing and ex15, 1900. ploiting the . . . tension between the material and immaterial components of commodity culture” (Richards 103), so the articles and fiction in women’s magazines served a similiar legitimating function. In A Hazard of New Fortunes, William Dean Howells humorously describes this trend as the ewig Weibliche principle of adding high-toned literature to the magazine mix to show “women triumphing . . . or else suffering tremendously” (141). To this end, the women’s magazines represented their readers not simply as guardians of the household and chief procurers of its goods but as participants in the larger civic and cultural community. Like its competitors, for instance, Bazar ran a regular column on the women’s organizations that flourished in the United States during this period.14 The December 15 column reports on regional activities such as the Racine, Wisconsin, club’s review of current literature on the position of women and the mission statement issued by the Woman’s Era Club of Boston regarding “the broadening and deepening of woman’s sphere and opportunities.” A case of discrimination against an African American member is noted and admonished with the policy statement that “the General Federation of Women’s Clubs has no color line in its constitution.”


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Other articles in the same issue evince a related interest in expanding the performance of gender roles. A piece signed by Sarah Bernhardt, “Men’s Roles Played by Women,” is accompanied by a photograph of the actress as Hamlet, a role that had entered her repertoire in 1899. An essay from Howells’s ongoing series “Heroines of 19th-Century Fiction” salutes Thackeray’s Ethel Newcome, “who has come to the knowledge of right and wrong by the use of her own sense, and has finally chosen the right through a love of it,” and Brontë’s Jane Eyre, “vivid . . . passionate, as well as good, conscientious, devoted.” In subject and setting James’s story would at first seem to conform to the magazine’s representation of a fashionable upper-class milieu in which women figure as prominent social arbiters. But the relationship of “The Faces” to the publication in which it was placed more or less by default turns out to be uncomfortably antagonistic. Whereas the magazine’s emphasis on cooperation within the women’s community cloaks the competitive and elitist aspects of fashionable consumerism, James exposes these harsher motives in his story of a socialite who publicly sabotages her rival by deploying haute couture as her weapon of choice. One might argue that the theme of women’s commodity status in the marriage market was written far more explicitly into fictions such as Wharton’s House of Mirth, serialized with resounding success in Scribner’s Magazine in 1905. But unlike Wharton, who had the cushion of being represented by a single publishing house for decades and a fairly secure berth in Scribner’s flagship journal, James at this point in his career reached out to all takers on both sides of the Atlantic, from the Yellow Book—the deluxe Aesthetic manifesto about which he privately expressed serious reservations—to assorted tabloids and ten-centers. The resulting publication of “The Faces” in a fashion vehicle like Bazar, as opposed to its appearance in a belletristic journal like Cornhill, troubled the matter of audience reception in ways surely unanticipated by the author and his editor. The tale, although quite fine—and, as its author noted, remarkably compact—has found little purchase in the Jamesian canon, perhaps because it is such a nasty piece of work. Mrs. Grantham, a beautiful woman with a somewhat louche romantic history as well as “a splendour of taste and a sense of effect,” has been thrown over by Lord Gwyther

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and has since taken up with a new man, Shirley Sutton. Lord Gwyther, who has recently married, asks Mrs. Grantham to guide his young and inexperienced bride through the complicated rituals of their social set. She consents. Soon afterward she displays the results of her artistry at Burbeck, a magnificent country estate where some thirty onlookers, including Mr. Sutton, have assembled to witness the spectacle. The unfortunate bride, having been worked over by Mrs. Grantham’s dressmaker, makes her entrance in a ridiculously elaborate costume: “[Sutton] saw many things—too many, and they appeared to be feathers, frills, excrescences of silk and lace—massed together and conflicting, and after a moment also saw struggling out of them a small face that struck him as either scared or sick” (CS 5: 357). Another guest, the aptly named Miss Banker, an authoritative keeper of the social register, pronounces Lady Gwyther’s fate: “Here, you know, that sort of thing’s grave. The poor creature’s lost. . . . Her husband, who’s proud, won’t like her the better for it” (358). What Sutton finally perceives behind the beautiful pathos of the wife’s face is the monstrously triumphant visage of Mrs. Grantham, whom he now abandons, as Lord Gwyther had done before him. Albert Herter’s stylish illustrations for Bazar (Figures 12, 13, 14) show Sutton and Mrs. Grantham in tastefully appointed surroundings and successive poses suggesting the latter’s growing social power.15 In the final, full-page drawing, the two stand at left foreground on the lawns at Burbeck, their profiles turned toward a small blurred figure in the background, the “little person very young and very much dressed” announced by the caption. Mrs. Grantham, who has “felt herself a figure for the forefront of the stage and indeed would have been recognized by anyone at a glance as the prima donna assoluta,” is by contrast in splendid possession of the scene. Tightly corseted and minimally trimmed, gesturing with her pearl necklace in one hand, she leans lightly on her parasol, a slight smile playing beneath the veil that clings to her face and neck. Her erect presence looms large and substantial before Sutton’s fainter outline. Viewed in any publication context, the story asks to be read as a condemnation of the superficial values of the moneyed upper class. James’s disembodied narrator affirms that “it is . . . with Sutton’s total impression that we are particularly and almost exclusively concerned,” and the story consistently persuades us to “see” the awful drama through

Figure 12. Albert Herter’s title-page illustration for “The Faces” in Harper’s Bazar, December 15, 1900.

Figure 13. “They made that up afterwards in an angle of a drawing-room.” Albert Herter’s illustration of Mrs. Grantham and Shirley Sutton for “The Faces” in Harper’s Bazar, December 15, 1900.

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S utton’s eyes—that is, to censure Mrs. Grantham and her social set for not recognizing the ugliness of Mrs. Grantham’s revenge and the poignant beauty of its victim. As J. Peter Dyson points out, the story turns the “aesthetic act” of clothing oneself beautifully into a consideration of its moral implications. James’s intertwined metaphors of theatrical spectacle (or gladiatorial combat) and commercial transaction implicitly argue that the concept of womanhood Figure 14. “A little person very young and very much is constructed in terms dressed had come out of the house.” Albert Herter’s of specularity and ritufull-page illustration of Mrs. Grantham and Sutton alized performance. On for “The Faces” in Harper’s Bazar, December 15, 1900. these terms women are appraised and bartered, like Mrs. Grantham and her successor in Lord Gwyther’s affections, as commodities in the social exchange. Eligible women are virtually interchangeable with the other luxury items on display at Burbeck, together constituting “with multiplied tables and glittering plate, with rugs and cushions and ices and fruit and wonderful porcelain and beautiful women, a scene of splendour, almost an incident of grand opera” (355). Metaphors of commerce and performance are seamlessly conjoined in scenes like the following between Sutton and Miss Banker just before the story’s denouement: This knowledge he extracted from Miss Banker, who was always the first to present herself at any gathering that was to enjoy her, and whom, moreover— partly on that very account—the wary not less than the speculative were apt to


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hold themselves well-advised to engage with at as early as possible a stage of the business. She was stout, red, rich, mature, universal—a massive, much-fingered volume, alphabetical, wonderful, indexed, that opened of itself at the right place. She opened for Sutton instinctively at G——, which happened to be remarkably convenient. “What she’s really waiting over for is to bring down Lady Gwyther.” “Ah, the Gwythers are coming?” “Yes; caught, through Mrs. Grantham, just in time. She’ll be the feature— everyone wants to see her. . . . “Because so much depends for the girl—in the way of the right start or the wrong start—on the signs and omens of this first appearance. It’s a great house and a great occasion, and we’re assembled here, it strikes me, very much as the Roman mob at the circus used to be to see the next Christian maiden brought out to the tigers.” (CS 5: 353, 355)

Donatella Izzo, citing Judith Butler, observes that James’s fiction in general often represents gender identity “as continuously produced and reproduced through its expressions, through its codified staging” (180–81). In “The Faces,” the author’s depiction of the savagery of what he repeatedly and ironically calls “the high social code” operating at Burbeck makes this point precisely. Butler’s comments on gender coding clarify what is at stake in the spectacle at Burbeck: Performativity cannot be understood outside of a process of iterability, a regularized and constrained repetition of norms. . . . This iterability implies that “performance” is not a singular “act” or event, but a ritualized production, a ritual reiterated under and through constraint, under and through the force of prohibition and taboo, with the threat of ostracism and even death controlling and compelling the shape of the production. (Bodies 95)

Readers of Harper’s Bazar found themselves in an awkwardly divided subject position regarding the story. The magazine’s seasonal coverage of fashion in the luxury market reinforced a culture of consumption that abhorred stylistic obsolescence and “bad taste”—the same negative values, in other words, that enable Mrs. Grantham to trump her benighted rival. Moreover, Herter’s illustrations were so close in size and manner to the magazine’s editorial fashion plates (by Ethel Rose and Caroline Love Goodwin, both regular contributors) that subscribers could not help recognizing a fictional world coterminous with their own—at least

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as that world was glossily represented in Bazar.16 And yet James’s and Herter’s standards of “good” and “bad” taste seem contradictory to those advanced in most of the fashion plates in the magazine. In Herter’s pictures, Mrs. Grantham appears in subdued outfits of modest cut and minimal fussiness. The fashions featured editorially in this particular issue, on the other hand, besides being more elaborate in design than those appearing in other women’s magazines of the moment, showcase costly materials in ways that seem conspicuous even by the luxurious standards of Bazar. On page after page in the Christmas issue one finds models enshrouded in serried furbelows and laces, their faces dwarfed by towering collars and voluminous fur wraps, their slender necks straining under hat brims weighted with plump nesting doves (Figure 15). However desirable these costumes appeared to contemporary readers of the magazine, James’s satire inevitably redounds to the fashion plates surrounding his fiction, so closely do they correspond to the “devilish” dressmaker’s fancies perpetrated under Mrs. Grantham’s direction on her trusting opponent.

Figure 15. “Evening cloak of rose brocade; yoke and cuffs of pink velvet; white lace drapery on hood” (left); “White felt hat with black velvet drapery and bow; two white doves as trimming” (center); “Street gown of blue cloth and chinchilla; long cutaway coat” (right). Fashion plates by Caroline Love Goodwin and Ethel Rose for Harper’s Bazar, December 15, 1900.


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We have seen that the editorial content of Bazar promulgated the free agency of women as political and economic forces in the marketplace. Readers were encouraged to rethink stereotypical women’s roles and to identify with the nobler instincts of well-known fictional heroines. They were engaged in discussions of social issues concerning the intersections of race, class, and gender. “The Faces” and its illustrations, on the contrary, exposed the larger patriarchal forces of class and gender management at work in the construction of the fashionable female consumer as a ruthless competitor for the male gaze. The story’s placement in the fashion magazine made James’s social critique seem sharper and more provocative than it appeared in the literary context of Cornhill, thus creating a comparatively adversarial frame for its American reception.

“The Real Right Thing” in the Mass Marketplace During the same period James published, with his agent’s help, in periodicals that proved, if anything, less hospitable than Harper’s Bazar. Whereas the quality journals of the Gilded Age were largely subscription supported and geared to a Northeastern-educated elite audience, mass-market journals relied on advertising revenues to lower cover prices and thereby attract a broader national audience of middle-class readers, including those living in rural areas who had not previously subscribed to magazines. The so-called ten-cent magazines, as Ellen Gruber Garvey points out, “took advantage of new technologies and economies of scale to offer more illustrations and livelier layouts than the elite magazines. Their interest in commerce and industry extended beyond the advertising pages into editorial selections as well” (9). The newer publications adopted the communication techniques of contemporary journalism, which had already begun to redefine the “news” as comprising not only current affairs but celebrity interviews, society notes, and sporting events. These features were covered via rapid information-gathering systems like the Associated Press, disseminated along with on-the-scene sketches and photographs, and trumpeted with eye-catching headlines and typefaces (Trachtenberg 122–24). With such consumer-oriented strategies Rob Collier set about refashioning his family’s magazine when he took over at Collier’s (founded

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in 1888 as Once a Week) in 1898. He began by recruiting illustrious authors and artists in an effort to capture a share of the audience of older and more prestigious periodicals. Collier later recalled of his publication of “The Turn of the Screw” (1898), “I had just come from Harvard with the idea that popular journalism needed a little true literary flavor. I showed my judgment of the public taste by ordering a serial story by Henry James. The illustrations were by John La Farge, and I have never Figure 16. Advance promotion for Collier’s Weekly, yet discovered what ei- 1900, citing plans for continuing war coverage ther the story or the pic- in the Philippines; sports features; short stories tures were about” (qtd. by James, Harte, and Crane; and “frequent and generous drawings” by artists such as Pyle and in Mott 4: 455). Herter. Collier’s friend and business manager, Condé Nast, raised advertising revenues and boosted circulation through “anticipatory” promotions designed to pique reader interest in the issue months ahead of the publication date. Figures 16 and 17 show how James’s name and image were used to promote Collier’s and another of the ten-cent venues, Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly. James might have been abashed, as he wrote to Howells, by Collier’s having “too portentously announced” his “unblushing pot-boiler of a ‘ghost story’” (Anesko, Letters 306). Nevertheless, “The Turn of the Screw” gave him his greatest popular success since Daisy Miller and prompted him to sell three more stories to Collier’s, despite his

Figure 17. Promotion for Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, 1900, featuring James’s name and image. On the previous page of its prospectus, Leslie’s proclaims, “The distinguished author [of ‘Paste’] . . . has rarely made such concession to the popular taste as in this little study of life in the modern ‘smart set’ of London.”


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complaints to Pinker about late payment— and despite the magazine’s rather hectic visual presentation of his work. The treatment of “The Turn of the Screw” typifies the heterogeneous layouts of the cheaper weeklies. Its stylistic mélange encompasses the “decadent” symbolism of La Farge’s headpiece and the linear art nouveau style of the decorative side panels (Figure 18) as well as the heightened graphic realism of Eric Pape’s full-page illustration of the frame tale for the governess’s narrative (see Figure 6).17 In subsequent presentations of James’s stories, the editors would

add pictorial advertisements to the mix. The managerial model of “anticipatory production” had unfortunate consequences for writers of fiction. As Christopher Wilson points out, the model “surfaced in new design mechanisms of format and editorial presence that attempted to control reader response” by guiding the direction, focus, and pace of the reader’s progress through the journal (55). This case study examines the publication of another of James’s stories in Collier’s, “The Real Right Thing” (December 16, 1899), for evidence of the ways in which literary authority was coopted by editorial policy and design format in the advertising environment of the ten-cent magazine.

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Figure 18. Headpiece by John La Farge for “The Turn of the Screw,” with decorative side panel (opposite), Collier’s Weekly, January 27–April 16, 1898.

James’s story concerns a young journalist who has been commissioned by the widow of a famous author to write a life of the artist, a project ultimately thwarted by the appearance of an uncanny presence guarding the deceased author’s private study. Critics generally agree that the tale is emblematic of James’s quarrel with the invasiveness of modern journalism and his counterargument that the artist’s “life” lay in his work: “The artist was what he did—he was nothing else” (CS 5: 124).18 The subject was much on James’s mind during this period as he worked desultorily, with a good deal of ambivalence, on his commissioned biography of William Wetmore Story. As a public figure, James had himself been pursued by interviewers and biographers. After his sister Alice’s death in 1892, he destroyed his copy of her diary, which he deemed too revealing of his private conversations, just as he would burn his own correspondence and ask friends and family to do the same. In 1896 James wrote to Sidney Colvin on the posthumous publication of their mutual friend Robert Louis Stevenson’s letters to express his pain at seeing a great man “so pursued to his innermost lair” by hungry booksellers and newspapers (LL 290). The pain must have been revived for him when Stevenson’s letters appeared serially in Scribner’s Magazine in 1899, while he was composing “The Real Right Thing.” The threatened exposure and eventual destruction of a celebrated


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author’s private papers had become a preoccupation in James’s shorter fiction. It furnished the subject for The Aspern Papers (Atlantic Monthly, March–May 1888) and resurfaced for a moment in the wife’s burning of the author’s “bad” and evidently very personal book in “The Lesson of the Master” (Universal Review, July–August 1888). In “Sir Dominick Ferrand” (originally titled “Jersey Villas” when it appeared, with illustrations, in Cosmopolitan in 1892, the year of Howells’s brief tenure there as editor), a fledgling author is tempted to publish the private letters of a public figure but finally decides to burn them.19 In “The Real Right Thing,” James goes so far as to summon a supernatural force—“Immense. But dim. Dark. Dreadful”—to protect the inner sanctum. This is a “potboiler ghost story,” following on the heels of the success of “The Turn of the Screw”; only here, significantly, James translates the haunting into a tale of authorship. “The Real Right Thing” centers on the struggle between the uncanny presence of the deceased “master” and the forces of publicity represented by the young journalist and the author’s widow (the latter resembling “some ‘decadent’ coloured print, some poster of the newest school”). Seen in the context of the story’s original publication in Collier’s, however, another looming threat to literary autonomy becomes visible. I would argue that what is being contested in the tale is not only access to the writer’s private papers—“diaries, letters, memoranda, notes, documents of many sorts,” which are now the widow’s “property, and wholly in her control”—but aegis over the author’s literary production, a contest that was being openly waged in the pages of the general-interest magazines where James now sought publication. Mark Seltzer and Daniel H. Borus have documented the steps by which the literary work came to be defined as “property” during the 1890s. The author’s work was defended in the professional journal of the Society of Authors, protected by international copyright law, measured by word or page count and

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compensated accordingly, brokered by full-time literary agents for the best possible return, and characterized by critics like Howells and James as being stamped by the author’s unique perspective and style (Seltzer 162–64; Borus 41–64). Yet at the same moment, an ascendant generation of publishers and editors in the realm of ten-cent magazines, cheap editions, and newspaper syndicates was supplanting the genteel standards and policies of its predecessors with more aggressive methods for assuming control of the literary property. For all his avowed concern with the “literary flavor” of the magazine, Rob Collier was typical of the younger generation in his orientation toward journalism and the bottom line. The rise of photography had stoked the public’s avidity for pictorial reportage, and following the perfection of the halftone in the 1880s, as Russell B. Nye notes, news pictures conveyed a visual impact, an impression of simultaneity and authenticity, that halftone drawings and even photogravures couldn’t offer (254–56). With its frontline pictorials and brash, plainspoken style, the “new journalism” drew on a distinctly masculinist, Rooseveltian ethos, evident, for example, in Collier’s on-site pictorial reportage on the continuing battle for U.S. dominance in the Philippines and implied in regular features like “Sport—Travel—Adventure” (Figures 19 and 20). Theodore Roosevelt’s earlier, weirdly gratuitous swipe at poor James comes to mind at this juncture. In a speech in 1884 at the Brooklyn Young Republican Club, according to the New York Times, Mr. Roosevelt said that his hearers had read to their sorrow the works of Henry James. He bore the same relation to other literary men that a poodle did to other dogs. The poodle had his hair combed and was somewhat ornamental, but never useful. . . . In Mr. Roosevelt’s opinion there were many traits in the “Poodle Henry James” that the independents of the Henry James order of intellect had in common. These men . . . were possessed of refinement and culture to see what was wrong, but possessed none of the robuster virtues that would enable them to come out and do the right. (October 16, 1884)

Alongside the punchy, graphic topicality of the features in Collier’s, James’s fiction was bound to appear effete and circumlocutory. The author’s self-consciously “literary” style might have been a selling point to consumer-driven magazines of the 1890s looking to upgrade their

Figure 19. “Ambushed in Luzon,” cover art for Collier’s Weekly, June 16, 1900.

Figure 20. “Sport—Travel—Adventure” feature in Collier’s Weekly, June 16, 1900.

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images, but it had also, for editors like Collier and Samuel McClure, become synonymous with “excessive concern with the niceties of expression, pathetic insistence on outmoded formalities of composition, and dry, lifeless subject matter” (Borus 45). Indeed, James’s essay “The Future of the Novel,” also published in 1899, seems to speak directly to the uncongenial conditions under which his experiments in short fiction were concurrently received in the mass-market periodicals: “A community addicted to reflection and fond of ideas,” he wrote, “will try experiments with the ‘story’ that will be left untried in a community mainly devoted to travelling and shooting, to pushing trade and playing football” (LC 1: 106). By the same standards, fanciful drawings like Howard Pyle’s headpiece for “The Real Right Thing” (Figure 21) were marginalized in the visual melee. Along with James and La Farge, Pyle had been added to the roster of prestigious contributors advertised by Collier’s. His headpiece depicts the ghostly apparition in the tale as a figure of ambiguous gender, enshrouded in a hooded cloak (the hood crowned with laurels) and pouring the last drops from an antique goblet. Pyle’s androgynous figure might have recalled for contemporary readers the much-reproduced image of “Grief,” the memorial for Clover Adams (completed in 1891) designed by Pyle’s friend Augustus St. Gaudens, a sculptor whose work inspired at least one of Pyle’s paintings.20

Figure 21. Headpiece by Howard Pyle for “The Real Right Thing” in Collier’s Weekly, December 16, 1899.


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More generally, Pyle’s illustrations, especially those with abstract themes of death, love, and spirituality, often made use of images derived from classical antiquity, showing figures with laurel-leaf crowns, scythes, goblets, and flowing drapery.21 Whatever his original sources, Pyle was in this case borrowing directly from his own archive, lifting a figure he had used for a reissue of Oliver Wendell Holmes’s popular volume The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (1894; Figure 22) and had adapted in numerous woodcuts for Harper’s Monthly, such as those for Howells’s “Stops of Various Quills” (1895; Figure 23) and for his own poem “Love and Death” (1897; Figure 24). One of the architects of the golden age of American magazine illustration during Figure 22. Howard Pyle’s illustration for Oliver the 1880s and 1890s, Pyle be- Wendell Holmes’s The Autocrat of the Breakfastgan with the belief that illus- Table (1894). tration was an instrument for cultivating public taste and would eventually give rise to a new native school of artists. (“I regard magazine and book illustration as a ground from which to produce painters,” Figure 23. Howard Pyle’s woodcut for William he wrote in 1900.)22 To fur- Dean Howells’s “Stops of Various Quills” (1895). ther these goals, he initiated a series of studio courses at Drexel Institute and founded the Brandywine school, training a generation of superb illustrators that included N. C. Wyeth, Maxfield Figure 24. Howard Pyle’s woodcut for his poem Parrish, Elizabeth Shippen “Love and Death,” in Harper’s Monthly, 1897.

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Green, and Frank Schoonmaker. But he worried that illustration was increasingly controlled by commercial interests, confessing to Thomas B. Wells of Harper’s in 1907, “I am in great danger of grinding out conventional magazine illustrations for conventional stories.” Pyle’s drawing for James’s story indicates that by 1899 the market demand for cheap and plentiful pictures had already impinged on the artist’s work, for his cloaked figure had clearly become a hackneyed affair, rather like one of the all-purpose “clichés” or “stock cuts” sometimes used to decorate magazine texts. Michelle Bogart has shown how the luster of illustration was tarnished by its increasing appearance in magazine advertisements. Although Pyle—unlike famous colleagues such as Howard Chandler Christy, Maurice Greiffenhagen, and Maxfield Parrish—never worked directly for advertisers, the environment of the mass-audience journals was compromising for artists and writers alike. For just as illustration was subject to commercial pressures, literature was deployed as a tool for selling merchandise in the advertisement-based economy of the ten-cent magazines. The 1890s saw a major shift in the nature of advertising, which had formerly been supervised by the retailer and aimed at the local market.23 With the growth of the magazine business and of industry in general, manufacturers assumed the task of publicizing their products, which could now be pitched to a national audience thanks to expanded transport routes for mail delivery and reduced postal rates for mass publications. Newly formed advertising agencies developed publicity tactics such as endorsements, slogans, and distinctive trademarks in their efforts to establish nationally recognized brands and to generate markets for new commodity categories such as breakfast cereals and cameras designed for amateur use. Ads increased in size, number, and visual appeal, abetted by the improvement of halftone and color printing. Most of these changes were as much in evidence in the “quality” magazines as in their ten-cent competitors—by 1900, for example, each issue of Harper’s Monthly carried a substantial advertising supplement printed on glossy paper. The real difference between the old guard and the new lay in the way the mass-circulation magazines redefined the reader’s transactional experience with the literary text. Whereas product promotion in the more prestigious magazines was typically confined to the front and back of the book, the newer periodi-


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cals of the 1890s broke up the text into segments “threaded” between advertisements, a practice known as “ad-stripping” or “tailing,” to draw the reader-consumer through the magazine. The altered relationship of literature and commerce is visible in the Collier’s layout (Figure 25) for “The Real Right Thing,” where James’s story is bracketed by two sets of images: Pyle’s otherworldly figure and the adjacent page of pictorial ads for brand-name products. In Collier’s, “The Real Right Thing” ironically illustrates the fictional donnée of authorial autonomy threatened by publicity—the latter term used in the late nineteenth century to refer to the advertising promotion of products as well as personalities. James had complained to Sidney Colvin on the publication of Stevenson’s letters that “one is face to face with a public that gobbles as well as bullies.” James’s artist-protagonist in “Flickerbridge” (1902) would warn in similar terms against a “machinery of publicity . . . as ferocious as the appetite of a cannibal.” On the facing pages of Collier’s, the author’s prophecy of the consuming public is literally borne out. The juxtaposition produces unintended but nonetheless

Figure 25. Layout of “The Real Right Thing” with facing page of advertisements.

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disconcerting parallels. A cup is emptied by the sepulchral figure of “The Real Right Thing” on the left-hand page while a little girl drains her cup of Baker’s cocoa on the right. Howard Pyle, the famous artist, vies with James Pyle, the nationally known manufacturer of Pearline washing compound. (The Pearline ad, drawn by Theodore A. Liebler, would have been familiar to audiences from its appearance as an advertising poster, c. 1895 [see Bunner].) The advertisements are aimed at a newly segmented reading constituency, reflected in the images of the women scrubbing away at a winking moon and the Tom Sawyer–esque fellow posting an advertisement in a prohibited space. Witness the contrast between the Collier’s ads for Sapolio and Pearline and the same companies’ promotions in Harper’s Monthly for October 1901 (this was the issue containing James’s “The Beldonald Holbein,” discussed in Chapter 3). The Harper’s ads (Figure 26) appeal to upper-middle-class female consumers in the more formal, “literary” language they were likely to encounter in the rest of the magazine. In the Collier’s layout, on the other hand, the linguistic and pictorial “voices” of literature and mercantilism are oppositional, the latter as-

Figure 26. Promotions, including those for Pearline and Sapolio, in the advertising supplement of Harper’s Monthly, October 1901.


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serting themselves in much the same way that secular-themed marginalia, according to Michael Camille, run counter to religious images in illuminated manuscripts. In his Preface to volume 18 of the New York Edition, James would inveigh against “the riot of the vulgar tongue,” contrasting true dialects, which he called the “speech of the soil,” with the “speech of the newspaper,” a “bastard vernacular.” In Collier’s, James’s literary language contends with the demotic speech of publicity, the latter celebrating its antiauthoritarian impulse in puns and slang: “What’s said of Sapolio is more than Moonshine,” and “I’ll stick this up anyway.” Even if the average member of the Collier’s audience did not consciously absorb the messages of the ads, their images and slogans nevertheless subverted the fictional construct and deflated its uncanny effects. Contemporary readers were jolted from a fictional world of impalpable forces—so wonderfully constituted by means of James’s conditional tenses and multiple “as ifs”—into the present-day realm of corporeal consumers, where actualities, as Nathaniel Hawthorne once lamented, are so terribly insisted upon. An editorial of 1903 in the journal Current Literature would conclude of comparable layouts that “the presence of advertisements among legitimate matter of the magazine depreciates its value without increasing its usefulness; imparts to it a decidedly ephemeral character; and lowers its dignity to the level of the daily sheet whose final fate it may be to be wrapped around a pound of nails in some obscure country store” (qtd. in Garvey 167). One further threat to the autonomy of the literary text in these precincts should be noted, namely, the questionable nature of some of the products and services advertised in the newly refurbished issues of Collier’s and of Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, where James’s “Paste” appeared in December 1899, at the same time as “The Real Right Thing.” In his Preface to “Paste” for the New York Edition, the author recalls “transposing the terms of one of Guy de Maupassant’s admirable contes . . . making this a matter not of a false treasure supposed to be true and precious, but of a real treasure supposed to be false and hollow, though a new little ‘drama,’ a new setting for my pearls—and as different as possible from the other—had of course withal to be found” (LC 2: 1242– 43). James characteristically remakes Maupassant’s story as an excursus into epistemology and ethics, and critical discussion of the story has

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for the most part followed James’s lead by focusing on his revision of Maupassant, whom James had famously criticized for fixing his sights on the seamier, sensual side of human nature. Once more I want to shift the critical focus slightly by considering the “new setting” James chose for his pearls, a publication context that encourages a rethinking of our responses to the tale and the author’s particular claims for it.24 Like Collier’s, Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly was at this moment sprucing up its image. Starting out as “a good magazine of the second class” (Mott 4: 44), it had fallen into decline when Leslie’s widow leased the business to live abroad. On her return to the United States in 1898, Miriam Leslie resumed leadership of the magazine and demonstrated her genius for publicity (this was after all the woman who had cosponsored Oscar Wilde’s American tour in 1882 to provide coverage of it in Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper [Freedman 51]). In six months she built up circulation and advertising revenues sufficiently to rival the competition, reducing the cover price from twenty-five to ten cents and perking up the contents with a lineup of renowned writers and artists. Howells urged James to supply a story for the revamped publication, and James, although put off by the form letter he received from its editors, complied by sending them “Paste” (Anesko, Letters 311, 313). The story appeared in the Christmas issue for 1899 with illustrations by Howard Chandler Christy. Known for his fashionable figures more than for depth of characterization or complexity of design, Christy contributed three dashing and virtually interchangeable vignettes, all marginal to the tale (two are shown in Figure 27). Contemporary readers of Leslie’s would have found far more compelling visual interest in the avalanche of advertising that covered more than one-half of the magazine. In the 1899 Christmas issue, 117 editorial pages are followed by 121 advertising pages, examples of which are shown in Figures 28, 29, and 30. Peter Rawlings maintains that the story was written with an eye on the market, but in this case the author surely got more than he bargained for. Among all of James’s periodical venues, Leslie’s was unrivaled for hucksterism, its advertisements apparently aimed at an audience riddled with what the Beecham’s ads used to call “Maladies of Indiscretion.” We can only imagine James’s reaction on receiving his copy.25


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Figure 27. “Charlotte fed, in fancy, on the pearls” (left); “She laid the pearls on the table” (right). Vignettes by Howard Chandler Christy for “Paste” in Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, December 1899.

The editors’ “Marginalia” column for the November issue celebrates the first anniversary of the revitalized Leslie’s, confirming “the principle upon which the up-to-date 10 cent magazine like FRANK LESLIE’S POPULAR MONTHLY is established—namely, that by tapping the vein of the great democratic reading class of this republic, it is better worth while to reach a possible 1,000,000 circulation at 10 cents than 100,000 at 25 or 35 cents.” As for the “volume and character” of the advertising published in the magazine, the editors explain somewhat incoherently, “the record of the past year is most satisfactory, as the earnings from this department are now 415 per cent, in excess of what they were a year ago. Our readers have been prompt to appreciate and respond to the inducements offered in these advertisements, which it is the aim to have always reliable” (“Marginalia” 106; italics added). No wonder Mrs. Leslie was able to turn the publication around so quickly. In Leslie’s previous incarnation as a twenty-five-cent magazine, its advertisements had been positively decorous in comparison. In the new and improved Leslie’s, readers were likely to encounter, in addition

Figure 28. Advertising pages (above and opposite) from Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, December 1899.

Figure 29. Full-page advertisement from Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, December 1899.

Figure 30. Advertising page from Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, December 1899.

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to mild lapses such as scantily clad models selling corsets and female depilatories and more profound offenses like the notoriously racist ad for Pears soap, dozens of promotions for patent-medicine elixirs and miracle cures whose claims to legitimacy were largely untrammeled by fact or scruple. Whereas older and better periodicals to some extent shielded James and his readers against such assaults on taste and honesty, the ten-cent publications often depended on an indiscriminate acceptance of mailorder advertisements to underwrite production costs. Thomas Richards observes that patent-medicine hawkers formulated a “system for representing the body, for turning it inside out and making it into a new kind of public spectacle and a new kind of therapeutic commodity,” and as there were no laws regulating truth in advertising in the United States and England until after the turn of the century, “there was no stopping them once they had gained access to the mass audience created and cultivated by the Victorian periodical press” (175, 183). The pages of Leslie’s teem with remedies for ending addictions to tobacco and morphine and for treating all manner of bodily rupture and effluence. Liquor advertisements, scarce in American periodicals before the 1880s due to strong prohibitions in many local markets, are not only plentiful here but thoughtfully interspersed with cures for alcoholism. Modern technology is the panacea, even if its workings must be taken on faith. Dr. D. D. Richardson attacks pelvic diseases with his Electro-Chemic treatment. Professor Weltmer has developed the “Absent Treatment,” ridding anyone of any ailment at any distance via a process of magnetic healing called Weltmerism. Readers are further advised that the Vital Energy they want will be supplied by Oxydonor, “a simple instrument (easily applied) that compels the body to drink in large quantities of pure Oxygen,” evidently, to judge from the illustration, by foot. Far more damaging were quack cures offered for serious afflictions like consumption and cancer. A representative example of the latter in the foregoing pages is the much-circulated advertisement for Dr. Bye’s cancer treatment (“Cured with Soothing Balmy Oils”), one of many such frauds that would later be exposed by Samuel Hopkins Adams in his muckraking series on popular medicines for Collier’s in 1905–6.


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An author may not be responsible for the format by which his literary efforts ultimately reach the public, but his work is unavoidably accountable to it. The “new setting” James sought during this period provides a curious and disturbing frame for the issues of honesty and propriety highlighted in his reworking of his literary sources. In his essays the author had made both the admirable and the transgressive aspects of Maupassant’s tales matters of relevance to his own fiction. The advertising section that makes up half of Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly undermines the publishers’ attestations to the “reliable” nature of the magazine’s commercial underpinnings, and by extension casts a shadow on the character of its content, for if shady mail-order solicitations speak to the supposed indulgence of implied readers, what do they say for the discrimination of editors and contributors? The promiscuous context, a problematic setting for work by a distinguished man of letters, seems particularly incongruent with the ethical questions James formulated in his critical papers and narratized in stories like “Paste.”

“Broken Wings” in the “Quality” Magazine James’s tales of authorship in the 1890s laid out the inimical conditions of magazine publication as he experienced them throughout the decade: the weakening of literary authority in an overwhelmingly pictorial setting, the invasions of publicity, the humiliations of rejection and blue-penciling to suit a family audience, the insistence on brevity and the bottom line. In “Nona Vincent” (1892) the young writer, having “spent costly weeks in polishing little compositions for magazines that didn’t pay for style,” turns to the dramatic form for his salvation. In “Jersey Villas” of the same year, the editor of a publication called the “Promiscuous Review” demands that authors make degrading “concessions to the platitude of his conception of the public mind.” In “The Next Time” (Yellow Book, July 1895), a gifted novelist writes a biweekly letter for a magazine that fires him for being too intellectual—this despite the author’s protestations that he has done “the worst he can do for the money.” In “Broken Wings” (1900), the subject of this last case study, James tells the double story of two artists, a painter and a writer, whose productions had once been critically praised but have since been “passed over.” The story is a fin de siècle summation of artistic frustration, and its conclusion, which

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unites the two characters in a lovers’ vow, may be read as James’s attempt to effect a fictional reconciliation between “commercial” and “serious” artistic aspirations. We have noted important differences between the newer periodicals and the journals to which James had been accustomed—differences in overall graphic design, editorial policy, accommodation of advertisers, and so on. In contrast to the mass-market publications, the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, where “Broken Wings” appeared, was one of America’s premier illustrated literary journals, universally praised for the excellence of its design and particularly for its painstaking reproductions of visual art. In The Golden Bowl, Prince Amerigo cherishes Poe’s “wonderful tale” of A. Gordon Pym—“which was a thing to show, by the way, what imagination Americans could have.” This case study shows what the better American illustrated magazines, with their marriage of imagination and technology, could do for fiction. James’s tale reflects the disappointments that had gone along with his attempts to place his later work in established belletristic magazines like the Atlantic and Harper’s Monthly—and, indeed, the Century. After The Bostonians was serialized in 1885–86 in the Century, the magazine’s editor, Richard Watson Gilder, told James that he had never published anything that appeared of so little interest to his subscribers (John 159). James subsequently sold several essays to the magazine, although in 1896 his essay “Dumas the Younger” was declined—according to James, because the material was “shocking to their prudery” (Notebooks 154). “The Liar” (1888) would be the last story James placed in the Century for over a decade. In June 1898 he tried the doors of the Century once more through his literary agent. Pinker inquired of its editor “whether you would care to have some short stories by Mr. Henry James. He tells me that he will have one or two ready very shortly, and it occurred to me that you might be disposed to entertain a proposal for their publication.” Pinker’s tentative tone suggests how demand for his client’s work had languished in the intervening decade. A handwritten addendum to Pinker’s note indicates the editor’s encouragement of a submission (Century Company Records). James thus had renewed hopes of the Century when he sent the story to Pinker in September 1899. “I don’t know what to say to you about the


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accompanying—Broken Wings—in respect to desirable destination,” he wrote. “It is . . . lovely and such as any one ought to be ashamed not to give me £60 for. I want something sent to the Century—this might do. On the other hand I am soon sending you several more . . . and perhaps there may be something among them more to the point. Yet the Century will easily print 7000 words and give me £60.” A week later, James wrote, “The thing I send you with this, today is again, alas, not of 5000, but of 7,000 (7,137—to be exact,) words. Never mind—I shall some day send you a masterpiece, [at?] 500 to make up for it.” Once he had received his sixty pounds from the Century, James predictably regretted fitting his fiction to the spatial constraints of magazine publication. “I wish I had made the story—or rather had suffered it to remain—longer,” he wrote to Pinker on November 23; “I came within an inch of ruining it altogether by squeezing it down to a small number of words! And the Century would have taken more and paid for more” (Za James, Box 1).26 “Broken Wings” appeared in December 1900 with a headpiece by F. C. Gordon (see the headpiece for Chapter 1) and a full-page illustration (Figure 31) by Maurice Greiffenhagen (1862– 1931), a prominent British artist best known for his drawings for the novels of H. Ryder Haggard. Along with A. L. Coburn’s photographs for the New York Edition and Joseph Pennell’s artwork for James’s travel essays, this was as near as illustration would come to James’s notion of successful pictorial accompaniment. Figure 31. “You mean that, all these years, you’ve really not known?” Illustration by Maurice Greiffenhagen for “Broken Wings” in the Century, December 1900.

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Greiffenhagen’s picture stands “as a separate and independent subject of publication, carrying its text in its spirit, just as that text correspondingly carries the plastic possibility” (LC 2: 1327). The cover of this book reproduces the artist’s original painting for the illustration, now in the Cabinet of American Illustration at the Library of Congress. Unusually large (approximately 29¾" × 20"), detailed, and colorful for a work intended for black-and-white reproduction, it was probably also meant for exhibition, perhaps on the walls of the Century offices, which were hung with the originals for some of the monthly’s most famous artwork (John 140). The quality of the illustration, of both its execution and its reproduction, testifies to the prestige still accorded to magazine illustration and its practitioners in the high-end journals. One is immediately struck by the wealth of visual information contained within the composition. In the pictured scene, from part 4 of the five-part story, the writer and the artist both confess to having left off more serious work to pursue commercial projects, which, too, have been passed by in the marketplace. They vow to abandon the luxurious country houses in which they have been marginal guests for the modest quarters of the artist’s studio-apartment, depicted here. Greiffenhagen presents the painter and writer at the moment of rapprochement. Behind them are two elaborately framed paintings and, farther back, what seems to be a tapestry or frieze above the dado. The cramped studiocum-sitting room suggests an inhabitant of straitened circumstances but refined tastes and respectable upbringing, implied by the good Persian rugs and the tea service laid out on an eighteenth-century table. Here we have a man ripe for domestic life with the woman who is in every way his equal in the carefully balanced composition that distinguishes both the visual and written texts. But how much of this scene is the artist’s interpolation? James’s description of the studio emphasizes the Spartan order of the place: The place, high, handsome, neat, with two or three pale tapestries and several rare old pieces of furniture, showed a perfection of order, an absence of loose objects, as if it had been swept and squared for the occasion and made almost too immaculate. It was polished and cold—rather cold for the season and the weather; and Stuart Straith himself, buttoned and brushed, as fine and as clean as his


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room, might at her arrival have reminded her of the master of a neat, bare ship on his deck awaiting a cargo. (CS 5: 337)

In keeping with his strict structural plan to parallel the lives of his two protagonists, James goes on in part 5 of the tale to show how Stuart Straith’s spare workspace is mirrored in Mrs. Harvey’s sterile habitation, whose “three or four simplified rooms had its perfect image in the hollow show of his ordered studio and his accumulated work” (342). Greiffenhagen has opted for dense patterning and tonal variation rather than a literal transcription of the hero’s “cold chamber of his own past endeavor, which looked even to himself as studios look when artists are dead and the public, in the arranged place, are admitted to stare” (340). In addition, Greiffenhagen has embedded in the scene his own conception of the artist’s unsold paintings, the nature of which is unspecified in the story. On the easel in the middle ground rests a framed painting composed of female figures in swirling draperies set against a cloister of vaguely Romanesque design. Beyond the easel, the fragment of another painting, as well as the decoration above the dado, suggests work in a similar style, namely, that of the second generation of English Pre-Raphaelite painters. Yet even with these interpolations, in fact because of them, Greiffen hagen’s painting complements James’s text in a number of ways that expand and deepen our reading of the story. The illustrator’s extreme compression of time and space is especially apposite for a tale James described as uncommonly contracted, providing a visual analog for the narrative strategies James liked to characterize, with a term borrowed from the fine arts, as “foreshortening.” Both men convey “a world in small compass,” to invoke a phrase James had applied to “The Pupil.” This was the necessary condition of magazine publication, later described in James’s Preface to “The Two Faces” as “the poor painter’s tormented acceptance, in advance, of the scanted canvas” (LC 2: 1173). One source of the affinity between artist and author is their shared approach to the limitations of the frame. In her comments on Greiffenhagen’s collaboration with Joseph Conrad for the serialization of Typhoon in Pall Mall magazine in 1902, Susan Jones writes that Greiffenhagen and Conrad both managed to bring modernist aesthetics into the more

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conventional forum of mass communication by “drawing our attention to the way in which we conventionally read an image—disrupting the apparent logic of framing and composition that traditionally renders mimetically a form of visual realism” (200). The observation holds true for Greiffenhagen’s partnership with James. For all its detailed verisimilitude, the “Broken Wings” illustration is avant-garde in execution. Its slightly tilted overhead perspective is typical of Greiffenhagen’s work for the magazines, as is his dramatic cropping of the composition. An emphasis on overall patterning—the striped chair slicing the right side of the picture, the busy geometric designs of the Caucasian rug and elaborate gilt frame, the folds of the woman’s gown against the floral pillow—balances a recognition of the painted surface with an illusionistic suggestion of spatial recession. Greiffenhagen’s stylistic modernity distinguishes him from most other artists assigned to James’s stories, a difference that perhaps suggests another source of James’s disinclination to have his fiction illustrated. In general, graphic artists had interpreted James’s fiction anecdotally, emphasizing narrative over formal or plastic considerations. Greiffenhagen’s pictorial approach, on the other hand, speaks to antimimetic elements in the story such as James’s rigorous structuring of the narrative sections so that the lives of the two protagonists can be folded one upon the other like the wings of a diptych, and his emphasis on uncanny parallels and coincidences over more naturalistic development of the plot. Even the fictional painter in the story marvels at such “odd identities and recurrences,” concluding with a self-reflexive (and oddly chaste) metaphor of ut pictura poesis: “Truly the arts were sisters, as was so often said; for what apparently could be more like the experience of one than the experience of another?” (CS 5: 341). In similar ways, too, Greiffenhagen and James incorporate selfreferential allusions to their professional experiences within the fictional framework. In his Preface to “Broken Wings,” James traces the origins of the tale back to “the felt chill of a lower professional temperature” regarding his work. Critics have noted James’s autobiographical parallels with the fictional writer in the story, as well as his reference to his own “crabbed hand—a plume from a broken or at least weary— wing” in a letter written to Kipling (Letters 4: 120) just after the story’s


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completion. Like Mrs. Harvey, who publishes a “London Letter” but quits because she can’t produce sufficiently “new twaddle,” James had in 1876 contributed a series of “letters” from abroad to the New York Tribune; when his editor complained the articles were not “newsy” enough, James quit with the announcement that they were the “poorest I can do, especially for the money.” (The same statement is echoed by James’s writer-protagonist in “The Next Time.”) And like both characters in “Broken Wings,” James had renounced the sociability of the manor houses in which he had been a frequent guest for the relative seclusion of his studio at Lamb House.27 Greiffenhagen drew comparable visual elements from personal associations. A member of the Royal Academy, the artist worked in a variety genres and styles. His allegorical painting An Idyll (1891; Figure 32), executed in the manner of second-generation Pre-Raphaelites like his mentor Edward Burne-Jones (Figure 33), was a much-reproduced image in its time, earning the dubious distinction of being D. H. Lawrence’s favorite painting, thereafter immortalized in Lawrence’s novel The White Peacock.28 A later painting, one of two by Greiffenhagen bought for the Tate through the Chantrey bequest, is a symbolist adaptation of the allegorical style (Figure 34). The artist’s advertising images were also well known to the public, including a picture for that ubiquitous sponsor Pears soap and posters for the British railway and the Pall Mall Budget (the weekly supplement to the monthly Pall Mall magazine). One sees the obvious inspiration of Toulouse-Lautrec in the bold, flat, cut-out design of the latter (Figure 35). Given Greiffenhagen’s stylistic versatility, his choice for the “look” of the easel painting embedded within his illustration for James is especially fitting in the context of certain private and professional associations both men brought to “Broken Wings.” The internal “canvas” pays tribute to the school of artists with whom Greiffenhagen had studied, like so many other Pre-Raphaelite disciples of his generation.29 Specifically, Greiffenhagen’s picture-within-the-picture again recalls paintings made during the 1870s by James’s friend Edward Burne-Jones, who died in June 1898, the year before work began on “Broken Wings.” Doubtless for Greiffenhagen, artists like Burne-Jones symbolized the

Figure 32. Maurice Greiffenhagen’s An Idyll (oil on canvas, 1891). © National Museums Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery.

Figure 33. Sir Edward Burne-Jones’s Phyllis and Demophoön (gouache on paper, 1870). © Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, UK.

Figure 34. Maurice Greiffenhagen’s Dawn (1926). © Tate, London 2009.


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Figure 35. Maurice Greiffenhagen’s widely circulated poster for the Pall Mall Budget (c. 1895), Imprimerie W. H. Smith and Son, London. From Les Maîtres de l’affiche, L’Imprimerie Chaix/NYPL Digital Gallery.

lofty principles, along with the outmoded style, of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and its second-phase adherents. Without question Burne-Jones provided the same kind of aesthetic and ethical touchstone for James, even though the author was to express increasing dissatisfaction with his friend’s work. In a letter to Charles Norton in 1886 James complained that BurneJones’s too-finicking pictures had more the still air of the studio than the breath of observed life; nevertheless, he continued, “he is certainly the most distinguished artistic figure among Englishmen today—the only one who has escaped vulgarization and on whom claptrap has no hold” (Letters 3: 147). The embedded “painting” in the illustration quotes from archaic Italianate scenes like Burne-Jones’s The Mill (Figure 36).30 Set off by its intricate frame, the painting represents an idealized and hermetic Arcadian world, notably lacking the kind of temporal references to fashion and decor that connect the larger illustration of the couple in the studio to the contemporary world of the reader. Within the pictured signs of the present day, Greiffenhagen evokes a school of painting and a set of uncompromising ideals that have since been “passed over.” By these means Greiffenhagen suggests the fictional artist’s more serious if unremunerative projects, as opposed to the commercial projects with which Stuart Straith is now occupied.

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Figure 36. Sir Edward Burne-Jones’s The Mill: Girls Dancing to Music by a River (oil on canvas, 1870). © V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum, London; bequeathed by Constantine Alexander Ionides.

At the same time, by nesting various historical and artistic frameworks in his illustration—“modernist,” “realist,” and “Romantic”—and foregrounding the disjunctures between these representational modes, Greiffenhagen creates what W. J. T. Mitchell calls a “metapicture.” As Burne-Jones himself playfully illustrates (Figure 37), a metapicture refers to its own medium, institutional setting, and historical positionality. Mitchell explains, “An image of nested, concentric spaces and levels is required to stabilize a metapicture, or any second-order discourse, to separate it cleanly from the first-order language it describes. Thus, most metapictures depict a picture-within-a-picture that is simply one among many objects represented” (42).

Figure 37. From Sir Edward Burne-Jones’s cartoon, “The artist attempting to join the world of art with disasterous [sic] results” (1883). Source: www.victorianweb.org.


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The concept of the metapicture helps us resolve two contradictory and atypical elements of James’s story: the conventional “romantic” resolution of the plot and the strangely commercial language through which the plot unfolds. Readers looking for romance here, like Catherine Sloper seeking her father’s affection, must cut their pleasure, as James says in Washington Square, “out of the piece, as it were, with portions left over, light remnants and shifts of irony,” for the business-like terms of the conclusion put the lovers’ mutual commitment on the decidedly practical footing of a “compact” or “agreement,” “responsibly” handled: “Let us at least be beaten together!” He took her in his arms; she let herself go, and he held her long and close for the compact. But when they had recovered themselves enough to handle their agreement more responsibly, the words in which they confirmed it broke in sweetness as well as sadness from both together: “And now to work!” (344)

Throughout the story, in fact, the language of commerce has been pulling us toward a reading of the protagonists’ relationship as something more than a love match—and something more than an idealized “marriage” (or as Straith would have it, sisterhood) of the visual and literary arts. Monetary particulars abound. In part 2, Mrs. Harvey confesses to Lady Claude at Mundham just how little money is to be made in the celebrity-novelist business. In part 3, she and Straith, finding themselves coincidentally seated together at the theater, explain their attendance at the performance: he has designed the costumes, and she is to report on the play in her “London Letter.” In part 4, they reveal their meager wages: she gets three-and-ninepence for a letter, he four-and-six for a play. In part 5, the lovers’ confessions of their past “fiction of . . . prosperity” are again recounted in professionally and financially specific terms: He had positively believed her to have gone on all the while making the five thousand a year that the first eight or ten of her so supremely happy novels had brought her in, just as she, on her side, had read into the felicity of his first new hits, his pictures “of the year” at three or four Academies, the absurdist theory of the sort of career that, thanks to big dealers and intelligent buyers, his gains would have built up for him. . . . She had left him, at all events, in full possession of all the phases through which in “literary circles” acclaimed states may pass on their regular march to eclipse and extinction. (340–41)

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By self-conscious references like these, the contemporary writer and artist who come together in the pages of the Century insert the story of “Broken Wings” into a larger fin de siècle debate on the commercialization of art in the mass-produced forms of magazine pieces, illustrations, posters, and print advertisements. The debate had commenced in earnest in 1886 with the vehemently criticized sale of Millais’s popular Bubbles painting to the editor of the Illustrated London News and its subsequent appropriation by the Pears soap company, which made it one of the most enduring advertising images of the nineteenth century. By the mid-1890s, Maurice Greiffenhagen figured prominently in the controversy over the commercialism of art. In one of numerous articles of the time on the current craze for advertising posters (this one in Scribner’s, July 1895),31 M. H. Spielmann mounts his defense of “the artistic poster of real beauty,” citing Greiffenhagen’s efforts as exemplary: Mr. Maurice Greiffenhagen’s bill for the now defunct Pall Mall Budget created a distinct sensation among the younger men, and enabled them to catch the public eye—as they had captured a considerable section of the London press as well as an equal section of wall-space in the exhibition galleries. Mr. Greiffenhagen’s work was peculiar enough to attract attention and elegant enough not to repel it; its three colors and their relative proportion were well enough selected and balanced to please the artist, and the whole was sufficiently successful to encourage other works in the same line. (43–44)

Two years later the same poster was declared “hideous” in an article lambasting the ubiquitous advertising phenomenon by Maurice Talmeyer for the Chautauquan, the official journal of an organization that sponsored public lectures to bring high-cultural issues to middle-class American audiences. The artist’s magazine illustrations called forth the same critical ambivalence. J. Stanley Little wrote in a contemporary profile of Greiffenhagen for the elegant English art journal Studio Magazine, “Some black and white work is creative and artistic, a product of genius rather than mere talent, as some journalistic work is. Nevertheless, speaking in wide generalizations, black and white work is as ephemeral, as destructive of the higher artistic capacity, as journalism is to the higher literary faculty” (239).


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James, of course, was no stranger to the art-and-Mammon debate.32 Jonathan Freedman has documented how “aestheticism’s rise from the status of a coterie concern into broader social prominence in the 1880s accompanied the growth in organization, sophistication, and extensiveness of the mass-circulation press and the cultural formations it depended on and spawned—particularly such crucial formations as the mass-market advertising industry and that new craft, public relations” (51). Freedman observes that James’s self-presentation as an elite and unmarketable author, like the author-protagonists in the three stories he wrote for the Yellow Book, was part of a persistent marketing strategy directed at upscale audiences. As we have seen in this chapter, James tended a public image of literary autonomy and disinterestedness while actively engaged in marketing his work to the popular periodicals. His correspondence with Pinker during this time is punctuated with exact tallies of word counts, payment agreements, and calculations of agents’ fees. In “Broken Wings” his protagonists’ parallel histories are laid out in just such careful computations. James’s story and Greiffenhagen’s illustration are expressions of each man’s simultaneous engagement with “high art” and the popular press. In Mark Seltzer’s formulation this is the “double discourse” of art and power: “on one level, an aesthetic resistance to the exercises of power, on another, a discreet reinscription of strategies of control” (148). William Dean Howells famously wrote about the double bind of “The Man of Letters as a Man of Business.” In an essay written two years after “Broken Wings” appeared, James described Balzac as “a man of business doubled with an artist,” adding that the fusion of the two personae “is never complete” (LC 1: 96). More than a lovers’ idyll or a confirmation of the sisterhood of the arts, the relationship between the two protagonists of “Broken Wings” would seem to be a fantasy merger, however fleeting, of business and art, in the pages of a quality journal at the peak of the magazine revolution. The professional details encoded in the story serve as another in James’s series of oblique authorial addresses to his periodical readers throughout the 1890s regarding the competing claims of commerce and high art. Privately, James referred to each of his rejected stories of the 1890s—“The Pupil,” “The Faces,” “The Beldonald Holbein”—

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as a “masterpiece.” Together, the narrative and illustration of “Broken Wings” portray the historical contingencies of their own joint production by valorizing the unsold “masterpiece,” paradoxically, within the modern commercial setting. Among the many short stories James produced for the magazine market, “Broken Wings” is a comparatively tame exploration of modernist techniques. More daring experimentation, the following chapter will argue, comes in the form of another of James’s overlooked “masterpieces,” “The Beldonald Holbein,” a tale that not only acknowledges the fictional construct but depends for its meaning on sources outside the narrative frame. For his “Holbein” canvas, however, James would need a different kind of pictorial collaborator.

Chapter 3

Stepping out of the Frame: James’s “Holbein”

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extends the work of the preceding pages by focusing on one of the “tales of the artist” James composed for the magazines at the turn of the century. “The Beldonald Holbein” is exceptional in James’s oeuvre for its numerous allusions to a single artist, Hans Holbein the Younger, yet the significance of this intricate web of historical reference has for the most part gone unexamined in the brief record of scholarship on the tale.1 The premise of the present discussion is that in “The Beldonald Holbein” James constructs a narrative space in which the reader’s mental “illustrations” of Holbein’s work are a necessary part of the experience of the tale. This is precisely the kind of collaboration between reader and author that James would advocate in his final Preface to the New York Edition: h is c h apt e r

That one should, as an author, reduce one’s reader, “artistically” inclined, to such a state of hallucination by the images one has evoked as does n’t permit him to rest until he has noted or recorded them, set up some semblance of them in his own other medium by his own other art—nothing could better consort than that, I naturally allow, with the desire or the pretension to cast a literary spell. (LC 2: 1326)

Generally speaking, as Stuart Culver observes, James’s representational strategy “is to ‘weave so beautifully tangled a web’ that the reader is forced both to acknowledge the proper boundaries of his authority

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Stepping out of the Frame

and to feel the degree to which his subjects are still not fully treated” (57). My argument here is that “The Beldonald Holbein” requires an unusually extensive and specialized sort of participation from the reader, whose familiarity with the Holbein canon is virtually a precondition of the sto ry’s success. Indeed, we have a remarkable example of an unsuccessful “reading” of the story in the form of the three full-page illustrations by Lucius Hitchcock, a Harper staff artist, that attended the apFigure 38. “The Beldonald Holbein.” Lucius pearance of “The Beldonald Hitchcock’s illustration for James’s story in Holbein” in Harper’s Monthly Harper’s Monthly, October 1901. in October 1901 (Figures 38, 39, and 40). As will become apparent in the course of this discussion, Hitchcock’s ill-conceived drawings are distinctly at odds with the mental images James clearly assumed—or hoped—his readers would supply for the tale. The illustrations (originally printed with shades of pink and green augmenting the gray halftones) will thus serve for the starting and concluding points of my inquiry. James’s literary art is of course imbricated with references to wellknown visual artists—to Raphael and Titian, Tintoretto and Bronzino, Lambinet and Leonardo. If Tintoretto had for James an “unequalled distinctness of vision” (CT 1: 342), Hans Holbein the Younger nevertheless occupied a privileged place in the author’s pantheon, for we can follow James’s fascination with this artist throughout his career. I’ll begin by piecing together his various observations regarding Holbein’s work to show how these elements go into the fictional construction of “Holbein” in the Harper’s story. More broadly, James’s commentaries will be examined for the light they shed on his distinctively modernist formulation of literary realism at the turn of the century. The chapter thus considers

Figure 39. “So many ways I mean of being one.” Lucius Hitchcock’s illustration of the artist’s studio for “The Beldonald Holbein” in Harper’s Monthly, October 1901.

Figure 40. “You call her a Holbein?” Lucius Hitchcock’s illustration of a gathering in the studio for “The Beldonald Holbein” in Harper’s Monthly, October 1901.

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James’s appropriation of the art of Holbein as both a fictional trope and a vade mecum of his own literary ideals and methods. References to Holbein crop up in James’s earliest nonfiction. In book reviews and art criticism of the 1870s, James repeatedly invoked Holbein as a kind of aesthetic touchstone. The title for The Ambassadors was most likely prompted by the recent publication (in 1900) of a book by Mary Hervey identifying the two men depicted in the Holbein painting of the same name, which had been in the collection of the National Gallery in London since 1890. James’s novel The Outcry (1911, from an unproduced play of 1909) was suggested by public protests over the projected sale of Holbein’s portrait of Christina of Denmark, the Duchess of Milan, which had long been on loan to the National Gallery and was considered part of the national heritage. Tintner (Museum World 226–27) and Levey (19) point out that the popular press kept the issue alive before the public, as demonstrated graphically in a cartoon that appeared in 1909 in Punch, showing Christina being ripped from her frame by a rich American collector (Figure 41). Edel reports that when Alice and Billy James (William’s son was an aspiring painter, particularly interested in portraiture) visited London on their honeymoon late in 1911, their uncle’s sightseeing agenda included an excursion to see the royal collection of Holbeins at Windsor (Life 5: 458). One may wonder if James was aware of his own resemblance to a Holbein portrait, at least as A. C. Benson saw him Figure 41. “Hans across the sea? / Stranger (U.S.A.) ‘Once aboard the liner, and the gyurl is mine!’” “Holbein” cartoon in Punch, May 12, 1909.


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during an overnight stay at Lamb House at the beginning of 1900, not long after James had completed “The Beldonald Holbein”: “His eyes are piercing. To see him, when I came down to breakfast this morning, in a kind of Holbein square cap of velvet and black velvet coat, scattering bread on the frozen lawn to the birds was delightful” (qtd. in Life 4: 247). James could not have failed to notice numerous parallels between the expatriate artist’s life and his own. Holbein the Younger was born in Augsburg in 1497 or 1498, the second son in a family of artists, including his father and elder brother, Ambrosius. The two boys are depicted in one of the father’s paintings (Figure 42); it is to the younger son that Hans the Elder is pointing, as if to indicate his favorite and artistic successor. (Recall that for the frontispiece of his autobiography [see Figure 80 in Chapter 4], James chose Mathew Brady’s daguerreotype of himself, the second son, standing beside his father.) Holbein the Younger trained and worked in Basel. Chafing under the increasingly restrictive regime of the Reformation, he left his wife and children to work in London, returning to Basel for a fouryear period (1528–32) and later for a brief stay in 1538. In the court of Henry VIII the artist found a more congenial creative environment and an appreciative patronage among the aristocracy, the burgeoning merchant class, and the major intellectual figures of his day. By the time of his death in London, Holbein had become one of most celebrated artists of his age, known for his concern with the expressive qualities of character as rendered through uncompromising observation of individual traits and material trappings. When James composed “The Beldonald Holbein” in his adoptive home in England, he was nearly fifty-seven, the same age he made the character of Mrs. Brash, the modern-day “Holbein” of his story. Having experienced a cooling off of the market for his fiction, James had been thinking of his own artistic Figure 42. Hans Holbein the Elder, self-portrait with two sons (detail of left panel, Baptism of Saint Paul, from San Paolo fuori le mura, c. 1504). Augsburg Staatsgalerie, Katharinenkirche. Photo: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, NY.

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legacy—perhaps of a belated appreciation or “revanche” such as he imagines for his elderly heroine. The Holbein story represents James’s most striking and sustained fictional use of the figure of an actual artist. Other references to Holbein in James’s fiction are slight, even offhand. In The Awkward Age, we are told that Edward Brookenham “had once or twice, at fancy-balls, been thought striking in a dress copied from one of Holbein’s English portraits” (68). In an early story, “At Isella” (1871), the narrator refers to a Swiss bridge adorned with “mystical paintings in the manner of Holbein.” This reference is picked up in a travel sketch a few years later: in “The Old Saint-Gothard” (1873), James points out a bridge adorned with “a series of very quaint and vivid little paintings of the ‘Dance of Death,’ quite in the Holbein manner.” In a more telling passage from the same sketch, James observes at dinner one evening in Andermatt an Englishman “who bore an extraordinary resemblance to the portraits of Edward VI.’s and Mary’s reigns. He was a walking, a convincing Holbein. The impression was of value to a cherisher of quaintness, and he must have wondered—not knowing me for such a character—why I stared at him. It wasn’t him I was staring at, but some handsome Seymour or Dudley or Digby with a ruff and a round cap and plume” (CT 1: 379, 383). These brief passages show James making associations that he will expand and ultimately conjoin in “The Beldonald Holbein,” written over a quarter of a century later: the conceit of a Holbein portrait come to life, and the medieval theme of the Dance of Death, the subject of Holbein’s best-known series of prints (three panels of which form the headpiece of this chapter). The name of Holbein appears on thirteen occasions in “The Beldonald Holbein,” always in conjunction with Mrs. Brash, who in her position as Lady Beldonald’s plain-faced paid companion is expected to act as a “candlestick or signpost” pointing up her employer’s beauty. But toward what do all the references to Holbein point? James recorded the germ of the story in a notebook entry from the Hotel d’Europe in Rome for May 16, 1899. His friend Maude Howe Elliot had told him of the belated “succès de beauté” of her mother, the poet Julia Ward Howe, who had stayed with her in Rome the previous winter. James noted her coming out (après) at the end of her long, arduous life and having a wonderful unexpected final moment—at 78!—of being thought the most picturesque,


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striking, lovely old (wrinkled and marked) “Holbein,” etc., that ever was. “All the artists raving about her.” AWFULLY good little subject—if rightly worked. Revanche—at 75!—of little old ugly, or plain (unappreciated) woman, after dull, small life, in “aesthetic” perceptive “European” “air.” (Notebooks 183)

On September 8, 1899, James sent the manuscript of his story to his agent. “But,” he wrote to Pinker, “it’s not as short (as usual!) as the thing I said I would send you. That thing you shall have next week; & this, meanwhile, is 8,800 words. But, again, my idea is that you should offer it to Harper: with good prospects, I believe,—they will take 8,800 from me rather better than a smaller number. They ought in this case to give me £60—I should put myself in the wrong with them in expecting less” (Za James, Box 1). James was to grow increasingly frustrated as publication of “The Beldonald Holbein” stalled. Appealing to his friend William Dean Howells (who was then writing the “Editor’s Easy Chair” column for the Monthly) on September 25, 1899, James asked if Harper’s had shown any interest in what he termed “a small masterpiece” (LL 326). Two years after James submitted it to Pinker, the tale at last appeared in the Monthly. The bankruptcy and subsequent restructuring of Harper & Brothers in 1899 partly account for the delay. Just as significant, surely, was the dip in James’s literary stock during this period, when, as noted in the preceding chapters, a number of short stories submitted through his agent to former venues such as the Atlantic were meeting with editorial resistance. Prophetically, the narrator of “The Beldonald Holbein” concludes, “It wasn’t—the minor American city—a market for Holbeins.” James included the story in two of his finest collections, The Better Sort (1903) and volume 18 of the New York Edition (1909). According to his practice in the Prefaces, he introduces the tales in volume 18 by recollecting the circumstances of their birth. Even allowing for James’s customary evasions and obfuscations in these stories of origin, when he comes to the Holbein tale, he is provocatively mum: “As for The Beldonald Holbein, about which I have said nothing, that story—by which I mean the story of it—would take us much too far.” The fact that James does not repeat here the brief anecdote recorded in his notebook—altered, let’s say, with names omitted—leads us to look beyond the theme of the belated “succès de beauté” for the more profound origins and significance

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of the narrative. As in the case of “The Real Thing,” whose title phrase is often repeated in that story though never quite defined, not least among the ambiguities of “The Beldonald Holbein” is the question of exactly what the characters who invoke the name of Holbein mean to signify by the reference. And like “The Real Thing,” another first-person account by an unnamed artist, “The Beldonald Holbein” hinges on a deceptively simple set of reversals of expectation. Lady Beldonald, an aging but carefully preserved beauty, has told her sister-in-law Mrs. Munden that she would like to have her portrait painted by the artist who narrates the story. Widowed, Lady Beldonald has engaged a succession of female companions—all unattractive, so as to offset the comparative charms of their employer—the latest of whom has just died. She engages a replacement, Mrs. Brash, a widowed cousin from America, who unexpectedly turns out, despite her requisite homeliness, to be lionized by the artistic set in England as a perfectly beautiful “Holbein” type, thus provoking the ire of the overshadowed Lady Beldonald. For her unwonted celebrity, Mrs. Brash is shipped back to obscurity in America, where, one eventually hears, she has languished and died. The narrator, for whom Mrs. Brash has never posed for fear of angering her companion, decides that he will at last paint Lady Beldonald. He hints that the portrait will now be what he calls “the real thing”: a revelation of the subject as the artist sees her rather than as she would like to be seen. In the course of the story, the iteration of “Holbein” gathers resonance not only through internal fictive associations but via intertextual references to an actual artist and a body of work that exist outside the narrative frame. The term is picked up and passed from character to character, gaining in the process of exchange the semantic currency of a shibboleth. Holbein is first invoked by a friend of the narrator: Paul Outreau, a French painter, spots Mrs. Brash at a gathering held at the narrator’s studio and exclaims, “She’s the greatest of all the great Holbeins.” The notion is borne aloft by the narrator, who had not noticed Mrs. Brash until now: “And I saw whom he meant—and what: a small old lady in a black dress and black bonnet, both relieved with a little white. . . . She was a Holbein—of the first water.” The word is passed along to Mrs. Munden, who is the narrator’s confidante, and to Lady Beldonald herself, to whom the narrator exclaims, “She brings the old


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boy to life!” Both women appear to take up the notion that plain Louisa Brash, hitherto unexceptional, is now, at the advanced age of fifty-seven, wonderfully like a Holbein in the flesh—though we cannot be certain to what extent Mrs. Munden, who embraces the idea immediately, and Lady Beldonald, who does not, are familiar with Holbein’s work. Told by Lady Beldonald that Mrs. Brash has always been considered ugly, the narrator answers, “It’s nothing new to one that ninety-nine people out of a hundred have no eyes, no sense, no taste. There are whole communities impenetrably sealed. . . . But it adds to the joy of the few who do see that they have it so much to themselves.” Thus in a kind of initiation rite the name is successively pronounced by characters who are called upon to demonstrate their ability to see—to perceive beyond the superficial—by averring in their use of the epithet that they recognize Mrs. Brash’s unconventional beauty. But while “Holbein” is obviously invoked as an encomium, what makes it so remains unspecified. The qualities that each character purports to recognize as “Holbein” are suggested indirectly: first of all in terms of the implied contrast with Lady Beldonald, whom the narrator compares to a Titian. Brash, the “imported foil” for her employer, is the un-Titian. We get fragmentary glimpses of Mrs. Brash—at first a tiny distant figure clad in black, then a nearer view of her “wonderful old tender, battered, blanched face,” its “every wrinkle the touch of a master.” The narrator’s most extensive description makes a delayed appearance at the close of part 3 of the five-part story: She was magnificently neat; everything she showed had a way of looking both old and fresh; and there was on every occasion the same picture in her draped head—draped in low-falling black—and the fine white plaits (of a painter’s white, somehow) disposed on her chest. . . . She was a good, hard, sixteenthcentury figure, not withered with innocence, bleached rather by life in the open. She was, in short, just what we had made of her, a Holbein for a great museum. (CS 5: 395)

Although “a Holbein” in the story refers chiefly to the artist’s painted portraits, for readers familiar with Holbein’s oeuvre—and James clearly assumes his readers will have at least passing acquaintance with the work—the name calls up images from other genres: the renowned Dance of Death series of woodcuts, say, or perhaps the drawings of members of

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the court of Henry VIII, or one of the altarpieces, the most familiar being the “Darmstadt Madonna” and its copy in Dresden. The altarpieces had been in the public eye as early as the 1860s, when their authenticity became the subject of scholarly debate (Ralph Wornum claimed the Dresden was a copy in 1864 [see Life and Works of Hans Holbein 23]). The discussion was resumed in the popular press in 1870, when the two works were exhibited together in Dresden; Oliver Wendell Holmes, for example, mentions the controversy in an article for Scribner’s in 1873 (494). Around the same time, James alludes to the public debate in a piece on the “Darmstadt Madonna,” quoted later in this chapter. Because no specific work by Holbein is mentioned in James’s tale, his readers, like the characters in the story, undergo their own initiation into Jamesian aesthetics by puzzling over what the narrator means to invoke with the name of the artist. Certainly, James’s contemporary readers had to wonder what Lucius Hitchcock meant to convey in his picture of the “Holbein” (see Figure 38). Modern-day readers are further challenged to determine what kinds of images and issues the artist’s name was likely to summon for the author and his contemporaries before considering how all the references to Holbein ultimately signify within the larger context of James’s work. To do so, we need to establish the art-historical background that provided James with sources for his views on Holbein as well as for the principles of art criticism he espoused early in his career. We can then see more clearly how “The Beldonald Holbein” extends and amplifies the nineteenth-century discussion of the painter and ultimately how the story dramatizes the debates on aesthetics and fiction-making that absorbed the author throughout his life. In James’s youth, Holbein was not yet represented in American collections. There was no example by Holbein in the National Gallery in London until the double portrait known as The Ambassadors entered the collection in 1890, but on family sojourns in Europe James would have had ample opportunity to view the artist’s paintings in the Louvre. Engravings of Holbein’s work occasionally appeared in journals to which James’s father subscribed, as well as in a handful of studies published during the period of James’s young adulthood. In an essay from 1873 James acknowledged indebtedness to photographs recently published


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by Messrs. Braun & Cie of Holbein’s drawings at Windsor Castle. (He would eventually discuss these drawings, lent by the queen to an exhibition at Burlington House, in an unsigned review of 1879, also quoted later in this chapter.) James outlines his early influences as an art critic in his first published piece of criticism, an unsigned review of Contemporary French Painters by P. G. Hamerton for the North American Review in 1868. Here the young author—who seems to have skipped the tentative stage of apprenticeship and assumed forthwith the voice of authority—laments the backward state of art criticism in English, most of it appearing in periodicals and little of it, he says, worth collecting in book form. His short list of worthy volumes admits Ruskin’s Modern Painters (grudgingly), Sir Joshua Reynolds’s lectures, the translated Vasari, Charles Robert Leslie’s HandBook for Young Painters, the popular guides of Anna Jameson, and A New History of Painting in Italy by Crowe and Cavalcaselle. To this small library he adds the “best French critics,” Gustave Planche, Louis Vitet, and Hippolyte Taine. Among these sources, Leslie, Jameson, and Ruskin treat Holbein in some detail, each of them taking up the question of the portraitist’s objectives and methods. Leslie, an expatriate American and an academic portraitist in his own right, argues that portraiture can indeed achieve the importance of history painting. (The latter genre was traditionally assigned the top rung of the painting hierarchy, as codified in Reynolds’s lectures.) Leslie then poses the question, “Are portrait-painters . . . to paint the vices of their sitters? Assuredly, if these vices exhibit themselves in the countenance.” In his defense of the genre he offers a somewhat invidious comparison that will be picked up by Ruskin and James: “I apprehend Sir Joshua was just as much of a flatterer as Titian. With a vulgar head before him, he would not, or rather could not, make a vulgar picture.” On the other hand, “The best portrait-painters, though they may not have penetrated through the mask to all beneath it, have, by the fidelity of their Art, given resemblances that sometimes correct and sometimes confirm the verdicts of historians. . . . Who can look at Holbein’s portraits of Henry VIII, and doubt the worst that has been said of his selfish cruelty?” (288–90). Anna Jameson praises Holbein in similar terms. She escorts her readers through the collections at Windsor and Hampton Court, pausing

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at two of Holbein’s portraits of Erasmus: “Those spare, acute, penetrating features,—that sharp, sarcastic, yet not ill-natured expression—that feeble stoop in the shoulders— how characteristic of the man who was the impersonation of the intellectual activity of his time, as Henry VIII. was of its brute force!” (347).2 In an unsigned article for Cornhill Magazine (1860) comparing the Figure 43. Hans Holbein the Younger, The Merchant work of Sir Joshua and Georg Gisze (1532). Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Photo: Bildarchiv Preussischer Holbein,3 Ruskin argues Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, NY. that Holbein’s art was greater because more rigorous, “earnest,” and unsparingly true to the sitter’s character. He concludes of Holbein’s portrait of merchant Georg Gisze (Figure 43), “The time occupied in painting this portrait was probably twenty times greater than Sir Joshua ever spent on a single picture, however large. The result is, to the general spectator, less attractive. In some qualities of force and grace it is absolutely inferior. But it is inexhaustible. Every detail of it wins, retains, rewards the attention” (326). The foregoing authors sound the major themes of the nineteenthcentury discourse on portraiture: the rising status of the genre in the history of art; the nature of “likeness” and the cultivation of mimetic techniques for achieving it; the artist’s ability to reveal an immanent truth behind the physical features of the subject; and the implicitly greater demands made on the viewer, who must attend to the meaning embodied in visual details. James would develop these themes in his nonfiction of the 1870s and 1880s, beginning with his travel pieces on Darmstadt and Basel, towns to which he claimed to have made special pilgrimages for


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the purpose of seeing Holbein’s work. These lesser-known essays merit quoting at length for what they reveal about the qualities James found exemplary in Holbein’s art. In a piece for the Nation (October 9, 1873), James describes the experience of viewing the “Darmstadt Madonna” (Figure 44) in the palace of Prince Karl: I was . . . ushered into the little drawing room, and allowed half an hour’s undisturbed contemplation of the beautiful Holbein—the famous picture of the Meyer family. The reader interested in such matters may remember the discussion carried on two years since, at the time of the general exhibition of the younger Holbein’s works in Dresden, as to the respective merits—and I believe the presumptive priority in date—of this Darmstadt picture and the presentation of the same theme which adorns the Dresden Gallery. I forget how the question was settled—whether, indeed, it was settled at all, and I have never seen the Dresden picture; but it seems to me that if I were to choose a Holbein, this one would content me. It represents a sort of plainlovely Virgin holding her child, crowned with a kind of gorgeous Episcopal crown, and worshipped by six kneeling figures—the worthy Goodman Meyer, his wife and their progeniture. It is a wonderfully solid work, and so full of wholesome human substance that I should think its owner could go about his daily doings the better—eat and drink and sleep and perform the various functions of life more largely and smoothly— for having it constantly before his eyes. I was not disappointed, and I may now confess that my errand at Darmstadt had been Figure 44. Hans Holbein the Younger, Madonna of Mayor Jacob Meyer (“Darmstadt M adonna,” 1525–26 and 1528). Hessisches Landes museum, Darmstadt. Photo: Foto Marburg/ Art Resource, NY.

much more to see the “Holbeinische Gemalde” than to examine the trail of the serpent—the footprints of Bismarck. (CT 1: 651–52)

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The fledgling critic’s appreciation is drawn in fairly naïve humanistic terms, focusing on the “plain-lovely” countenance of the Virgin and “wholesome human substance” of the assembly. It is significant, however, that even at this stage in his career, James is concerned with the effect of the work of art on its viewers, and that he presents the authorial persona as a solitary and emotionally responsive spectator, detached from the crowd of fellow-tourists and presumably set apart from the others by virtue of his ability to appreciate beauty of an unconventional, “plainlovely” sort. As the narrator of “The Beldonald Holbein” will remark, “It adds to the joy of the few who do see that they have it so much to themselves.” In contemplation of Holbein’s “masterpiece,” James escapes the rapacity of modern “progress” (“the footprints of Bismarck” and the “immense black serpent” of railway snaking through the landscape) as well as the indiscriminate din of the table d’hôte. He is a perceptive “reader” who not only sees but makes imaginative connections between past and present—who sees a Holbein portrait spring to life in the person of an Englishman seated at the communal dining table. In another article for the Nation (October 1873) describing his journey from Italy to Basel to see that city’s Holbein collection, James addresses more specifically the features he admires in the artist’s work. The passage, quoted here in its entirety, shows the author formulating ideas about Holbein’s aims and methods within the broader context of the divergent development of northern and southern European art. The great portraitist lived for many years at Basel, and the city fell heir in one way and another to a number of his drawings and to several of his pictures. I found it a different sort of art from any that has ever flourished in the lovely land I had left, but a very admirable art in its own way—firm, compact, and comfortable, sure alike of its end and of its means. The Museum at Basel contains many other specimens of the early German school; and to an observer freshly arrived from Italy they have a puzzling and an almost painful interest. Every artist of talent has somewhere lurking in his soul, I suppose, a guiding conception, an ideal of formal beauty, and even Martin Schongauer must have dimly discriminated in his scheme of things portrayable between a greater and a less degree of hideousness. This ruthless caricaturist of humanity, it is to be presumed, has bequeathed to us his most favorable view of things, and he leaves us wondering from what monstrous human types he can have drawn his inspiration.


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The heart grows heavy as one reflects what art might have come to if it had developed exclusively in northern hands. The Italian painters of the great schools certainly often enough fall short of beauty—miss it, overlook it, wander erringly to one side of it; but its name, at least, is always on their lips and its image always at their hearts. The early Germans do not seem to have suspected that such a thing existed, and the painter’s mission, in their eyes, is simply to appropriate, ready-made, the infinite variations of grotesqueness which they regard as the necessary environment of the human lot. Even Holbein, superb genius as he was, is never directly and essentially beautiful. Beauty, to his sense, is verity, dignity, opulence, goodliness of costume and circumstance; and the thoroughly handsome look of many of his figures resides simply in the picturesque assemblage of these qualities. Admirably handsome some of them are; not the least so the fascinating little drawings in pen and ink and sepia, familiar now half the world over by Messrs. Braun’s photographs. Holbein had, at least, an ideal of beauty of execution, of manipulation, of touch. Anything firmer, finer, more suggestive of the fascination of what is vulgarly called “niggling” with brush and pencil it would be difficult to conceive. The finest example of this among the drawings is the artist’s delightful portrait of himself. He ought to have believed in handsome forms, for he was himself a very handsome fellow. Among the paintings all the portraits are admirable, and two have an extraordinary interest. One is the famous profile of Erasmus, with his eyes dropped on a book, and that long, thin, delicate nose, which curves largely over the volume, as if it also were a kind of sympathetic absorbent of science. The other is a portrait of a mysterious young man, in a voluminous black cap, pulled forward over his brow, a searching dark eye, and a nose at once prominent and delicate, like that of Erasmus. Beside him is a tablet with a Latin inscription, and behind him a deep blue sky. The sky is crossed diagonally by the twig of a tree and bordered by a range of snow mountains. The painting is superb, and I call the subject mysterious because he was evidently no ordinary fellow, and the artist tells us of him but half that we would like to know. (CT 1: 661–62)

If “there is no greater work of art than a great portrait,” as James would claim in his essay on John Singer Sargent (1887), Holbein represents for the author the highest level to which portraiture can aspire. It is not simply Holbein’s “realistic” portrayal of his subjects that James admires (he notes with considerably less enthusiasm the “extraordinary verisimilitude” of other works of sixteenth-century Northern art on

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display) so much as his superb techniques for conveying, through the materiality of bronze and fur and flesh, the presence of something else, some “mysterious” element beyond the purely plastic, beyond the more conventional beauty realized by the Italian painters, having to do with the depth of the artist’s imaginative vision. Whatever disagreements James had with Ruskin’s view of art as “a region governed by a kind of Draconic legislation” (CT 2: 408), he held with the elder critic that an artist’s qualities of character and acute perception are reflected, as he would argue in “The Art of Fiction,” in technique itself. As Viola Winner observes, James “believed as Ruskin did that what made a painting truly valuable was evidence the painter had ‘lingering relish for something in objects over and above their literal facts’” (23, quoting James in a review for the Atlantic in 1872). In his comparison of Sir Joshua and Holbein, Ruskin describes Holbein’s representational power (“a hand whose patience of regard creates rather than paints,” 326) as proceeding from a deeply reflective, intellectual, and—dare one say—moral nature. James argues along similar lines in numerous reviews and critical papers. He remarks in another travel sketch of 1873 that Tintoretto “never drew a line that was not, as one may say, a moral line. . . . He felt, pictorially, the great, beautiful, terrible spectacle of human life” (CT 1: 342–43). He writes in a review of Delacroix’s journals in 1880 that “in the arts, feeling is always meaning, and so I think we do not go too far if we permit ourselves to allude to the moral and psychological side of Delacroix” (Sweeney 185). In the essay on Sargent, he chides the artist for his want of reflective engagement with his subjects. Reviewing (for the Nation in 1875) an exhibition of portraits by John Singleton Copley in Boston, James invokes the example of Holbein to suggest the vision that Copley lacks, for all his technical skill: As for suggestiveness, he rendered perfectly and exhaustively all that he saw, and he saw nothing that he could not render. He was definite, as we say; but that adventurous vision of the indefinite which has brushed with its wing all the very greatest works of art is never reflected here. Copley was by no means a Holbein, but he holds a very honourable place in the ranks over which Holbein presided as supreme genius. (Sweeney 107)


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For his favorable notice (1876) of Eugène Fromentin’s book Les maîtres d’autrefois, James chooses to quote the author’s opinion of the relative merits of Rubens and Holbein, a view that obviously corresponds with his own: “‘Suppose Holbein . . . with Rubens’s clientèle, and you immediately see before you a new human gallery, very interesting for the moralist, equally admirable for the history of life and the history of art, and which Rubens, one must admit, would not have enriched by a single type’” (James’s trans., Sweeney 119). In “The Winter Exhibitions in London,” written for the Nation (February 13, 1879; uncollected), James once more uses the occasion of a review to analyze Holbein’s superiority over the great English portraitists. The Romneys, the Gainsboroughs, even the Sir Joshuas, emanate from a society in which, at no time, the sentiment of art has been intense. . . . The English painters were fortunate; they were highly paid; they were patronized by a splendid aristocracy; their models belonged to the handsomest race in the world; their pictures suggest all the proper ideas of British gentility and morality, of that combination of luxury and propriety which is one of the most striking achievements of English civilization. But, as painters, they lacked the last initiation.

In contrast, on the side of the “initiated” James situates Holbein, whose drawings had been lent from the queen’s collection to the exhibition: The interest of this noble series of portraits (both of men and women) is that of all Holbein’s work—a strong and incorruptible reality, a rendering of the individual outline, of the literal facts and idiosyncrasies of the face, that has never been surpassed. . . . It is more than a portraiture: it is almost a betrayal, and we cannot help wondering whether his models, had they apprehended it, would have consented to the unmitigated manner in which he was to perpetuate them. (“Winter Exhibitions” 116)

James’s discourse on portraiture develops many points of the debate begun in the mid-nineteenth century and continuing into the twentieth on the nature of “realism” in visual art and literature. In his critical commentaries on Holbein, James seems to be working out lifelong theoretical preoccupations about realism, perception, and the making of fiction. Conversely, in tales of the artist such as “The Real Thing” and “The Beldonald Holbein,” James dramatizes in fictional form the

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ideas set forth in his art criticism. The denouements of these two artists’ tales propose that the narrators, both English portrait painters, have undergone in artistic terms a “last initiation” during the course of their tales, at the expense, one might say, of the aristocratic models they would betray. Following Ruskin, James suggests in his critical appreciations how Holbein’s portraiture moves beyond surface verism. Ruskin and James both note that the intensely reflective quality of Holbein’s painting solicits a corresponding intensity of vision in the viewer. James points us toward Holbein’s distinctive methods for enlisting the imaginative participation of the viewer when he singles out, in his essay on the Basel collection, the artist’s self-portrait and two additional “portraits of extraordinary interest”: those of a “mysterious young man” and of Erasmus. I want to pause here to examine these portraits for the ways they provoke the viewer’s self-awareness, because I believe James fashions the role of the spectator-reader in comparable ways in “The Beldonald Holbein.” The “mysterious” young man in the portrait (Figure 45) is Bonifacius Amerbach, a close friend of Erasmus. Holbein portrays Amer bach in extreme closeup, his body cut off at the edges of the frame. Holbein’s placement of [Stanford University Press does not hold electronic rights to this image.] his subjects vis-à-vis the picture plane puts them in direct relation to the viewer.4 Beside the sitter, a large white panel, framed like a painting, recedes at an oblique angle that seems to continue forward into the viewer’s space. Figure 45. Hans Holbein the Younger, Portrait of Bonifacius Amerbach (1519). Öffentliche Kunstsammlung, James takes special note Basel. Photo credit: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kultur of this inscribed plaque besitz/Art Resource, NY.


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but does not translate it for us, although he was able to read Latin (in Notes of a Son and Brother he writes of his school days in Switzerland when “I worried out Virgil” [243]). The inscription, composed by the sitter, reads, “Although only a painted likeness, I am not inferior to the living face; I am instead the counterpart of my master, and distinguished by accurate lines. Just as he completes three intervals each lasting eight years [i.e., the sitter is twenty-four years old], this work of art diligently renders his true character” (Müller 194). Following a standard artistic trope of the time, the portrait “speaks” of its own realistic portrayal (194), paradoxically reinforcing our recognition of the painting as an artificial construct, both likeness and painted surface. Even that inscription in the portrait . . . may be viewed as a realistic trompe l’oeil effect, a consistent rendering of material reality, a verbal message imprinted on the soft soil of the ground in a perspective coherent with the rest of the image. It belongs to the simulated reality of its pictured three-dimensional space rather than to the canvas surface, like an ordinary signature. At the same time, it signifies the active presence of the artist in that space as both a speaking self and an operating hand. (Müller, 187)

In numerous paintings James would have seen in Basel and Paris, Holbein highlights not only written inscriptions but scenes of reading and writing, as in the several portraits the artist executed of Erasmus. The sitter obviously requested that he be depicted at his desk, at work on a theological text, in an attitude reminiscent of medieval depictions of the scholar or evangelist in his study, for the pose is repeated in each of the portraits he commissioned. Figure 46 shows the Erasmus in Basel singled out by James. Holbein’s portrait of Erasmus in the Louvre is nearly identical to this one, its subject placed a bit farther from the frame against a slightly more ornate background. A surprising number of Holbein’s portraits foreground acts of reading and writing this way, bringing the sitter and the “written” text close to the picture plane and often orienting the written document toward the viewer. We should recognize as well that portraits such as those of Georg Gisze (see Figure 43) and the astronomer Nikolaus Kratzer (Figure 47) portray sitters poised in acts that recall or mimic acts of inscribing. Gisze is shown unsealing a letter, its inscription, along with the sit-

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ter’s gaze, turned toward the spectator; various writing tools are arrayed on the table before him. As Oskar Bätschmann and Pascal Griener observe, [Stanford University Press does not the Gisze portrait is dizhold electronic rights to this image.] zyingly stocked with written materials—letters, seals, ledgers, and other insignia of the Hanseatic merchant—whose detailed and “realistic” depiction vies with the exaggerated contraction of the space in which the subject is placed: “In complete disFigure 46. Hans Holbein the Younger, Erasmus of regard for all rules of per- Rotterdam Writing (1534). Öffentliche Kunstsamm spective, Holbein has di- lung, Basel. Photo credit: Bildarchiv Preussischer lated the space in order Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, NY. to accommodate a wealth of symbols, designed for a merchant and a nouveau-riche in search of a personalized iconography. Letters from colleagues surround him, all of them repeating the name of the powerful man whom his correspondents have been longing to reach” (181). Kratzer, too, plies the tools of his profession in a pose that mimics the writer with his pen, an analogy reinforced by the presence of a half-written document on the table beside the sitter giving the sitter’s age and the year of the painting’s execution. In each of the works discussed in the preceding pages, Holbein elicits on the part of the observer two distinct and opposing ways of seeing. The invisible brushstroke, the wealth of detail, the uncannily naturalistic depiction of three-dimensional forms and textures: all these elements encourage us to read the portrait as a literal representation. At the same time, the proliferation of inscriptions, whether a “label” at the top of the picture giving the age of the sitter and date of composition or


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a Latin text vouching for the veracity of the portrait, draw attention, as Susan Foister observes, “to the surface of the portrait, and hence to the illusionistic powers of the artist” (Holbein and England 213). By portraying the sitter at the moment of reading or writing a text, Holbein makes our self-awareness as spectators that much more emphatic. In his essay on the nineteenth-century American painter Thomas Eakins, Michael Fried analyzes the artist’s painted representations of the written word as well as his thematization of the act of writing—for example, in the figure of a man taking notes in the background of Eakins’s celebrated painting The Gross Clinic, and, analogically, the surgeon gesturing with his scalpel in the foreground of that painting. Fried sees in these figures Eakins’s metaphorical representation not only of his father’s practice as a professional calligrapher but of the artistic processes of drawing and painting. Through these images the painting offers up “a natural analog to its own mysterious processes.” On the basis of such self-reflexive images, Fried takes issue with a “standard realist reading” of paintings such as The Gross Clinic (64). I have argued that the same kinds of images appear with noteworthy frequency in Holbein’s art and have the similar effect of destabilizing the realist project by implying, particularly in the pictured acts of the sitter wielding the tools of his profession, the creative arts in which Holbein was proficient: painting, drawing, printmaking, design. And I imagine that James, a young man engaged in Figure 47. Hans Holbein the Younger, Nikolaus the family business of auKratzer, Astronomer to King Henry VIII (1528). thorship, and one who ofLouvre Museum, Paris. Photo credit: Erich ten ventured analogies beLessing/Art Resource, NY.

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tween the visual and literary arts, would have been alive to these subtexts. In “The Beldonald Holbein,” James creates a similar disjuncture in the reading of the text, at once drawing readers into the representational field and “catching” them in the act of looking. I have examined and extended James’s commentaries on Holbein— on the artist’s achievements of verisimilitude, his expressive sympathy for the subject along with his refusal to flatter, his representation both of the living subject and of the artificial means by which it is rendered, his emphasis on the mediating vision of the artist in collaboration with the viewer—because these features seem to me to constitute the figure to which James’s “Holbein” ultimately refers. The story recounts the history of an unpainted picture. The projected portrait of a wealthy client, Lady Beldonald, both initiates and concludes the action of the story, with several postponements marking the intervals between these two points. When the various obstacles to the project have been removed, Lady Beldonald once more agrees to sit for her portrait, but by this time the artist has a different conception of the artwork in question: he will paint her as she is, “the real thing,” in all her hermetic inexpressiveness, rather than as she would prefer to appear. It is clear that Lady Beldonald herself remains unchanged; her vanity has “kept her from the first moment of full consciousness, one feels, exactly in the same place” (383). It is the narrator’s perspective that has shifted. What has effected his change of viewpoint is simply his experience of the “Holbein” brought to life. “Seeing” Holbein comes to represent, among other things, the artist’s imaginative vision and his resistance to the whims of the marketplace as they are embodied in the fashionable habitués of the London art scene and perpetuated in the flattering superficialities of society portraiture. The reader’s heightened awareness of the mediating vision of the artist-narrator is central to James’s story. In his literary criticism, James takes authors to task for breaking through the frame to point out the fictional nature of their work, an act he describes as the writer’s “suicidal satisfaction in reminding the reader that the story he was telling was only, after all, a make-believe” (“Anthony Trollope” 1883; LC 1: 390). But of course we have numerous instances of James calling attention to the fictional construct, even if he doesn’t address the reader directly.5 Isabel exclaims on her entrance into Gardencourt,


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“Oh, I hoped there would be a lord; it’s just like a novel!”; Dr. Sloper of Washington Square, a monster of self-regard, protests that he’s not, after all, a father in an old-fashioned novel. In “Pandora,” published in the New York Sun in June 1884, the Winterbournian Count Vogelstein meets a feckless, suspiciously Daisyish young American girl just after he has picked up “a Tauchnitz novel by an American author”: “It was the oddest coincidence in the world; the story Vogelstein had taken up treated of a flighty, forward little American girl, who plants herself in front of a young man in the garden of an hotel” (CS 2: 819, 821). “The Real Thing” has been read as the artist’s rejection of literal mimesis, a point James reinforces in self-referential terms: the artist-narrator of “The Real Thing” works on “potboilers” “in black and white, for magazines, for story-books, for sketches of contemporary life,” just as James’s story itself first appeared with illustrations in the periodical Black and White, and as James regarded such magazine stories as mere “potboilers” to sustain his more serious art. And so on. Little wonder that recent criticism of James’s tales has tended to focus on James’s postmodern techniques (see, for example, the essays in the collection edited by Joseph Dewey and Brooke Horvath). Still, of all James’s stories, “The Beldonald Holbein” appears to me the most consciously metafictive, pointing up its own narrative techniques to an uncommon degree. The author inscribes his objective at the beginning of the tale, with the narrator’s comment that “the thing was to paint her, I perceived, in the glass case—a most tempting, attaching feat; render to the full the shining, interposing plate and the general show-window effect.” This is just what the story proceeds to do: to render both the subject and the “glass case” or the “frame” in which it is displayed. The narrator repeatedly refers to his account as a literary construct, as “my anecdote,” and “a little tale,” a “comedy,” a “drama.” The end of the second section of the tale announces “one of the strangest little dramas I have ever known,” and the following section opens in the same key: “It was a drama of small, smothered intensely private things, and I knew of but one other person in the secret; yet that person and I found it exquisitely susceptible of notation” (391). Moreover, in league with his secret sharer and de facto accomplice, Mrs. Munden, the narrator is directly responsible for each development

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in the story he records. Mrs. Munden foretells that it will crush Lady Beldonald to see Mrs. Brash lionized, and the artist concludes, “It was for me to decide whether my aesthetic need of giving life to my idea was such as to justify me in destroying it in a woman after all, in most eyes, so beautiful” (392). Protesting that “it is not my fault if I am so put together as often to find more life in situations obscure and subject to interpretation than in the gross rattle of the foreground,” the narrator deliberately twists the plot. “What I thus came face to face with,” he writes, invoking a familiar Jamesian metaphor drawn from painting, “was . . . the full, if foreshortened, revelation of what among us all was now unfailingly in store for her. To turn the handle and start that tune came to me on the spot as a temptation” (393). In short order, Mrs. Brash becomes “just what we had made of her, a Holbein for a great museum; and our position, Mrs. Munden’s and mine, rapidly became that of persons having such a treasure to dispose of ” (395). In these terms the story supplies the analog for its own creation. The painter’s story consistently foregrounds acts of writing and reading or translating. The narrator says he is interested less in Louisa Brash’s triumph over a lifetime of homeliness than in “the question of the process by which such a history could get itself enacted” (394). The reasons for Mrs. Brash’s having passed for plain “were written large in her face, so large that it was easy to understand them as the only ones she herself had ever read. What was it, then, that actually made the old stale sentence mean something so different?—into what new combinations, what extraordinary language, unknown but understood at a glance, had time and life translated it?” (394). At the story’s end, he hasn’t the note of a sketch, neither of Lady Beldonald nor of Mrs. Brash, who never sat for him. What he and his readers are left with is simply the anecdote. As the nameless artist-narrator of “The Real Thing” says at the conclusion of that story, he is grateful for the lesson—which he is now determined to apply to the portrait he intends to paint. Presumably, as in “The Real Thing,” the lesson concerns the difficulties of defining and representing the “real.” Perhaps the narrator suffers the same “failure of vision” he attributes to Lady Beldonald, particularly when it comes to the role he and Mrs. Munden play in the “sacrifice” of Mrs. Brash. He repeatedly if unwittingly reveals his conception of


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Mrs. Brash as an object to be appropriated, and his treatment of her and her employer is exploitative to the point of vampirism. “Do I possess a Holbein, of any price, unawares?” he initially asks Outreau; and when Outreau proposes taking her to Paris, the narrator stakes his claim: “‘I propose to keep her to myself ’” (389). Later he explains to Lady Beldonald, “Oh, we see bang off—with a click like a steel spring. It’s our trade; it’s our life. . . . That’s the way I saw you yourself, my lady, if I may say so; that’s the way, with a long pin straight through your body, I’ve got you. And just so I’ve got her” (390). James argues in his essays that the success of the artistic creation, of its ability to give the impression of life, depends upon the quality of the mind and sensibility of the creator. In emphasizing the fictional narrator’s callous manipulation of others, James indicates one reason why, at the end of the tale, with the “disappearance of the famous Holbein,” the narrator is left with a void. “I know nothing of her original conditions— some minor American city—save that for her to have gone back to them was clearly to have stepped out of her frame.” In place of “the gem of our collection—we found what a blank it left on the wall. Lady Beldonald might fill up the blank, but we couldn’t” (401, 400). (We may compare the narrator’s statements with James’s invocation of his muse in his notebook a few months after the publication of “The Real Thing,” as he worked on a number of short stories for the magazines: “I have only to live and to work, to look and to feel, to gather, to note. My cadres are all there; continue, ah, continue, to fill them” [July 13, 1891; Notebooks 58].) At the same time, the Janus-faced language of the story suggests another kind of “crisis of representation,” to borrow Fredric Jameson’s phrase, arising from the gap the reader perceives between the epistemology of realism and the postmodern self-reflexivity that acknowledges the frame.6 Into the breach in the canvas stepped Lucius Hitchcock (1868–1942), whom Harper’s paired with popular authors like Mark Twain and Booth Tarkington. The artist effectively captures the tone of Twain’s comic melodrama (Figure 48) and the small-town milieu of Tarkington’s novel (Figure 49). But he seems to stray out of his element in depicting James’s circle of European sophisticates. The social gathering in the studio (see Figure 40) is an indecipherable mass of undifferentiated characters, and the scene of the society artist at his easel (see Figure 39) is undeveloped

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Figure 48. “He proceeded to lash her to a tree.” Lucius Hitchcock’s illustration for Mark Twain’s A Double Barrelled Detective Story (1902).

Figure 49. “Positively no free seats!” Lucius Hitchcock’s illustration for Booth Tarkington’s The Conquest of Canaan (1905).

and spatially unmoored. More than likely Hitchcock never bothered to read James’s story. His frontispiece identifies itself as “The Beldonald Holbein,” the inappropriateness of which must surely strike the reader when Mrs. Brash is introduced several pages into the story. This is no fifty-seven-year-old heroine, least of all a homely one. It is, however, a Holbein. Compare Figure 38 with Holbein’s sketch of Elizabeth Daun cey (Figure 50; the mistaken identification in the upper left corner is a later addition). Portraits of elderly females are rare in the Holbein catalogue, and given the scarcity of models, Hitchcock has disastrously chosen to copy a portrait of one of Thomas More’s daughters, Elizabeth Dauncey, who was twenty-one when she sat for Holbein. The drawing was a preparatory study for Holbein’s group portrait of the More family, a sketch of which exists although the painting was subsequently destroyed. Daun


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cey’s portrait was reproduced in Woltmann and in Holmes; for his illustration, Hitchcock simply updated the headgear. Although Holbein executed many portraits of elder statesmen, men of letters, and businessmen, all of which were meant to stand on their own, a single portrait of an older woman was unlikely to have been commissioned without a companion portrait. Holbein’s matrons would have been pendants to their husbands’ portraits. For example, although the portraits of Mary Wotton and her husband, Henry Guildford, were separated at some point in their history, companion studies of the two are in the Royal Collection, where the painted portrait of husband remains, the wife having gone from a private collection to the St. Louis Museum in 1943. On the basis of the descriptions of Mrs. Brash in James’s story, and the dearth of elderly female sitters in the Holbein canon, Adeline Tintner’s hypothesis is persuasive: a likely model for James’s “Beldonald Holbein” was Margaret Bacon, Lady Butts, the wife of the royal physician, Sir William Butts; their portraits had been separated but were eventually reunited in the collection of James’s friend Isabella Stewart Gardner (Figures 51 and 52). Tintner speculates that Gardner, who had been urged by Bernard Berenson to buy the two Holbein portraits in early 1899, might have taken photographs of her recent acquisitions to show James when she visited him at Lamb House in late November of that year (“Real Life” 282). James had already completed his story several months before Gardner’s visit; but Tintner’s identification of the Holbein is nevertheless plausible Figure 50. Hans Holbein the Younger, based on the internal evidence of Portrait Study of Elizabeth Dauncey (pastel the story combined with what we drawing, c. 1527). The Royal Collection know of the artist’s oeuvre. © 2009, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

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Figure 51. Hans Holbein the Younger, Sir William Butts. Courtesy Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.

Figure 52. Hans Holbein the Younger, Margaret Bacon, Lady Butts. Courtesy Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.

At Windsor, James had doubtless seen Holbein’s preparatory drawing of Lady Butts. In any event he would have been familiar with the convention in Western portraiture from the seventeenth century onward of posing spouses on separate facing panels, the wife looking toward the husband, traditionally at her heraldic right. A matron implied the presence, and consequently the absence, of her companion. It has been speculated that Holbein’s extraordinary group portrait of his own family (also in the collection at Basel) was to have been accompanied by the artist’s self-portrait, the place of which is hinted in the directed gaze of the youngsters (Figure 53). (Jochen Sander’s discussion of the painting in The Basel Years catalogue is convincing on this point. As Sander notes, at some point in its history the painting was cut down in size and remounted [Müeller 403–4].) Holbein painted this highly personal work around 1528–29, probably during his brief return to Basel, and it seems to allude to his long periods of separation from his family as he pursued work in England. The wife’s careworn face and humble dress and the searching gestures of the children movingly suggest the missing element in the family group.


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All portraiture implies the absence or death of the subject. Art theorists from Alberti onward have observed that a portrait derives its power from making the human subject, distant or deceased, present to us in iconic form. As James wrote to his friend Theodore Child after the death of Elizabeth Boott in 1888, “How strangely it is in the power of a good portrait to revive, recreate what is buried and finished” (Letters 3: 227). More generally, James observed in his essay on Daumier (1890), “Art is an embalmer. . . . It prolongs, it preserves, it consecrates, it raises from the dead” (rpt. in PT 135). The acknowledgment of mortality casts a shadow on the meticulous rendering of all the worldly possessions on display in Holbein’s portraits, most famously in the double portrait called The Ambassadors, which had aroused so much scholarly and public interest when it entered the collection of the National Gallery in London in 1890 (Figure 54). The theme of mortality, implied in the instruments of timekeeping and other earthly pursuits on the shelves behind the two ambassadors, is forcefully signaled by the well-known image of the anamorphic skull in the foreground of the painting. The uncanny distortion of the skull, which can only be deci[Stanford University Press does not phered from an oblique hold electronic rights to this image.] angle of viewing that renders the rest of the painting illegible, forecloses a realist reading of the work. The hovering death’s head is Holbein’s most blatant reminder of the artifice behind (or before) his representationalism, a sign Figure 53. Hans Holbein the Younger, The Artist’s Wife that inevitably brings and Children (c. 1528–29). Courtesy Kunstsammlung, the puzzled viewer into Basel.

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Figure 54. Hans Holbein the Younger, Double Portrait of Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve (“The Ambassadors,” 1533). © National Gallery, London / Art Resource, NY.

self-consciousness. We see ourselves seeing. The “singular object floating in the foreground” of Holbein’s painting, as Jacques Lacan told his seminar students, is there to be looked at, in order to catch, I would almost say, to catch in its trap, the observer, that is to say, us. It is, in short, an obvious way . . . of showing us that, as subjects, we are literally called into the picture, and represented here as caught. . . . The way this fascinating picture presents, between the two splendidly dressed and immobile figures, everything that recalls, in the perspective of the period, the vanity of the arts and sciences—the secret of this picture is given at the moment when, moving slightly away, little by little, to the left, then turning


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around, we see what the magical floating object signifies. It reflects our own nothingness, in the figure of the death’s head. It is a use, therefore, of the geometral dimension of vision in order to capture the subject, an obvious relation with desire which, nevertheless, remains enigmatic. (92)

Typical of sixteenth-century Northern art, Holbein’s oeuvre brims with implied and literal images of death, a fact registered in James’s earlier references to the Dance of Death woodcuts, which had been widely reproduced over the centuries, and with which contemporary readers were likely to have been familiar. Indeed, when Edith Wharton wrote “After Holbein” (1928)—the story of two senescent socialites whose final dinner engagement is a prelude to death—she made no mention of the artist or his work in her tale, evidently assuming her readers would mentally supply the appropriate visual references cued by her title. In “The Beldonald Holbein,” as in Wharton’s story, Death is an unseen but omnipresent partner. The absent other lies at the heart of James’s tale. Lady Beldonald is a widow forever in search of an appropriate female companion to serve as a homely pendant to her public image; it is hinted that her painted portrait, when displayed “on the line” at the Academy, might attract a proper pendant in the form of a second husband (Donoghue 216). Mrs. Brash, too, is widowed, as are the several childless ladies-in-waiting before her, excepting the terminally unattached Miss Dadd, who dies soon after the opening of the story. Mrs. Munden, whose husband is nowhere in evidence, may well (or might as well) be a widow. The narrator, like the artist of “The Real Thing,” has no discernible life or love outside the confines of the studio. Mrs. Brash will eventually die offstage, in exile, having “stepped out of her frame.” As Lacan observes, “Holbein makes visible for us something which is simply the subject as annihilated” (88). Thus in the title figure of “The Beldonald Holbein” James brings together two Holbein-inspired themes from his earlier commentaries— the ancient portrait that comes to life; and the work of art as a notation of death-in-life, a memento mori. One is perhaps reminded here of Milly Theale confronting the Bronzino portrait in The Wings of the Dove: “The lady in question, at all events, with her slightly Michael-angelesque

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squareness, her eyes of other days, her full lips, her long neck, her recorded jewels, her brocaded and wasted reds, was a very great personage—only unaccompanied by a joy. And she was dead, dead, dead. Milly recognized her exactly in words that had nothing to do with her. ‘I shall never be better than this’” (139).7 It is the remarkable conceit of “The Beldonald Holbein,” however, that none of the characters can really be said to “live,” not even within the confines of the literary construct. Lady Beldonald remains sealed in her glass case (“She hasn’t had what I should call a life,” Mrs. Munden remarks). Mrs. Brash is referred to from first to last as an inanimate object. The narrator exclaims to Lady Beldonald, “It’s a Holbein!” continuing, to her bewilderment, “Why, the wonderful sharp old face—so extraordinarily, consummately drawn—in the frame of black velvet.” Eventually Mrs. Brash steps out of the narrator’s “rich little gallery of pictures” and “out of her frame.” And so, “banished from the museum” and shipped off to “a minor American city” that has neither a printed “catalogue” nor a viable “market for Holbeins,” “refreshed by the rise of no new movement to hang it” and “without the intervention of the ghost of a critic,” the picture turns its face to the wall. Appropriately enough, the end of “her terrible little story” is occluded from the reader’s sight and must be inferred from three letters addressed to Mrs. Munden. Then it is that the Holbein becomes “mere dead paint” (402). The story’s references to its own artifice are indeed a “trap,” in Lacan’s term, to catch the reader-observer in the act of looking. In A Small Boy and Others James would mark precisely this moment as his “great initiation” into critical spectatorship, when the small boy and his friends attend, for the second time, a crude production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Union Square. On this re-viewing the friends all at once become aware of the flimsy mise-en-scène and the machinery behind the drama, “the audible creak of the carpentry.” “However,” James concludes, “the point exactly was that we attended this spectacle just in order not to be beguiled, just in order to enjoy with ironic detachment and, at the very most, to be amused ourselves at our sensibility should it prove to have been trapped and caught” (94). In “The Beldonald Holbein,” James constructs the role of the reader through the acknowledgment of the proscenium arch. The “point” of the


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small boy’s experience of the play is the ironic detachment that comes from a second viewing—and with it, an ability to compare and supplement what is seen with prior knowledge. I have suggested that readers of the “Holbein” story are enlisted to bring to the fiction some prior familiarity with the historical Holbein’s work, without which knowledge James’s network of intertextual references falls flat. It is perhaps significant that James did not attempt to wrest his story from Harper’s and place it elsewhere, despite the maddening two-year delay in publication. If the English spectators in the story are worldly philistines compared with their French counterparts, who at least have an appreciation for unorthodox beauty, the American audience—lacking catalogues, critics, and viable markets for art—is shown to be simply clueless. “The Beldonald Holbein” seems to constitute a special appeal to American readers, whose comparatively undeveloped sensibilities may be gauged by Hitchcock’s accompanying drawings. Perhaps assigning Hitchcock to illustrate the story was part of an editorial project of “norming down” James’s story for its audience. At any rate the results demonstrate, embarrassingly, the importance of knowing something of Holbein before tackling “Holbein.” Harper’s Monthly, the company’s prestige publication, styled itself as family entertainment. Its avowed mission was to provide general education for the public. To this end the copiously illustrated issues for June to November 1901 offer articles on pseudo-anthropology (e.g., an essay, with illustrations by Hitchcock, on the “pestilent” Jewish ghetto in Prague; and another by James Moody of the Bureau of American Ethnology on alleged cannibalism among the Tonkawas), a series of pieces on U.S. history by Woodrow Wilson (illustrated by F. Luis Mora, Howard Pyle, and others), and numerous works of short fiction. Many of these short stories mine the popular vein of historical romance and are accordingly illustrated in the American Pre-Raphaelite mode. In uncharacteristically partisan prose, Mott observes in his History of American Magazines that the sentimental short story during the postbellum period “flourished in Harper’s, but it emitted its cheap perfume everywhere” (3: 227). It was still emitting at the turn of the century, for all Howells’s editorializing on behalf of literary realism. A list of opening gambits from the Harper’s stories in the latter half

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of 1901 helps us measure the gulf between James’s tale and those of his neighbors. A romance by Richard LeGallienne, illustrated by Elizabeth Shippen Green, begins, “Perhaps, dear Reader—if you will excuse so old-fashioned a manner of address” (Figure 55); another by Maurice Hewlett, with illustrations by Albert Sterner, is pitched in the same key: “If the old romancers are to be believed, the ways of lovers were not so diverse as you might have supposed.” “King Custom” by Maud Stepney Rawson, with pictures by Howard Pyle, opens on this tableau: “My Lady of Brede sat under a wine-colored beech, her plumed hat drooping over her eyes.” F. Luis Mora’s illustration for “The Madonna of the Ermine Mantle” (effusively subtitled “A Legend of La Motte Feuilly, the Dower-Château of Charlotte D’Albret, Wife of César Borgia”) by Elizabeth W. Champney (Figure 56) typifies the Pre-Raphaelite manner that best suited the literary romance.

Figure 55. Elizabeth Shippen Green’s illustration for “An Old Country House” in Harper’s Monthly, August 1901.


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Figure 56. F. Luis Mora’s illustration for “The Madonna of the Ermine Mantle” in Harper’s Monthly, October 1901.

A modern-day tale by Eleanor Hoyt titled “Women Are Made Like That,” with accompanying sketches by Sterner, provides another sort of contrast to “The Beldonald Holbein”: Hoyt’s protagonist, an American artist living in Paris, is the embodiment of the New Woman (Figure 57). She achieves freedom from her former fiancé and resounding artistic success at the end of the story, when her painting is hung “on the line” at the Salon to a “chorus of praise” from the critics. Obviously, James’s story provides none of the familiar elements and comfortable denouements he describes so winningly in “The Art of Fiction” as “a distribution at the last of prizes, pensions, husbands, wives, babies, millions, appended paragraphs, and cheerful remarks.” His style is oblique and circumlocutory, beginning with the characteristic confusions of his racy opening dialogue. The narrator is unnamed and

Figure 57. Albert Sterner’s sketch for a story by Eleanor Hoyt in Harper’s Monthly, November 1901.

Figure 58. “Sargent” cartoon in Harper’s Monthly, June 1901.


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unreliable, the modern-day Holbein is left unexecuted, and the story concludes where it began, its resolution once more deferred. These are the features that had made James’s stories increasingly difficult to sell to the periodicals. Yet as we have seen, James guides his implied readers toward the appropriate angle for viewing his story, or rather, toward the slightly shifting perspective that reveals both a vivid impression of life and the death’s head at its center. He cultivates the reader’s sense of the contingency of interpretations—and definitions of beauty—within a given cultural frame. As Edith Wharton was later to do in her novella False Dawn (1924), he thematizes the mutability of preferences in art, which are governed, in great measure, historically and geographically. He imagines readers whose knowledge and discernment extend beyond the trendy art scene described in “The Beldonald Holbein” as “bounded on the north by Ibsen and on the south by Sargent” (398). (Unfortunately, as Figure 58 implies, for the average American viewer even Sargent was beyond the pale.) Most significant, his story moves the discourse of aesthetics away from the idealized beauty of Italian Renaissance masters like Titian toward the harder truths of the Northern artists. Although soon James would all but give up publishing short stories, he was still trying to create an American market for Holbeins.

Chapter 4

“The Business of Art”: Essays on Illustration

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who decried the encroachment of illustration in modern letters, James spent an inordinate amount of time discussing pictures in print. Preceding chapters of this book have documented the narrative strategies through which James responded in his fiction to the pictorial trend in publishing. This chapter examines his analytic techniques for appraising modern illustration in a series of essays he wrote on some of its best-known practitioners. Ultimately James gave as much consideration to the medium of blackand-white illustration as any writer of his day. He contributed catalogue notes for several illustrators’ exhibitions, published lengthy appreciations of George Du Maurier’s work, wrote a group of essays on illustrators for Harper’s, devoted one of his “American Letters” for the periodical Literature to a discussion of illustrated magazines, and used the occasion of his final Preface to the New York Edition to contrast standard black-and-white illustration with the photographed frontispieces by A. L. or someone

“The Business of Art”

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Coburn that he had commissioned for his collected works—all this in addition to providing a wealth of fond reminiscence in his autobiography regarding the illustrated books and journals of his youth. Exquisitely aware of the historical moment he called the “present revival” of magazine art, James drew parallels between the author of short stories and the illustrator of modern life. The sheer number of pages he devoted to the topic is testimony to his recognition of the impact of the magazine revolution in the latter part of the century as well as to his need to work out for himself and his readers the problematical nature of the relationship of picture and text.1 My analysis focuses on the sketches of contemporary illustrators that James prepared for Harper’s New Monthly and Harper’s Weekly between 1886 and 1890 and republished in slightly revised form, along with his essays on John Singer Sargent and Honoré Daumier, under the title Picture and Text (1893). Years later, in his Preface to The Golden Bowl, James would openly reject the practice of “grafting” illustrations onto his fiction, the sole exception being works, like Coburn’s, that are “mere optical symbols or echoes, expressions of no particular thing in the text, but only of the type or idea of this or that thing.” His reasons are unequivocal and emphatic: “Anything that relieves responsible prose of the duty of being, while placed before us, good enough, interesting enough and, if the question be of picture, pictorial enough, above all in itself, does it the worst of services” (LC 2: 1326–27). Evidence presented in the foregoing chapters shows how James fought “picture-book” practices in the periodicals for much of his career. Why then did he undertake to commemorate at length the achievements of modern illustration in the essays he produced for Harper’s? The following discussion attempts to answer the question, first by examining James’s relationship to the Harper organization and then by interrogating his critical methodology in the essays. John L. Sweeney finds Picture and Text “more an act of friendship than a book . . . a little garland of advertisement for his friends Abbey, Boughton, Reinhart, Millet and Parsons and for the publishers who employed them as illustrators” (31). Leon Edel calls the book “a subtle and delicate piece of appreciation and criticism,” adding that “the best essays in the book are those devoted to Sargent and Daumier” (Life 3: 157). Adam Sonstegard writes, “As it praises

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a half dozen of these graphic artists, Picture and Text relays its art appreciation in overtly envious tones” (177). But the work is far more complex and subversive than these descriptions would suggest. Ralph Bogardus, who remains the only scholar to comment at length on the book, singles out the author’s odd mixture of reservation and praise “with overtones of tongue in cheek” (61). I want to take up the matter of authorial ambiguity in the essays on illustration by considering the significance of their production at a particular moment in James’s career. From 1886 onward, especially after the lackluster reception of serialized versions of The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima, James addressed himself to a readership that was ill-equipped or unwilling to devote its energies to the kind of attentiveness his increasingly recondite fiction required. “Important throughout this period,” Michael Anesko observes, “is James’s effort to create and maintain an audience for his work. Characteristically, his ambitions were divided between conflicting ideals—between the private seriousness of the artist’s imagination and a concomitant desire for public understanding of his intentions” (Friction 79). Short stories were generally his most profitable publications, and during the late 1880s and 1890s James’s production was prolific. Readers of the magazines in which James regularly published were eager for pictures. The press, motivated by consumer-oriented publishing strategies, enabled by technical improvements in image reproduction, and spurred by the growing capabilities of a new generation of illustrators, generously obliged. The copy James submitted was sometimes held back for months—one travel piece for over a year—while the pictures were completed. During this period James wrote his most extensive commentaries on illustration, and it is against the background of his stepped-up efforts for the periodical press that these papers should be read. It seems to me that James’s studied rhetorical ambiguity in the essays stems from his recognition that illustration was the price of admission to popular venues and his desire at the same time to maintain a critical separation of his texts, particularly his short stories, from their visual accompaniment. As I have noted, James gained financially and professionally by working with and writing about the important illustrators of his day. They made his fiction more familiar and approachable, and James wasn’t above trading on their recognizability in his efforts to get


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his material published. Negotiating with Frederick Macmillan to bring out two volumes of his recent stories—and making his bid for an advance on payment—James reminds the publisher that his story “Cousin Maria” had appeared the previous year in Harper’s Weekly “with big pictures by [Charles S.] Reinhart” (July 5, 1888; Moore 144–45); in a letter to Macmillan six months later he would amend this description to “ugly big drawings by Reinhart” (January 22, 1889; Moore 149). Publicly, of course, James hadn’t the luxury of being so forthright; but in his essays on Reinhart and other members of the Harper’s art department, James would similarly benefit by his association with popular artists while persuading his readers to regard the illustrations as something apart from his fiction. My thesis is that just as James used the forum of critical commentary to cultivate a receptive audience for his fictional experiments in the novels, most notably in his essay “The Art of Fiction” (1884) and in the Prefaces of 1907–9, so he continued this educative mission during the intervening period by means of his portraits of well-known illustrators, which were pitched at the magazine readership for his shorter fiction. In shaping the reader’s perceptions of modern illustration, James not only posits the angle from which his short stories are best perceived but manages to suggest in the process why his tales do not lend themselves to pictorials. That James wrote about this group of artists is hardly surprising.2 His fiction often took themes and settings from his acquaintance with the major artists of his time. He enjoyed friendships with many, dating from his youthful association in Newport with William Morris Hunt and John La Farge. James’s affection for John Singer Sargent, George Du Maurier, and Edwin Austin Abbey, amply corroborated in the letters, would be reason enough for wanting to discuss their work. He paid several visits over the years to their artists’ colony at Broadway, a picturesque village in Worcestershire, before writing his first article about them, and he warmly praised the circle in letters to his brother. He wrote to William on September 10, 1886, I have just come back from four days (my utmost limit of absence on a social basis) at Broadway, where Frank Millet, the American artist, has a house in which he spends six months of the year . . . and which (beside his wife, who is charming,

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and his children) he shares with Abbey and Sargent, and various guests. There are other friends, and guests in the village, mainly Americans, though Edmund Gosse and Frederick Barnard (the man who makes the remarkable grotesque illustrations—to Dickens etc.) are there this year, and it is altogether a very pleasant and harmonious little artistic community. . . . Sargent, who has left Paris, is domesticated there. (Letters 3: 132)

Nor was his public praise of these artists a simple matter of puffery, in the manner of his benign aperçus for friends like Mary Ward. The letters show him to be a genuine if not uncritical admirer of their talents. He thought Sargent the most gifted; but “Millet is an excellent fellow who has ended by painting very well indeed (he didn’t at all at first),” he wrote to William after his third visit to Broadway, “and Abbey is a pure genius” (October 1, 1887; Letters 3: 199–200). It is nonetheless important to keep in mind that James confined his discussions in these essays to the work of a coterie from the Harper stable. His title for the longest piece in the series, “Our Artists in Europe” (published in the June 1889 issue of the Monthly and renamed “Black and White” as the introductory essay for Picture and Text), refers not to the subjects’ shared American origins, for George Boughton and Frederick Barnard were English and George Du Maurier French by birth, but to their common business association with Harper & Brothers. J. Henry Harper and his wife had visited Broadway in the summer of 1886, and Harper writes in his memoir of the hearty welcome and “rollicking fun” to which they were treated (House of Harper 462). In his study of the Broadway group, Marc Alfred Simpson concludes that Harper’s favorable response to the place “must have influenced the publication of such later projects as Henry James’s appreciation of the village (‘Black and White’), no less than the increased patronage of Millet, Parsons, and Barnard that is noticeable in the ensuing years” (364). The venue and focus of James’s articles for Harper’s thus represent— and served to reinforce—James’s mutually beneficial relationship with a company to which he maintained lifelong ties despite increasing exasperation with its handling of his work, especially with the lengthy publication delays occurring around the time of the firm’s financial reorganization in 1899.3 Until that point Harper’s remained, after the Atlantic, James’s venue of choice for his shorter pieces, holding out the


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alternative of publication in the less prestigious Weekly if a submission were turned down for the Monthly. Anesko concludes that “the Harpers must have paid him well, for, as James told his brother William in 1894, he made it a rule ‘not to say “No” to them’” (Friction 171). Between 1888 and 1890, James took time from writing The Tragic Muse (which commenced serialization in the Atlantic in January 1889) to concentrate on shorter, more remunerative projects such as the Harper’s essays and a translation of Alphonse Daudet’s Port Tarascon, which ran in Harper’s New Monthly between June and November 1890 with 117 illustrations by noted European artists and was released in book form the following year. He wrote to William at the end of 1889 that “for the bribe of large lucre” he took on the translation project, which Harper’s was to publish “with wonderfully ‘processed’ drawings” (Letters 3: 264– 65). James’s anticipation of the “wonderfully ‘processed’” illustrations recalls his remark to the editor of the Century that he enjoyed pictures well enough so long as it wasn’t his work they were illustrating. Besides the magazine pieces, of course, Harper & Brothers published a career-long list of books by James, beginning with the “official”—that is, unpirated—American edition of Daisy Miller (1878) and continuing through the American edition of Hawthorne (1880), a host of short story and essay collections, The Awkward Age (1899), The Ambassadors (1903), and The American Scene (1907). The company also produced several illustrated volumes of his work, including Picture and Text; later editions of Daisy Miller (1892, 1902) with pictures by Harry W. McVickar; and Washington Square (1880), reprinted with the illustrations Du Maurier had made for the novel’s serialization in Cornhill Magazine. It is also worth noting that James had originally arranged with Macmillan to allow Harper’s to publish, simultaneously, the serial version of The Reverberator (1888) in Harper’s Weekly, although the idea was eventually scrapped because of insufficient time for the production of pictures, an essential feature of the Weekly (Friction 123). Finally, years after his rift with the firm, James reluctantly agreed to Harper’s bringing out in book form his longish story “Julia Bride,” which had first appeared in the Monthly in March–April 1908; both versions featured illustrations by house artist W. T. Smedley.4 I emphasize the connection between the production of James’s papers on contemporary illustration and his lifelong involvement in the

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larger economy of Harper & Brothers because James himself suggests the connection in several letters of the time and, more pertinently, in the essays themselves. True, in his literary criticism James routinely excoriates the publicity mongering that had become an omnipresent feature of the publishing world. In his ardent statement on “Criticism” (1891) for the New Review, for example, he peers into the ravenous maw of the periodicals industry and notes that it is kept fed by “the great business of reviewing”—much of it “off-hand,” vapid, and circulated on a vast scale by “our wonderful system of publicity” (LC 1: 96). In the fiction he wrote leading up to the articles on illustration, James similarly denounced the invasiveness of “the age of newspapers and telegrams and photographs and interviewers” (The Aspern Papers, 1888) and the rapacity of American journalism (The Reverberator, 1888). In the latter novel, George Flack, a journalist for the eponymous American magazine, sells the young heroine and her family on the idea of having the girl’s portrait painted by an American “master” he is promoting by arguing that art is a commodity like any other product bought for speculation: Mr. Flack explained to them that it would be idiotic to miss such an opportunity to get something at once precious and cheap; for it was well known that Impressionism was going to be the art of the future, and Charles Waterlow was a rising Impressionist. It was a new system altogether and the latest improvement in art. They didn’t want to go back, they wanted to go forward, and he would give them an article that would fetch five times the money in a couple of years. (35)

His attacks on the “new journalism” notwithstanding, James’s attitude toward his own magazine work was typically one of “professional realism” (Edel and Powers, “Bazar Letters” 75). Susan M. Griffin observes that in his early reviews of art exhibitions (written for the most part in the 1870s), James shows a “pragmatic cognizance of the dynamic interrelationship of critic, artist, audience, market, and object” (Foreword 2). As far back as 1875 the fledgling art critic had written in a review for the Galaxy: Many a picture has been bought, not because its purchaser either understood it or relished it—being incapable, let us say, of either of these subtle emotions—but because, for good or for ill, it had been made the subject of a certain amount of clever writing “in the papers.” It may be said that not only does the painter have to live by his pictures, but in many cases the critic has to as well, and it is there-


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fore in the latter gentleman’s interest to foster the idea that pictures are indispensable things. (Sweeney 88–89)

As a professional reviewer of these shows, and later as the author of catalogue notes for his friends’ exhibitions and of “clever” magazine articles about their work, James was necessarily implicated in what he would call in his essay on Edwin Abbey “the business of art.” In private correspondence concerning his essays on illustration, James owned up to his part in the business. He wrote apologetically to his friend Ned Abbey in 1887 about the piece he had published on Abbey in Harper’s Weekly the year before: “Your two books made me ashamed of that wretched, vague, little article I wrote about you a year ago; and yet, bad as it is, the mania for publicity is the curse of our vulgar age. Herrick or Goldsmith wouldn’t have done it—and that is why I love you—that you transport one so perfectly to uninteroceaning times— that is, they had no interviewers” (n.d.; qtd. in Lucas 164). James was equally gimlet-eyed in negotiating subsequent work for Harper’s. On August 5, 1887, he wrote to James R. Osgood (his own publishing company having gone under, Osgood was serving as the En glish agent for the Harpers), asking him to use his influence—“put on the screw a little”—to hurry along the publication of two stories Harper’s had been sitting on, as well as of an article he had submitted months earlier on John Singer Sargent. Present-day readers of James will recognize the Sargent essay, eventually published in Harper’s Monthly in October 1887, as a benchmark in the critical appreciation of the young American artist’s talents. But James’s letter to Osgood helps us locate that essay within a larger cultural system in which up-and-coming artists, critics, dealers, and journal editors all work to construct the public persona of “the artist.” Art historians from the 1960s onward have analyzed the dynamics of the “dealer-critic system” that emerged in the late nineteenth-century art world.5 The following two letters show James to be a prescient observer of the developing interdependence between the new art market and the nascent field of professional art criticism in the periodical press. I had hoped it would appear immediately after the great success [Sargent] had at the Academy this year—the Academy buying his picture out of the Chantrey Fund &c [in 1876 the Chantrey Trust became available for purchasing paintings for the British national collection]—& lately I heard from him that he had been

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asked for material by the Art Journal (Fine Arts Society) who propose to publish an article about him. He gave the material & never thought till afterwards that this might interfere with or anticipate the paper I had prepared about him for Harper. He wrote to the Art Journal telling them of this & requesting them to hang back; but I am afraid the circumstance will have just the opposite effect. It would distress me very much if my article should be forestalled. Moreover it is already antiquated—if it appears some months after the Academy episode of this year (the most important that has ever happened to him) & contains no mention of it. Do you happen to know what the Harpers are doing—or are intending to do—with the paper? I pray they may bring it to the light. I may add that I put forth the same prayer on behalf of a couple of other things of mine (2 stories—and very good ones!) which they appear to be keeping indefinitely. One of them went to them in October–November last. I hoped they would bring them soon to the front—so that I might hand them others. (unpublished; Za James, Box 2)

The symbiotic relationship of publisher, writer, and subject again comes to the fore in James’s subsequent correspondence with Osgood. James’s letter of February 1, 1890, concerns the placement of a second article on a prominent member of Harper’s art department, Charles S. Reinhart, whom he had briefly discussed in his earlier group portrait, “Our Artists in Europe.” James says he was motivated in part by having given short shrift to his friend in the previous essay. But his real argument is that the Harpers had essentially commissioned the second piece on Reinhart and would obviously profit by having one of their “name” artists featured editorially—preferably, with Osgood’s shepherding, in the Monthly, a more prestigious venue than the Weekly. When I was in Paris in December, Reinhart broached to me that the Harpers had sounded him on the subject of my doing, for their Weekly, an article to accompany a portrait—an article similar to one I did for them a couple of years [ago] about Abbey. He intimated that he would be glad if I would do it & that they wd, without any further negotiation on the subject, greatly welcome it. In a moment of contrition for not having perhaps used him as well as the artists in my recently delivered paper on the Artists, I gave him my word that I would produce him a sketch. To make my long story short, I have now produced it—& it occurs to me that I had better ask you what I had best do with it. Who is the present editor of the Weekly? I don’t know him, and have had no communication with him. Reinhart tells me that he simply awaits the article—but I don’t know how to address it. Had I better send


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it simply straight to Messrs. Harper—or is there any way in which you could take charge of it for me and introduce it? Now that it is written, though I didn’t much want to write it and did so mainly for good manners, I think it is really too good for the “Weekly.” However, it is very welcome to go there—if they will give me a liberal reward for it. It deserves that. I will send it straight, if you advise, but feel, somehow, as if it wanted some god fathering. (unpublished; Za James, Box 2)

I want to emphasize that the commodity discourse James employs in his letters to Osgood does not appear in his finished piece on Sargent—although we will see that it does inform his essay on Reinhart. Readers would scarcely expect the language of commerce, lampooned with undisguised glee in The Reverberator, to enter into James’s essay on a real-life “rising Impressionist” like Sargent (whose work in fact consisted chiefly of society portraits done on commission). Purveyors of elite culture like James and Sargent needed to cultivate consumers, of course, but they had to do so without appearing to collude with the marketplace. James had slyly intimated as much in a wonderfully canny review in 1877 for the Galaxy, where he writes of the opening of a private “avant-garde” gallery in London, “I suppose it is correct to speak of the Grosvenor Gallery as primarily an artistic enterprise; for it has had its origin, on the part of its distinguished proprietor (Sir Coutts Lindsay), rather in the love of pictures than in the love of money. . . . In so far as his beautiful rooms in Bond Street are a commercial speculation, this side of their character has been gilded over, and dissimulated in the most graceful manner” (Sweeney 139). Robert Jensen observes that as power shifted from the academic Salon to private commercial galleries in the art world of fin de siècle Europe, the discourse of art appreciation tended to suppress the language of commerce. In the myth-making language used to sell modernism, the “genuine” painting, “by virtue of its claims to authenticity as art, is inherently not commercial” (22). It is all the more significant, then, that in his second “sketch” on Reinhart (finally published in the Weekly on June 14, 1890), James openly acknowledges how his article feeds “the machinery of publicity.” The essay begins with a lengthy disquisition on the cult of celebrity: We Americans are accused of making too much ado about our celebrities, of being demonstratively conscious of each step that we take in the path of progress;

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and the accusation has its ground doubtless in this sense, that it is possible among us today to become a celebrity on unprecedentedly easy terms. . . . It is more and more striking that the machinery of publicity is so enormous, so constantly growing and so obviously destined to make the globe small, in relation of the objects, famous or obscure, which cover it, that it procures for the smallest facts and the most casual figures a reverberation to be expected only in the case of a world-conqueror. The newspaper and the telegram constitute a huge sounding-board, which has, every day and every hour, to be made to vibrate, to be fed with items, and the diffusion of the items takes place on a scale out of any sort of proportion to their intrinsic importance. The crackle of common things is transmuted into thunder—a thunder perhaps more resounding in America than elsewhere for the reason that the sheet of tin shaken by the Jupiter of the Press has been cut larger. (PT 62)

How must Reinhart have reacted to a disingenuous preamble that effectively pulls the rug out from under any praise that follows? James clearly worried about Reinhart’s reception of both of his commentaries, for two letters in Reinhart’s files show the author attempting to cushion the blow. In one letter he writes: Let me say frankly that I don’t believe you will care much for either of my articles. You will probably think that the fear of being fulsome has made me revolting. At any rate you will find something to forgive in the few apparently ungracious remarks in the columns of prose I sent the other day to the Weekly. The trouble is I can’t ever begin in the bald newspaper way—“C. S. Reinhart, our brightest illustrator, was born down in Pittsboro—&c.” I have to have a little architecture, a portico, a doormat & an antechamber. This comes off as it can. After all, it’s all very brief and bare. (Unpublished; Reinhart Papers, Box 1 [James’s second “apology” to Reinhart is quoted later in this chapter]) 6

James’s unflattering remarks in his second essay extend well beyond its portico. Having claimed that an “important” canvas Reinhart had exhibited at the Salon of 1887 “gives the full measure of Mr. Reinhart’s great talent and constitutes a kind of pledge,”7 James continues, It may be perverse on my part to see in it the big banknote, as it were, which may be changed into a multitude of gold and silver pieces. . . . I irreverently translate it into its equivalent in “illustrations”—half a hundred little examples, in black and


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white, of the same sort of observation. . . . To do little things instead of big may be a derogation; a great deal will depend upon the way the little things are done. Besides, no work of art is absolutely little. I grow bold and even impertinent as I think of the way Mr. Reinhart might scatter the smaller coin. (PT 76–77)

With the metaphor of hard currency James differentiates the larger and more “important” work of painting from the lesser work of illustration, the latter undertaken principally for financial gain. By extension, he seems to offer his own ambivalent rationale for temporarily abandoning weightier literary projects in favor of magazine pieces written for ready money. Most important, he highlights the nature of a portrait that is essentially quid pro quo: “Mr. Reinhart took his first steps and made his first hits in HARPER, which owes him properly a portrait in turn for so much portraiture” (PT 64). James apparently wants his readers to recognize this particular piece as part of “the business of reviewing,” which according to his 1891 essay “Criticism” “is done with baser coin” than more serious works of analysis (LC 1: 98). My argument in the following pages is that the tension between the writer’s task of commemorating the admirable work of the Harper illustrators, most of whom were his friends, and his self-protective need to distinguish his art from theirs, accounts for the richly subversive ambiguities of James’s commentary, a congeries of rhetorical moves I would characterize as techniques of containment.8 In light of James’s observation to Osgood that the Harper organization had solicited a separate article to “accompany a portrait” of Reinhart, we should consider how the figure of the modern illustrator was constructed visually as well as verbally in the essays that were subsequently collected as Picture and Text (Figure 59 shows the cover in actual size). Following an established convention of book publication, James’s photograph appears as the frontispiece for Picture and Text (Figure 60), such portraits having been used from the seventeenth century onward to convey the writer’s reputation and authority (Barchas 21). What is noteworthy in this case is that in keeping with the rising status of the commercial artist, the Harper illustrators were accorded similar treatment, their portraits interleaved with James’s text in this charming book of diminutive proportions (Figure 61).

Figure 59. Cover (actual size) of Picture and Text.

Figure 60. Frontispiece of Picture and Text.


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But to appreciate the celebrity treatment of these artists when two of the essays originally appeared in Harper’s Weekly, we need to bear in mind the tabloid scale of the Weekly, a folio-sized paper (approximately 10¾" ×15") featuring pictorial essays, news articles with large engravings made from sketches and photographs taken “on the scene,”

Figure 61. Portraits from James’s Picture and Text: Frank D. Millet (top left), George H. Boughton (top right), George Du Maurier (bottom left), Alfred Parsons (bottom right).

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arts coverage, and short fiction. To accompany James’s article on Edwin Austin Abbey in the Weekly, the artist’s likeness—engraved from a photograph taken by Napoleon Sarony, a specialist in celebrity portraits—appeared on the cover of the magazine, thereby granting him star status rivaling that of renowned authors and political figures of the day (Figure 62). For James’s essay on Reinhart, the artist’s portrait was featured on the second page of the Weekly (Figure 63). The cover shown below is reprinted here at about 26 percent of its actual size. In his remarks on Abbey, James reminds us, “The finest work he has yet done is in his admirable illustrations, in HARPER’S MAGAZINE, to ‘She Stoops to Conquer,’ but the promise that he would one day do it was given some years ago in his delightful volume of designs to accompany Herrick’s poems” (PT 46). Figure 64 shows one of several pages of publisher’s advertisements from a supplement to the issue containing the piece on Abbey. By viewing James’s articles in their original periodical format—with its juxtaposition of editorial features on the artists, portraits of the artists among other notable public figures, and advertisements for Harper’s books illustrated by Abbey and his colleagues—we can see more clearly how the essays functioned as company-sponsored instruments for promoting the corporate image of their illustrators and boosting the firm’s magazine and Figure 62. Portrait of Edwin Austin Abbey on the book sales. cover of Harper’s Weekly, December 1886.


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Collectively, the portraits of these illustrators present a significant counterpoint to stereotypical images of the artist put before the public in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Representative “types” include the éminence grise of the Royal Academy, Sir Frederick Leighton (“the urbane, the curly, the agreeably artificial” Leighton, James called him [Letters 3: 211]), shown in a photograph from 1892 in Cosmopolitan Magazine (Figure 65); a worldly William Merritt Chase, lounging smokingly, in a photograph of 1878 (Figure 66); and the flamboyant dandy, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, painted by Chase in 1885 (Figure 67). In Inventing the Modern Artist, Sarah Burns shows how an opposing “corporate” image of the American artist gradually made its way into the cultural and economic mainstream in the latter part of the nineteenth century as a result of strengthened ties between art and industry,

Figure 63. Portrait of Charles S. Reinhart in Harper’s Weekly, June 1890.

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p articularly through the rise of illustration and the decorative arts (35). Pictures of artists as serious business-suited types began to appear in the press, while at the same time a slightly more down-to-earth version of this image was promulgated in portraits of contemporary illustrators. The visual portraits in Picture and Text represent the Harper illustrators as sober, unworldly professionals—“young American workers,” in James’s repeated term, “new workers” in the fields of mass Figure 64. Promotion for Harper’s books highlighting culture. James’s verbal those illuatrated by Abbey, in the supplement for portraits similarly norHarper’s Weekly, December 4, 1886. malize the artists as an unassuming confraternity of “brothers of the brush” working in the bucolic setting of Broadway and collaborating in the manner of artisans in a medieval guild. James’s descriptions of their simple communal workspaces in the Cotswolds would also have suggested to readers of the time a marked contrast to the lavishly decorated and orientalia-bedecked artist’s studios made familiar to the public through images like those shown in Figures 68 and 69. In London, James had visited the studios of Frederick Leighton and John Everett Millais, coming away “impressed, as usual, with the gorgeous effect of worldly prosperity & success that both these gentlemen present. I suppose it is the demon of envy—but I can’t help contrasting the great rewards of the successful painter, here . . . with the so much

Figure 65. Portrait of Sir Frederick Leighton in Cosmopolitan Magazine, January 1893.

Figure 66. William Merritt Chase, albumen print, 1878. Photographer unknown. The William Merritt Chase Archives, Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY, Gift of Mrs. Virginia Brumenschenkel.

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more modest emoluments of the man of letters” (qtd. in IG 271). Pictures of Chase’s famous Tenth Street studio in Greenwich Village, according to art historian Barbara Gallati, helped generate public “fascination with the ‘artistic’ space as the cultural locus of creative energy. . . . It was principally through Chase that the notion of the American artist’s studio as a simple workplace or salesroom died. For Chase, the studio became a work of art in itself; a product and extension of the artistic personality that created it” (39). Not incidentally, these exotic settings also proved to be clever marketing tools.9 James implies as much in The Reverberator, where the American “celebrity of the future” is first seen in his Paris atelier smoking cigarettes “on Figure 67. William Merritt Chase, a vast divan, covered with scrappy oriJames Abbott McNeill Whistler (1885). © The Metropolitan ental rugs and cushions”; his prospective Museum of Art, New York, NY / clients are shown around the premises, Art Resource, NY. inspecting various completed and unfinished canvases “as they looked at bonnets and confections when they went to expensive shops” (Novels 580, 578). In contrast to these chic urban ateliers, the rural milieu is emphasized to an unusual degree in “Our Artists in Europe” (referred to hereafter as “Black and White,” its title in Picture and Text). James makes the village of Broadway the centerpiece of this extended opening essay of the book. Along with the portraits of the author and artists, three drawings of village scenes by Alfred Parsons make up the list of illustrations for Picture and Text: two sketches of the “Priory,” which served as the shared studio of Abbey and Millet (Figure 70), and a third of the village green (used as the headpiece of this chapter). By all contemporary accounts Broadway was indeed idyllic. What interests me here is the way James constructs Broadway as the remote

Figure 68. Sir Frederick Leighton’s studio, pictured in Cosmopolitan Magazine, January 1893.

Figure 69. Undated photograph of William Merritt Chase’s In the Studio (gelatin silver print, c. 1881). Photographer unknown. The William Merritt Chase Archives, Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY, Gift of Ronald G. Pisano.

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and otherworldly setting for the “revival” of the art of illustration, only mentioning in passing that Parsons and Abbey also maintained beautiful studios side by side in London (PT 19). Simpson notes that in 1884 Abbey had rented the studio directly below Sargent’s in London and that together these studios became gathering places for London’s “bohemian society,” including James, Du Maurier, Leighton, Vernon Lee, and Walter Pater (83). Boughton, too, maintained a sumptuous house and studio in Campden Hill, pictures of which accompanied an earlier Figure 70. Alfred Parsons, “Back of ‘The article by Cosmo Monkhouse Priory,’ Broadway,” in Picture and Text. for the Century, “English Artists and Their Studios” (Figure 71). Monkhouse emphasizes the sophistication of the artist’s surroundings: “The art of Boughton . . . is not likely to be reflected in the studio. Boughton’s is full of china, bronzes, and curiosities of all kinds. . . . The rest of its rich and beautiful appointments are personal to the man of travel and culture” (562). These fashionable studios notwithstanding, James makes the quaint village of Broadway “the particular spot which history will perhaps associate most with Figure 71. George Boughton’s studio in Campden Hill, the charming revival” of pictured in the Century, August 1881.


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the modern illustration movement (PT 2). By some “pleasant confusion” (effected here by sleight-of-syntax), the rural locale becomes at once an artist’s rendering and a state of mind: A very old English village lying among its meadows and hedges, in the very heart of the country, in a hollow of the green hills in Worcestershire, is responsible directly and indirectly for some of the most beautiful work in black-and-white with which I may concern myself here—that is, for much of the work of Mr. Abbey and Mr. Alfred Parsons. I do not mean to say that Broadway has told these gentlemen all they know . . . for Mr. Parsons, in particular, who knows everything that can be known about English fields and flowers, would have good reason to insist that the measure of his large landscape art is a large experience. I would only suggest that if one loves Broadway and is familiar with it, and if a part of that predilection is that one has seen Mr. Abbey and Mr. Parsons at work there, a pleasant confusion takes place of itself; one’s affection for the wide, long, grass-bordered vista of brownish grey cottages, thatched, latticed, mottled, mended, ivied, immemorial, grows with the sense of its having ministered to other minds and transferred itself to other recipients; just as the beauty of many a bit in many a drawing of the artists I have mentioned is enhanced by the sense, or at any rate by the desire, of recognition. Broadway and much of the land about it are, in short, the perfection of the old English rural tradition. (2–4)

James locates his artists in a hermetic and, in effect, preindustrial space, difficult to reach and unspoiled because untouched by modernity. Here “the coaches used to turn (there were many of old, but the traffic of Broadway was blown to pieces by steam, though the destroyer has not come nearer than half a dozen miles)” (7). Broadway’s fairy-tale landscape anticipates the fictional country retreat to which James’s young painter escapes in “Flickerbridge” (1902). Magically sheltered from contemporary life, Flickerbridge survives as “an old corner such as one didn’t believe existed, and the holy calm of which made the chatter of studios, the smell of paint, the slang of critics, the whole sense and sound of Paris, come back as so many signs of a huge monkey-cage.” To the hero, “the scene was as rare as some fine old print with the best bits down in the corners. Old books and old pictures, allusions remembered and aspects conjectured, reappeared to him . . . how one might spoil it! . . . Its only safety, of a truth, was to be left still to sleep” (CS 5: 429).

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Like Washington Irving’s Tarrytown and Hawthorne’s Salem, Flickerbridge is situated on the border between the present day and the imaginary past, and the same might be said of James’s re-creation of the village of Broadway. Broadway exists a world apart from the current art scene in London and Paris. In its inhabitants’ seeming rejection of urban materialism James implies sincerity and integrity. Ironically enough, the publicity James created by publishing his essay did spoil the village a little, according to Ned Abbey, who grumbled in a letter at the time that James’s article “did not much help the privacy of the place” (qtd. in Lucas 148). We can gauge the artfulness of James’s depiction by restoring a few items he airbrushed from the scene. Located about ninety miles northwest of London, Broadway was not quite as inaccessible as James would have it: Simpson points out that “with the train schedules, and then the ride by cart from Evesham, it was conceivable to come to town for the day” (190). The artists’ colony included a number of prominent figures whom James mentions in his letters but omits from the essays: not just wives (like Lily Millet, with whom James corresponded, and Gertrude Abbey, whom J. Henry Harper credits in his memoirs with forwarding the artist’s career) and assorted progeny, but illustrious visitors like Edmund Gosse and Lawrence Alma-Tadema; and long-term residents like the noted actress Mary Anderson (who was James’s friend and his inspiration for Miriam in The Tragic Muse), and John Singer Sargent, who had moved into a seventeenth-century inn in the village in 1885 (the building, untenanted, is mentioned in “Black and White”). Here is Gosse’s delightful—if equally “composed”10 —memory of the Broadway scene: In the late summer of 1886 . . . Edwin Abbey, John S. Sargent, Alfred Parsons, Fred Barnard and I, and others, lived through five bright weeks of perfect weather in boisterous intimacy. Early in September Henry James joined us for a short visit. The Millets possessed, on their domain, a mediaeval ruin, a small ecclesiastical edifice, which was very roughly repaired so as to make a kind of refuge for us, and there Henry James and I would write, while Abbey and Millet painted on the floor below and Sargent and Parsons tilted their easels just outside. We were all within shouting distance, and not much serious work was done, for we were in towering spirits and everything was food for laughter. Henry


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James was the only sedate one of us all—benign, indulgent, but grave. . . . It is remembered with what affability he wore a garland of flowers at a birthday feast, and even, nobly descending, took part one night in a cake-walk. But mostly, though not much our senior, he was serious, mildly avuncular, but very happy and unupbraiding. (qtd. in Charteris, Sargent 72)

Gosse’s biographer calls the expansive Broadway circle “semibohemian” (Charteris, Gosse 189). James’s version is somewhat tamer, its membership more selective. In “Black and White,” James discusses George Boughton and Alfred Parsons at length in the same context as the habitués of Broadway, although actually the two were peripheral to the circle. On the other hand, he minimizes the presence of Fred Barnard, who was a resident of the village; Barnard was a troubled soul who evidently drank, and his illustrations were, as we have seen in James’s letter to William, less appealing to the author’s taste. In “Black and White” Barnard makes a brief appearance as “that very peculiar pictorial humorist . . . who, allowing for the fact that he always seems a little too much to be drawing for Dickens and that the footlights are the illumination of his scenic world, has so remarkable a sense of English types and attitudes, costumes and accessories, in what may be called the great-coat-and-gaiters period” (22). I have noted that Sargent, who lived in Broadway at the time, does not figure here among the dramatis personae. Again the omission is meaningful. James’s essay on Sargent, along with his paper on Daumier, will be reprinted in Picture and Text. Considered thus apart from the Harper’s illustrators, these two artists serve as exemplars of “fine art,” in Sargent’s case, and of a singular talent for lifting caricature to the level of enduring achievement, in Daumier’s. The articles grouped in Picture and Text are rounded out with a short dialogue about the theater that bears, on the face of it, little relation to the other essays; yet as Bogardus observes, “After the Play” argues that lavish scenery makes a negligible contribution to the theatrical piece (64).11 In other words, the coda to the book, as well as the separation of “illustrators” from “artists” and the diatribe on publicity in James’s second essay on Reinhart, together serve to relegate decorative art and illustration to a secondary category of creative endeavor. Michelle Bogart observes that the border between illustration and

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fine art was still permeable in the late nineteenth century, although the line would be clearly drawn by the 1920s. She cites the fluid and successful careers of art-school-trained illustrators like Abbey, La Farge, Homer, and Pyle: All four men identified themselves as fine artists and were accepted as such among their peers in genteel art and literary circles of the late 1870s and 1880s (those in the New York City artists’ group the Tile Club, for example)—men who themselves attained high reputations by the late 1880s and 1890s. Homer and La Farge (in the 1860s) and Abbey (in the late 1880s, along with others like Frank Millet, Kenyon Cox, and Childe Hassam) moved back and forth between illustration for publications and painting for its own sake. Mastery of both enterprises was consistent with the ideals of the English Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic movements, which they and Pyle admired. Proponents of both movements believed, for example, that the so-called minor arts—illustration, decorative arts, and other crafts—should be accorded the same artistic status as painting and sculpture. They advocated collaboration on the production of elegant illustrated books and journals as a valuable means of achieving this unification of the arts. (19–20)

It would seem, however, that James was working toward a definitive critical division between painting and the graphic arts in the Harper’s essays. In fact, he had been doing so since his art reviews of the 1870s. In the early reviews James consistently frames his aesthetic judgments in terms of the contrast between the pictorial and plastic on one side and the illustrative and anecdotal on the other.12 Just as significant, he identifies the unsophisticated middle-class consumers who flock to Academy shows and new commercial galleries with the rapidly expanding middle-brow audience he is beginning to address in the magazines.13 He criticizes pictures on view at the Royal Academy, for example, for being “painted down” to the level of bourgeois taste by artists who “accept as the standard of perfection one’s fitness for being reproduced in the Graphic” (Sweeney 148).14 James’s art reviews thus look forward to his later essays on literature, in which he takes issue with critics and other readers who value narrative over formal concerns. By the same principle, in his essays on illustration he attempts to show the inadequacy of anecdotal (as opposed to pictorial) modes of interpretation when applied to


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the subtleties of the modern short story, the literary form that he more than any other American writer helped to develop. In Picture and Text he carefully separates illustration from fine art in a number of ways, beginning with his distancing of the illustrators from their counterparts in town. In similar fashion, although each of the illustrators was also a painter of pictures displayed in prestigious venues, James confines his discussion to their work in black and white and reinforces the borders of his subject at every juncture. Millet, for example, was the first of the group to settle at Broadway and to “appropriate” its treasures, “as I could easily prove,” James protests, “if it did not perversely happen that he has commemorated most of his impressions in color. That excludes them from the small space here at my command; otherwise I could testify to the identity of old nooks and old objects, those that constitute both out-of-door and in-door furniture” (4–5). “In speaking of Mr. George Boughton, A.R.A,” James writes further along, “I encounter the same difficulty as with Mr. Millet: I find the window closed through which alone almost it is just to take a view of his talent. Mr. Boughton is a painter about whom there is little that is new to tell to-day, so conspicuous and incontestable is his achievement, the fruit of a career of which the beginning was not yesterday. He is a draughtsman and an illustrator only on occasion and by accident” (27). James is moreover at pains to present magazine illustration as having its own brief and distinct history, one that is documented exhaustively in the popular journals “of our generation”—as opposed to the centuries-old history of art recorded in the annals of serious scholarship. He notes, for instance, that “the course of things is so rapid in this country that the years of Mr. Reinhart’s apprenticeship to pictorial journalism, positively recent as they are, already are almost prehistoric” (71). The entire history of “pictorial journalism” seems contained in the back numbers of the Harper publications, for specific examples of which James repeatedly enlists his readers’ recollection: The readers of HARPER have had for years a great deal of [Mr. Abbey’s company], and they will easily recognize the feeling I allude to—the expectation of familiarity in variety. The beautiful art and taste, the admirable execution, strike the hour with the same note; but the figure, the scene, is ever a fresh

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conception. . . . His whole career has been open to the readers of HARPER, so that what they may enjoy on any particular occasion is not only the talent, but a kind of affectionate sense of the history of the talent. That history is, from the beginning, in these pages, and it is one of the most interesting and instructive, just as the talent is one of the richest and the most sympathetic in the art-annals of our generation. (13)

In the same vein he writes, “A turning of the leaves of HARPER brings one constantly face to face with [Mr. Parsons]”; “the reader will remember [his] beautiful illustrations for Mr. Blackmore’s novel of Springhaven” (22); and “the reader will remember how often he has accompanied with pictures the text of some amiable paper describing a pastoral region” (24). George Boughton’s forays into illustration, though relatively infrequent, “have mostly occurred, however, in the pages of HARPER, and the happiest of them will still be fresh in the memory of its readers” (27). With these repeated appeals to the reader’s presumed familiarity with the pictures, audience members are enlisted as participants in the modern revival of illustration virtually from its inception. In one of his first published essays (1866), on the novels of George Eliot, James had proclaimed, “The writer makes the reader very much as he makes his characters. When he makes him ill, that is, makes him indifferent, he does no work; the writer does all. When he makes him well, that is, makes him interested, then the reader does quite half the labor” (LC 1: 922). William Dean Howells, always among James’s most perceptive admirers, saw early on that James would need to create his own audience. James was to create his readers not only in his fiction but quite literally, as we see here, in his criticism as well. While James speaks of the imaginative territory the storyteller shares with illustrators like Abbey and Reinhart (PT 15, 65), he spends most of his time putting ground between himself and these men. At the most basic level, their material differs substantively from his. Of Boughton, James explains, “The note of his work is the melancholy of rural things, of lonely people and of quaint, far-off legend and refrain” (31). Similarly, “With all [Abbey’s] ability, with all his tact, it would be impossible to him, we conceive, to illustrate a novel of contemporary manners” (51). Even Du Maurier, although his subjects are of the present day, presents


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“a panorama of tall, pleasant, beautiful people, placed in becoming attitudes, in charming gardens, in luxurious rooms, so that I can scarcely tell which is the more definite, the impression satiric or the impression plastic.” A little too deferential to the muse of elegance, too satiric, too given to types, Du Maurier’s art, by the author’s lights, would make a poor fit with James’s own (34–36). James manages to suggest that the work of these artists is not only unsuitable to his subject matter but unfitted to his more modern and nuanced methods of depiction. The devices discussed so far are all elements of what I have called James’s techniques of containment. They serve to cordon off his subjects, an effect managed despite the fact that their work is specifically designed for mass consumption by a contemporary audience. James writes that in Broadway, “everything is convertible. Even the passing visitor finds himself becoming so; the place has so much character that it rubs off on him, and if in an old garden—an old garden with old gates and old walls and old summer-houses—he lies down on the old grass (on an immemorial rug, no doubt), it is ten to one but that he will be converted” (5). James was “converted” into a black-and-white sketch by Sargent, which the author later saw fit to publish along with his short story “The Death of the Lion” in the inaugural issue of the Yellow Book.15 In his discourse on illustration he was able to turn the act of conversion around by making over the illustrators as figures in his own composition. James leaves his sketch of Reinhart in “Black and White” for last. Reinhart was not a member of the Broadway community, nor even a visitor, despite his friend Abbey’s frequent invitations.16 He is presented in the company of the others in “Black and White” because like them he belonged to the Harper atelier. Reinhart was one of the most popular and prolific illustrators of his time, and James rightly praises his drawing as “not precious, as the aesthetic say, nor pottering, as the vulgar, but free, strong and secure” (38). Even so, James tempers his admiration to a far greater extent than in the case of the other illustrators, both here and in the follow-up essay on Reinhart, for reasons quite apart from the quality of the draftsmanship. Unlike his fellow artists (Du Maurier being the exception), Reinhart primarily drew scenes of modern life. As James puts it, “He is the observer of the immediate, as Mr. Abbey is that of the considerably

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removed, and the conditions he asks us to accept are less expensive to the imagination than those of his colleague” (37). More to the point, as someone specializing in contemporary figural scenes, Reinhart was the only artist in the group who had actually illustrated James’s short fiction, three Harper’s stories in fact, and his pairing with James in future publications was a distinct possibility—or rather, a threat. How to create distance between Reinhart’s work and his own? Consider the setting James constructs for Reinhart in the concluding segment of “Black and White”: Mr. Reinhart is open to the large appeal of Paris, where he lives—as is evident from much of his work—where he paints, and where, in crowded exhibitions, reputation and honors have descended upon him. And yet Paris, for all she may have taught him, has not given him the mystic sentiment—about which I am perhaps writing nonsense. Is it nonsense to say that, being very much an incarnation of the modern international spirit (he might be a Frenchman in New York, were he not an American in Paris), the moral of his work is possibly the inevitable want of finality, of intrinsic character, in that sweet freedom? (42)

James seems rather pointedly to define Reinhart’s milieu as not-Broadway, a contrast elaborated by Reinhart’s distance from his colleagues temperamentally as well as geographically. In James’s formulation, a “cosmopolite” like Reinhart tends to be “a little hard,” a “prosateur”; he lacks the “mystic sentiment,” the local and “poetic” touch of his colleagues, with their “predilections” and their “dreams.” The latter are typical Jamesian code words for the suggestive qualities of genuine artistry. In other words, James wants to contrast the superficial observation of contemporary life, which is most amenable to illustration, with the profound complexity of his brand of fiction, which is not. James’s description of his own artistic goals and methods in these essays is always indirect, implied by contrast with the illustrator’s craft. He introduces Reinhart in “Black and White” as the illustrator of “the modern sketch of travel,” and of the modern tale—the poor little “quiet,” psychological, conversational modern tale, which I often think the artist invited to represent it to the eye must hate, unless he be a very intelligent master, so little, on superficial view, would there appear to be in it to represent. The superficial view is, after all, the natural one


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for the picture-maker. . . . He is not so much suggestive as positively and sharply representative. His facility, his agility, his universality are a truly stimulating sight. He asks not too many questions of his subject, but to those he does ask he insists upon a thoroughly intelligible answer. (37–38)

In his subsequent full-fledged essay on Reinhart, James continues to measure, with exaggerated coyness, the gap between the author’s vision and the artist’s translation of it: Mr. Reinhart has, of course, interpreted many a fictive scene—he has been repeatedly called upon to make the novel and the story visible. This he energetically and patiently does; though of course we are unable to say whether the men and women he makes us see are the very people whom the authors have seen. That is a thing that, in any case, one will never know; besides, the authors who don’t see vaguely are apt to see perversely. The story-teller has, at any rate, the comfort with Mr. Reinhart that his drawings are constructive and have the air of the actual. (74)

Perhaps the most intriguing of James’s techniques of containment in these essays is what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick might have called the “ostentatious circularity” of his reasoning. Particularly in his comments on Reinhart, he deploys the technique of talking around his subject with a mischievous wit verging on insolence. (“I have left Mr. Reinhart to the last because of his importance, and now this very importance operates as a restriction and even as a sort of reproach to me. To go well round him at a deliberate pace would take a whole book” [37].) In a number of excerpts quoted in this chapter, James seems to gesture toward certain statements about illustration without actually making them. He accomplishes the critical feint by establishing a pattern of self-referential utterances of the kind Sedgwick terms “periperformatives.” Sedgwick’s formulation of the periperformative builds on speech acts that J. L. Austin identified in 1950s as “performatives”: that is, first-person indicative statements in which to utter the statement is to do it—as in the declarations “I promise . . . testify, confirm, commemorate,” and like-minded verbs that can be preceded by “hereby.” (Austin’s term has been much contested and adapted by later commentators. Like Shoshana Felman, for instance, Sedgwick modifies the term to “‘explicit’ performatives,” to distinguish them from the aspect of performativity that deconstructive criticism recognizes as common to all utterances.)17

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According to Sedgwick, the efficacy of periperformative utterances depends on their tangency to, as well as their difference from, explicitly performative statements. James invokes the performative, but what he asserts is not “I prove” or “I testify” or “I confirm” but rather “I could easily prove,” “I could testify” (24), “I feel how much I confirm” (78). Praise is typically cast in the conditional; great illustration is described as provisional rather than accomplished fact; and fulfillment of the “promise” of commercial art is deferred to some indefinite moment in the future. “If,” James writes, “at the same time as we commemorate what they have done we succeed in enlarging a little the conception of what they may yet do, we shall be repaid even for having exposed ourselves as fanatics—fanatics of the general manner, I mean, not of particular representatives of it” (64). Neither making positive claims for the present state of illustration nor repudiating it, the author adopts a rhetorical stance athwart the two. Sedgwick demonstrates the subversive quality of the periperformative in James’s novels by analyzing the slippery and self-conscious “circularity” of Charlotte Stant’s speech to the Prince in The Golden Bowl (“I don’t care what you make of it, and I don’t ask anything whatever of you—anything but this. I want to have said it—that’s all; I want not to have failed to say it” [107–8]). Charlotte delivers herself of these pronouncements during her secret meeting with the Prince—ostensibly to shop for a wedding gift for Maggie Verver, the Prince’s fiancée—on the eve of the marriage. The effect of Charlotte’s speech, Sedgwick points out, is to interfere with, to occlude, the (performative) wedding vows before the fact (73–75). In his essays on illustration, James employs an analogous method of gesturing toward saying or having said without making the statement itself, thus warping and displacing the pronouncements he would make. He begins “Black and White” by stating that the pages of his essay “may be referred to without arrogance in support of the contention that the limits of this large movement, with all its new refinement, are not yet in sight” (2). He ends his second essay on Reinhart by stating that the artist’s studies of American moeurs “showed what there is to see—what there is to guess. . . . It would be serious work and would abound in reality; it would help us, as it were, to know what we are talking about. In


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saying this I feel how much I confirm the great claims I just made for the revival of illustration” (77–78). He restates the claims he has made for the preeminence of modern illustration without quite having produced substantiation for those claims. Equally important to this preemptive approach are James’s omissions regarding the drawings that Reinhart and Du Maurier had already made for his fiction, all of it appearing in Harper’s publications. In the case of Du Maurier, James devotes most of his discussion to the artist’s earlier, brilliant drawings for Punch. Figures 72 and 73 show two of Du Maurier’s celebrated satires for Punch of Aesthetic movement “types”: the artist, Maudle, and his friend the art critic, Prigsby, contemplating Maudle’s latest picture. But James makes no mention of his beloved friend’s illustrations for Washington Square until his fourth and final essay on the artist, published in Harper’s Monthly (September 1897) after Du Maurier’s death. Then James recalls, I am also fondly and confusedly conscious that we first met on the ground of the happy accident of an injury received on either side in connection with his having consented to make drawings for a short novel that I had constructed in a crude defiance of the illustrator. He had everything, in that way, to forgive me, and I had to forgive him a series of monthly moments of which nothing would induce me at this time to supply the dates. (LC 1: 879)

Du Maurier, for his part, blamed himself for the failure of their collaboration on Washington Square, which he alludes to in an essay published in 1890. “When I have failed to please,” he writes, “the only revenge has been a discreet silence; indeed, in one case, where I failed conspicuously and disastrously, through the unsuitability of subject-matter to my pencil, the author has heaped coals of fire on my head, by becoming my intimate friend” (353). One would have to say that the artist’s dim view of his contributions to Washington Square is justified (Figure 74). Even the reviewers of the time commented on the poor quality of the illustrations for the book, the New York Herald’s otherwise positive review calling them “disappointing” and the Chicago Tribune reviewer concluding, “Of Du Maurier’s illustrations the less said the better. Not only do they fail to illustrate, but they are not at all in harmony with the book, being as

Figure 72. “Maudle on the Choice of a Profession.” George Du Maurier’s artist, Maudle, in Punch, 1881.

Figure 73. “The art-critic.” George Du Maurier’s art critic, Prigsby, in “Distinguished Amateurs,” in Punch, 1880.


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thoroughly English in construction and design as the latter is un-English and American in locale and detail” (qtd. in Gard 101–2). The drawings are more caricature than illustration, lacking the wit and grace James admired in Du Maurier’s cartoons for Punch. What might be termed James’s “rhetoric of omission” is even more pointed in his treatment of Reinhart. One would have expected the author to mention Reinhart’s drawings for three of his stories recently published in Harper publications: “Cousin Maria” (renamed “Mrs. Temperly” when collected in book form) in the Weekly (August 1887); and “Louisa Pallant” and “Two Countries” (later retitled “The Modern Warning”) in the Monthly (February and June 1888). Yet he neglects them altogether: if, according to James, “silence is the perfection of disapproval” (PT 14), Reinhart is dealt what nineteenth-century deportment books call the “cut direct.” Since James’s critical commentaries on Reinhart were published in 1889 and 1890, and reprinted in 1893 with emendations but still no acknowledgment of these joint productions, Harper’s readers of the period—particularly if they were the faithful historians James makes them out to be—could only conclude that James left these drawings out of his account because he disliked them.

Figure 74. “He had a sweet, light, tenor voice.” Illustration by George Du Maurier for Washington Square (1880).

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Quite the contrary. In a fascinating series of unpublished letters (among Reinhart’s papers at Columbia University), James not only expresses extravagant admiration for a number of these sketches but asks to buy them for his own collection and makes detailed arrangements for their purchase. James’s letters were written between June and August 1888—that is, just after the publication of the stories and before the appearance of the essays on Reinhart and his colleagues. On June 13 he thanks Reinhart for his “heroically generous response to my inquiry of the other day” regarding purchase of the drawings. “Let me for today tell you simply that you endear yourself singularly to me & that I am almost ashamed to be treated as if my ‘appreciation’ were worth so great a price,” James continues, adding, “I leave you to judge however whether that appreciation will be less cordial after this. . . . I shall receive them with gratitude & enthusiasm, and . . . they will form the rarest ornament (though that doubtless is not saying much) of the humble home of yours most truly.” On July 27, having just received all three sets of drawings in “a state of thunderous excitement,” he writes, They show me, now more than I supposed, how, to be fully appreciated, your work must be seen as it comes from your hand & how much it loses in the way it’s interpreted for publication. All these things abound in charming intention & admirable rendering. . . . How wonderfully well you draw & with what delicacy & yet definiteness you characterize! Truly, it is a beautiful & interesting art, which ought to bring you more glory—great as is the honour you already enjoy from it. The face & figure, the whole indication—especially the seated body—of the girl sketching, in Louisa Pallant [shown in Figure 75], are a kind of work that excites all my respect. (Reinhart Papers, Box 1)

In response to Reinhart’s offer to give James the “Cousin Maria” drawings, the author declines the gift (in his letter of August 4) with the characteristically orotund politesse he reserved for writing about subpar work by people he liked, indicates his preference for the two later sets of drawings, asks to substitute one of these sketches for the proffered “Maria” set, and proceeds to negotiate at length for the purchase of the remaining illustrations from “Louisa Pallant” and “Two Countries,” making six drawings in all, at the price of $150, a fair but not inconsiderable sum for a man who habitually complained of being financially strapped.


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The following spring, in May 1889, James sent Reinhart a contrite note along with an advance copy of “Our Artists in Europe,” which Harper’s Monthly issued at long last in June. His note of May 21 continues apologetically, “I send you a copy of the article in Harper . . . I mean the long-delayed, of which we talked in December. Please judge it mercifully. The other—the little one about you individually, for the Weekly, which I sent three months ago through Osgood, ‘the House’ has never acknowledged nor taken any notice of. Their ways are queer and their manners are bad” (Reinhart Papers, Box 1). James’s private correspondence with Osgood and Reinhart helps clarify some of the ambiguities and omissions of his published commentaries. On one hand, we have his growing cordiality with the artist, his high regard for at least some of the pictures, his now-familiar observation that his recent work has been treated cavalierly by Harper, and his concomitant recognition that “the House” encouraged, even solicited editorial “appreciations” of its writers and artists as good business practice. On the other hand, James didn’t much care for the “Cousin Maria” drawings nor, more generally, for the comparatively crude translation of the original artwork into engraved images for the printed page, least of all when the printed pages were his. The appearance of these stories in their original printed form suggests a few more reasons for James’s ambivalence. Donald D. Stone points out that James’s notebook entries of the time show him consciously taking up Howells’s advice that he return to his “international theme,” partly in the hope of regaining lost popularity (247). The three stories James published in the Harper magazines for 1887 and 1888 revolve around upper-middle-class American expatriates in posh European resorts, and their international subjects most likely determined Harper’s choice of Reinhart to illustrate them. As James notes in his commentaries, Rein hart was known for his pictures of well-heeled Americans disporting themselves at fashionable watering places for travelogues such as Charles Dudley Warner’s celebrated series on American resorts. The artist naturally used the same visual language for depicting the subjects of both the travel articles and the fictions, which ran side by side in the pages of the upscale magazines (Figures 75, 76, and 77). For instance, Reinhart’s illustrations for James ran in Harper’s Monthly during the same period as

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his sketches for A Little Swiss Sojourn, a travel series by William Dean Howells (discussed in the following chapter; see Figure 86). Richard Brodhead observes that by juxtaposing illustrated travel sketches and fiction in this way, quality journals like Harper’s Monthly tended to blur the lines between categories: “These insistent conjunctions . . . tell us that nineteenth-century literary genres we are used to thinking of as freestanding were not autonomous in their original cultural production but formed mutually supportive parts of a concerted textual program” (125–31). Essentially heteroglossic, the format of the illustrated magazine undermined the unitary concept of authorship, a province James strove hard to preserve. In his final Preface to the New York Edition James would conclude of the writer’s text and the illustrator’s interpolation, His own garden, however, remains one thing, and the garden he has prompted the cultivation of at other hands becomes quite another; which means that the frame

Figure 75. “I had before me the daily spectacle of her manner with my nephew.” Illustration by Charles S. Reinhart for “Louisa Pallant” in Harper’s Monthly, June 1888.

Figure 76. “She looked lovely as she stood there, with happiness on her face.” Illustration by Charles S. Reinhart for “Two Countries” in Harper’s Monthly, February 1888.


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Figure 77. “Tourists at Montreux” Illustration by Charles S. Reinhart for William Dean Howells’s A Little Swiss Sojourn in Harper’s Monthly, March 1888.

of one’s own work no more provides place for such a plot than we expect flesh and fish to be served on the same platter. One welcomes illustration, in other words, with pride and joy; but also with the emphatic view that, might one’s “literary jealousy” be duly deferred to, it would quite stand off and on its own feet and thus, as a separate and independent subject of publication. (LC 1: 1326–27)

It was precisely this self-protective isolation—of text from picture, of fiction from nonfiction, and of his own cultivated garden from the plots of others in the same magazine issue—that James was aiming for in the Harper’s essays on illustration. We are still left with the puzzle of his particular disdain for the “Cousin Maria” pictures, one of which is shown in Figure 78. Whence the author’s specific aversion? Reinhart’s style for this project is pared down to shorthand, and his spare line may reflect the exigencies of publishing for the Weekly deadline, but one might also argue in the artist’s defense that his style here evinces a purposeful economy of design.

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Figure 78. One of three illustrations by Charles S. Reinhart for “Cousin Maria” in Harper’s Weekly, August 13, 1887.

As William Coffin notes in an article for Scribner’s, “American Illustration of To-Day” (1892), “Mr. Reinhart possesses a facility in pendrawing that is so remarkable that it must be mentioned as the first distinguishing quality in his work. It is apparent in all his drawings, which always look as if they had been easily done, and it is very rare to see one that has the slightest suggestion of having been retouched or worked over” (345–46). It is in his extensive remarks on publicity at the opening of the second Reinhart essay that James provides the clue to what was perhaps his primary objection to these engravings, or “cuts.” In that passage, quoted earlier in this chapter, he writes that “the diffusion of the items takes place on a scale out of any sort of proportion to their intrinsic importance” and that their thunderous crackle is “perhaps


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more resounding in America than elsewhere for the reason that the sheet of tin shaken by the Jupiter of the Press has been cut larger” (62). Proportion is a key to James’s criticism in general, and to his private characterization of Reinhart’s “ugly big drawings” for “Cousin Maria” in particular. The “sheet . . . cut larger” is a fair description of the tabloid format. Turning now to the original layout of the story in the Weekly, we see that the relation of text to image (on the right-hand side of Figure 79) is indeed clumsily out of scale. The problem cannot be laid exclusively on the artist’s doorstep: both the cuts and the story are sabotaged by being printed in such top-heavy relation. The bloated format only emphasizes the insubstantial outlines of Reinhart’s drawing, while his figured giants nearly swallow up the squashed text. On widening our view to the full two-page spread in the Weekly, a more disturbing aspect of the visual presentation of the story becomes evident. A lively jumble of fiction and nonfiction was, as we know, crucial to the financial success of the periodicals industry. As Richard Watson Gilder of the Century observed, “We put a poem or an artistic story in next to a war article and that number of the magazine has a huge circulation, but it is the war article that gives it the circulation and is the power to pay authors, rather than the individual story” (qtd. in Gabler-Hover 242). Unlike the Century and the Atlantic, however, Harper’s Monthly made a point of avoiding articles on timely or controversial public affairs, instead leaving coverage of topical matters to its Weekly publication, a journal aimed at a wider segment of the population than the literary Monthly. In 1887, Harper’s Weekly was mining the vein of popular interest in the post-Reconstruction “New South” in a series of articles that ran concurrently with fictions like “Cousin Maria.” In his history of the family firm, J. Henry Harper recalls that an editorial party had been invited by John H. Inman, “a devoted and enterprising friend of American industries,” to investigate “the great changes and improvements” that had occurred in the South since the Civil War. The idea fell in line with Harper’s economic and social interests in promoting North-South reconciliation.18 Charles Dudley Warner was hired to write the copy, and three staff artists were brought along to document the trip, about

Figure 79. Full layout of “Cousin Maria” in Harper’s Weekly, showing adjacent illustration by Horace Bradley for featured series, “The New South.”

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which Harper soothingly concludes, “Political differences and the friction of races were found to be yielding to the beneficent touch of healthy industrial enterprise and a fresh prosperity” (House of Harper 550–51). The full-page photoengraved drawings for the “New South” series created jarring contrasts with the stories printed on neighboring pages, as Figure 79 shows. Within the pages of Harper’s Weekly, the plight of African Americans in the postwar South was routinely treated with a combination of mild sympathy, condescension, and—particularly in scores of cartoons supplied by E. W. Kemble, A. B. Frost, and Charles G. Bush—blatant racism. Commenting on the drawing (by Horace Bradley) of the field workers shown in Figure 79, for example, an editor of the Weekly writes, Expert cotton-pickers work with great rapidity, as they are generally paid by the pound. . . . It is hard, hot work at times, and under a broiling sun. As celerity is everything, sometimes any animal that can haul is pressed into service, and in the illustration a mule and an ox are seen attached to the same wagon. Men and women seem to enjoy the work, and through the cotton fields they sing as they pick. There have been many inventions devised for the mechanical picking of cotton, but nothing, so far, has proved as effectual or economical as the hands of the colored people. (595)

Nevertheless, despite all the insensitivities of the accompanying text, the photographic realism with which the African American workers are presented is so densely detailed, and so dramatically composed withal, as to overpower and trivialize the adjacent work of fiction. The unhappy juxtaposition represents the clash between two competing forms of realism in the late nineteenth-century popular press, documentary and fictional. The latter, in this case, is James’s brand of “‘quiet,’ psychological, conversational modern tale,” depicting privileged lives in an international setting—as opposed to, say, the grittier realism of regional American fictions of his day. One might argue on James’s behalf that “Cousin Maria” exposes the decadence of the society in which his figures move: nouveau riche American expatriates who restrain one daughter so that the other is free to marry into nobility; corrupt members of the European aristocracy who arrange the marriage; haute bourgeois salons where suitors who offer neither wealth


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nor prestige are rejected out of hand. But for all James’s penetrating sociological investigation, it is the story’s restrictive upper-class milieu that is brought to the fore in Reinhart’s soufflé of a drawing. As a result the fiction seems more frivolous, even as the workers who solemnly confront the viewer from the adjacent page take on greater gravity. That same month, in the February 12 edition of the Weekly, James’s essay on Constance Fenimore Woolson had appeared (with an engraving of Woolson on the cover, taken from the now-familiar photograph of her in profil perdu), praising the author for capturing “the dialect of the freedman” amid the essential “voicelessness of the conquered and reconstructed south.” The facing pages of the Weekly seem ironically to illustrate James’s observation that at this point, at least, apart from marginal exceptions such as tales by Fenimore Woolson and George Washington Cable (and only much later with the appearance of Charles Chesnutt’s stories in the Atlantic), “no social revolution of equal magnitude had ever reflected itself so little in literature, remained so unrecorded, so unpainted and unsung” (LC 1: 640–41). that James experience publication in the illustrated magazines as a loss of authorial control. The presentation of his work was profoundly affected by the decisions of illustrators, photographers, editors, designers, and typesetters. As someone who often found himself “illustrating the illustrators,” according to his phrase in “Black and White,” James aimed to reverse the process, regaining a measure of authorial control by inscribing the illustrators and their work within his text. The operation of James’s critique was both proleptic regarding fulfillment of the “promise” of illustration and retroactive in its implications regarding previous illustrations of his fiction. James would lobby aggressively for including illustrations in two later projects, but on these occasions the pictures would be of his own choosing. Following his meticulous supervision of Coburn’s frontispieces for the New York Edition, the next project for which James insisted on illustrations was the second volume of his memoirs. Notes of a Son and Brother includes the famous Mathew Brady daguerreotype of young Henry with his father (Figure 80) plus five drawings by William James, whose artistic I t was in e v itab l e

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“The Business of Art” Figure 80. Frontispiece of Notes of a Son and Brother (1914). Daguerreotype of Henry James Jr. and Henry James Sr. by Mathew Brady, from the William James papers, MS Am 1092.9 (4597.6). By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Figure 81. Illustrated letter from William James reproduced in Notes of a Son and Brother.


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talent James had always confessed to envy. One illustration, which Henry discusses at length, shows a letter from William (Henry quotes the letter, rewriting it, of course) that incorporates William’s sketch of Henry reading a story aloud to a rapt listener (Figure 81). It is a splendid instance of reader, writer, and draftsman mise-en-abîme. James’s American publisher, Charles Scribner, was puzzled and alarmed by the prospect of a second volume of James’s autobiography, for he had been expecting instead Henry’s promised edition of William’s letters. On October 27, 1913, Scribner, awaiting the English publisher Macmillan’s corrected proofs for the book, wrote to James’s agent that William’s son had just arrived with the illustrations Henry had chosen for the new volume: I fear that Mr. James’s Introduction to the Letters has grown into a second volume and that the letters themselves (which were expected to make the bulk of the volume) will not appear at all. Of course this is for your eye and I do not wish to discourage Mr. James, but as you must realise, this enterprise is likely to prove disappointing if my fears are well founded. We started with the idea of a volume of William James’s Letters and we shall have two volumes on Mr. Henry James’s early life. (Za James, Box 2)

In his autobiography, as in his essays on illustration, James was able to inscribe—to contain—the accompanying pictures, enfolding them in his own richly textured recollection.

Chapter 5


When Americans went abroad in 1820, there was something romantic, almost heroic in it, as compared with the perpetual ferryings of the present hour, when photography and other conveniences have annihilated surprise. The Aspern Papers, 18881 The fact that so little is now left of this terra incognita shows with what swift rapacity during the intervening period the veils have been torn away in hundreds of books, outnumbering, indeed, all that had ever before appeared in this department of literature. . . . And it is because of this regard for truth that the novelist performs for us the best offices of the traveler, over whom he has the advantage that his disclosures are not confined to the outward world, but are also intimate and subjective. Howells, “Editor’s Study,” January 1902

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with a look at James’s contributions to the modern travelogue, a literary genre that owed its development in large part to the success of the illustrated magazines. In the decades after the Civil War, European travel had become a fact of modern American life, and travel articles by noted authors were an omnipresent feature of the upscale periodicals, nearly rivaling short fiction in popularity. Although James usually consigned his travel pieces to the “potboiler” class and groused about them in letters to friends and relations, he regularly undertook them during the 1870s and 1880s as a form of subsidized research for his stories and novels and, equally important, as a means of cultivating a wider and more receptive audience for his fiction and nonfiction. During the first decade of the twentieth century he collected dozens of these articles in a series of travel books on England, France, and Italy, each lavishly illustrated by Joseph Pennell (1857–1926), one of the most prominent artists in the field and the illustrator with whom James would work most extensively. As noted in Chapter 4, James’s autobiography and the New York Edition were the primary projects for which the author was known to insist on illustrations; but I intend to show here that pictures were crucial to the creation of the travel books as well. This chapter reassesses the significance of James’s project for repackaging his travel writing and the role Pennell assumed in that work. As William W. Stowe points out, through the travel pieces, and the international-themed fiction that grew out of them, James “helped perpetuate the idea that Europe could provide Americans with a certain distinction unavailable on these shores. This idea helped to sell copy to magazines, magazines to readers, boat tickets, hotel rooms, and a wide range of travel products and services to an ever-increasing number of Americans” (162). Yet modern-day observers typically overlook the other major cog in the machinery of nineteenth-century travel promotion, namely, the sketches, engravings, photographs, and other visual aids that helped armchair and actual travelers appropriate the sights of Europe. From the late eighteenth century onward, fine-art reproductions in travel books—whether William Gilpin’s idealized aquatints of the Italian countryside or engravings of Romantic landscapes by y st u dy c o nc l u d e s

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J. M. W. Turner, Thomas Cole, and Washington Allston—served as what Brigitte Bailey calls “strategies of evoking and containing the pleasurable estrangement of travel.”2 During the second half of the nineteenth century, the expanding and increasingly “realistic” visual discourse of scenic photographs, souvenir postcards, travel brochures, and countless magazine and book illustrations gave readers a larger sense of purchase in distant lands. Scholarship on James’s many travel essays, scant to begin with, tends to ignore the heavily pictorial component of these pieces. Commentators on the genre of travel writing such as Helen Carr and Morton Dauwen Zabel make the distinction between “the traveler who writes” and “the writer who travels.” The former is typically an adventurer in terra incognita; the latter, like James, is a “rediscoverer” of familiar territory who combines the journalist’s responsibility for accuracy with the “predisposed, purposive, and highly subjective sensibility” of the modern artist (Zabel 23–25). Joseph Pennell’s illustrations for James advanced the ideal of the aesthetically keen and knowledgeable “rediscoverer” of Europe, helping the author to shape what Jean-Christophe Agnew has called the reader’s “possessive or acquisitive cognition” (74)3 of foreign places that had become increasingly familiar to American travelers in the last quarter of the century. The pictures were key elements in James’s successful re-presentation of his earlier writing, and of his image as an expatriate American writer, to a new and presumably more worldly generation of readers. Among the few scholars who discuss Pennell’s work with James, Wendy Graham highlights James’s deprecations of their joint productions; and Ralph Bogardus, whose study of the illustrations for James’s oeuvre remains the most extensive treatment of the subject, states flatly that “no active collaboration occurred between the author and his illustrator” (68). On the contrary, I will argue that James’s letters to Pennell, together with correspondence unearthed in Pennell’s files regarding the publication of the travel books and additional commentary drawn from Pennell’s biography and memoirs, flesh out a portrait of the artist as a coproducer of the “Jamesian” image of Europe to a greater extent than has been recognized. In his letters to Pennell, written chiefly between 1888 and 1904 (but


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continuing until 1915 as numerous social notes of the sort James liked to characterize as “the mere twaddle of graciousness”), James discusses the subject material and style he envisioned for the travel illustrations, indicates the kinds of revisions his travel books entailed, and expresses his admiration, even rueful envy, of the visual artist’s ability—the latter sentiments adumbrated in his essays on illustration and in his autobiographical volumes. That James saw in Pennell an artist who shared his aesthetic sensibilities accounts in no small measure for a working relationship that spanned twenty years. As Howells suggests in the “Editor’s Study” column quoted in the second epigraph for this chapter, the evolution of travel literature in the late nineteenth century in many ways paralleled the development of literary realism in fiction, both genres displacing “the old-fashioned traveller’s tale” of “the physically strange and wonderful” with the more intimate “fresh views they give us of the world” (341). Together, the texts and the illustrations of James’s travel books run counter to the trend of photographic literalism in their selfconsciously subjective and impressionistic attempts to reenvision the experience of the American abroad. The work with Pennell began with “London,” an essay James wrote for the Century. James submitted the piece to the magazine’s associate editor, Robert Underwood Johnson, in January 1887, along with a note in which he made his case against illustrations while conceding their commercial usefulness—in proof of which he put forward his own candidate for the job: I hope I haven’t made [the article] too long—especially if there are to be illustrations (as I have assumed, by an allusion in the text). . . . As regards illustrations you will of course please yourself: I frankly confess that I hate them when attached to my own prose—and like them only as an incident of that of others. But no doubt, in your pages, this article will be held properly to require them. If I were in London at the present time I should take the liberty (assuming you would assent) of sounding Sargent, who is now settled there, on the subject of his making some drawings. But without knowing your idea I don’t like to take the step of writing to him—especially as I am by no means sure it would produce fruit. The article itself is by no means so pictorial as I had at first intended—but perhaps it makes it up in other ways. (Letters 3: 161)

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James thus assumed his editor would follow the market demand for pictorials. Even before knowing the artist to be assigned to the piece, he acknowledged the illustrator’s presence in the final section of his essay: But why do I talk of Greenwich, and remind myself of one of the unexecuted vignettes with which it had been my plan that these desultory and, I fear, somewhat incoherent remarks should be studded? They will present to the reader no vignettes but those which the artist who has kindly consented to associate himself with my vagaries may be so good as to bestow upon them. (CT 2: 42)

The “London” article was a long time seeing print. A full year after James submitted the essay, Joseph Pennell, whom Johnson had only just assigned to illustrate the article, made his overture to the author. James’s reply on January 6, 1888, shows him simmering over the stalled production: Dear Mr. Pennell, I am much obliged to you for your inquiry—for your interest in my article: though rather appalled that the Century, to whom I made it over just a year ago, is now only putting it into hand. . . . The article from being so general is difficult to illustrate—and the thing, I should say, ought to be freely and fancifully done; not with neat, definite, photographic “views.” Into that, however, you are not in danger of falling. Street vistas, characteristic corners (that of Hyde Park, say), something in the City, or on the way to it (say that church at the end of the Strand, where the road forks), etc. I should put in a plea for some view of (or in) the Green Park—with the dim and ugly pinnacles of Buckingham Palace. I lived close to it for nine years and was always crossing it. But do your own London, and it will be sufficiently mine. (Letters 3: 218)

According to unpublished letters of 1887–88 from the Century editorial staff to Pennell (Pennell Collection, Box 216), the holdup stemmed partly from the distractions of Pennell’s heavy workload. His editors had chosen him for the James project even though the artist was overextended with several simultaneous commissions for the magazine, including a continuing series by Mariana Van Rensselaer on the cathedrals of Europe and articles on the Uppingham School, the London Guilds, and the Fitzwilliam Museum. Time and space commitments in the magazine dictated that the artist complete several of these projects before tackling


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the James article. (Pennell and his editors evidently planned to use some of the runoff from these projects to illustrate James’s piece.)4 In addition, although Pennell’s output was famously prodigious (Richard Watson Gilder once suggested Pennell be sent to Neptune, as he would “exhaust this planet inside of two years”),5 the artist tended to follow his own agenda, which was not necessarily that of his editors. Two days after writing to James, he apparently informed his editors that he would do etchings rather than drawings for the James project, a costly and time-consuming maneuver that was roundly discouraged by the manager of the Century’s art department, W. Lewis Fraser. Fraser’s letter to Pennell on January 31, 1888, tells us a good deal about the economics of magazine illustration and the precedence given to the visual component of James’s article on the part of the Century staff: I have spoken to Mr. [Robert Underwood] Johnson about it, and he says that he has no remembrance of such an arrangement being made. He says that you spoke to him about your wish to do a [sic] something which should illustrate better than had ever been done, the life and movement and atmosphere of that great city. . . . Certainly had I known that you contemplated working in this way I should have tried to have dissuaded you from it. . . . You will see that my objection to etchings is well founded when I tell you that in order to reproduce them well they must be engraved on wood at a cost of from six to eight dollars per square inch, and even then I do not think that we gain anything over a drawing, because the engraving of etchings is no longer a novelty. . . . I am very sorry to have to write thus, for I do not wish to discourage you or to interfere with your project, but there is only one opinion here in regard to Mr. James’s article—it started from your desire to make such things in London as I have spoken of—at least such is Mr. Johnson’s memory—and what we require are those things which you can do so well—nobody better, to judge from some of the drawings that you have made of the cathedrals— the crowding, and movement, and phases of weather, which are characteristic in such an eminent degree of London. (Pennell Collection, Box 216)

Little progress seems to have been made until May, when Fraser notes, “I am glad you are getting ahead with the Henry James London drawings. I will not criticize these, or in fact say anything about them until the drawings are all here.” As Pennell’s files are laced with editorial replies to his sharp complaints about the sloppy engraving and printing

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of his work, we can assume Fraser came in for his share of harassment, for he responded in kind on at least one occasion. On October 1, Fraser rails against the poor condition of a set of drawings Pennell has sent the engravers for another project: “You have pitched into me so much and so often, and I have borne it with tameness and fortitude, but at last the worm has turned. I enclose you a letter [from the engraver] which has been called into existence by the torn, dilapidated and soiled condition of your otherwise beautiful drawings.” He then adds, “The ‘London’ is now all engraved and makes a ‘bang up’ article; one of the most attractive and artistic that we have had” (Box 216). All of the above helps explain the infuriating delay in the publication of James’s article. Still, when the essay finally appeared in print, James was, doubtless to his own surprise, as delighted with the artist’s contributions as Fraser had been. In a letter sent from the Grand Hotel in Paris on December 5, 1888, James raves to Pennell: It was only yesterday, that at the Dijon station, on my way from Marseilles to this place (I have been spending several months in the South,) I put my hand on the December Century and your admirable illustrations to my London paper. Let me express without more delay my great appreciation of them—which is partly that to which all your work moves me and partly a pleased sense that my article gains much from a pictorial accompaniment carrying out so strongly its general sentiment and mission. Even if I wrote much better than I can dream that I do, I would much rather draw as you do than write like that. You artists are the happy people—you do the thing while we only talk about it and around it. All the pictures seem to me of the highest cleverness, but charming particularly the Piccadilly and the sunset in Oxford St. This latter, in especial, is beautifully big and delicate. You handle an instrument of unlimited capacity—what a joy, what a power and what things you will do yet! May I never fall into less responsive hands. I have a sense that there are somehow four of these—and one pair Mrs. Pennell’s—in charge [so] that I have something to thank her for too. Please at any rate give her my very kind remembrance and believe me very gratefully yours. (Pennell Collection, Box 234)

Pennell’s visual vocabulary translates the spirit of James’s “London”— in Fraser’s words, “the crowding, and movement, and phases of weather” characteristic of the city. Figures 82 and 83 show the two illustrations James singled out in his letter to the artist. An equally moody and evocative nocturnal scene (Figure 84) was originally executed in watercolor

Figure 82. “Piccadilly.” Illustration by Joseph Pennell for James’s essay “London” in the Century, December 1888.

Figure 83. “Sunset in Oxford Street.” Illustration by Joseph Pennell for “London” in the Century, December 1888.

Figure 84. “Wet Evening, Parliament Square—House Sitting.” Illustration (from a watercolor, charcoal, and gouache drawing) by Joseph Pennell for “London” in the Century, December 1888.

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and charcoal, with touches of gouache that give texture to the reflected lights of the city. Pennell pictures the “early lamplight” in the “dense darkness” of a London winter—bringing to mind, as well, James’s earlier description in The Princess Casamassima (1886) of “the reflection of the lamps on the wet pavements, the feeling and smell of the carboniferous London damp; the way the winter fog blurred and suffused the whole place, . . . produc[ing] halos and dim radiations” (Novels 57–58). The “London” illustrations are among the most successful pictures Pennell was to devise for James’s work, perhaps because the piece is among all of James’s travel sketches the most unified in its impressions. Typically in his travelogues, James views the present scene through a tissue of literary references and personal memories that functions like a scrim in a theatrical production. He begins here with an impression of the city taken eighteen years before—although this was not the first time he had seen London, for that initial recollection “had turned gray, like faded ink.” His verbal palette throughout the essay is chiefly limited to inky blacks and faded grays and browns, blurred by the magnificent thick medium of the sky, where the smoke and the fog and the weather in general, the strangely undefined hour of the day and season of the year, the emanations of industries and the reflection of furnaces, the red gleams and blurs that may or may not be of sunset,—as you never see the orb of day, you can’t in the least tell,—all hang together in a confusion, a complication, a shifting but irremovable canopy. (CT 2: 20)

Pennell’s pictures convey the prevailing mood of the text—somber, crepuscular, dense with atmospheric effects. The important point is that even as James maintains that he is a “lover of the quaint,” his travel sketches, like Pennell’s, contrive to catch the note of modernity in their emphasis on the individual observer’s fleeting impressions. In her essay “Modernism and Travel (1880–1940),” Helen Carr points out that from James’s contributions onward, the traditional “realist” instructive tale of heroic travel adventure would be superseded by a more subjective and literary “modernist” approach to travel writing: “There was a move—as in imaginative literature—from the detailed, realist text, often with an overtly didactic or at any rate moral purpose, to a more impressionistic style with the interest focused as much on the


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travellers’ responses or consciousness as their travels” (75). James would later recall in his Preface to The Princess Casamassima that his notes for his protagonist’s views “were exactly my gathered impressions and stirred perceptions, the deposit in my working imagination of all my visual and all my constructive sense of London” (LC 2: 1101). In fact, a noteworthy feature of the “London” essay is James’s selfreflective commentary on the “constructive” process of writing itself, from his first reference to the faded ink of forgotten scenes to his final lament for the “unexecuted vignettes” he has arbitrarily excluded from his text. James brings his subjectivities to the foreground in a remarkable scene of writing near the end of “London.” He muses that at times when the city is deserted, as during Christmas week, Then it is that I am most haunted with the London of Dickens, feel most as if it were still recoverable. . . . It is not a small matter either, to a man of letters, that this is the best time for writing, and that during the lamplit days the white page he tries to blacken becomes, on his table, in the circle of the lamp, with the screen of the climate folding him in, more vivid and absorbent. . . . The weather makes a kind of sedentary midnight and muffles the possible interruptions. It is bad for the eyesight, but excellent for the image. (CT 2: 38)

Significantly, in revising the magazine article for his English Hours collection, James changed the last word in the passage from imagination (Century 234) to image, thus emphasizing the mystic process by which mental impressions are translated verbally and visually to the page. The moment he depicts is reminiscent, and purposefully so, I think, of Hawthorne’s description in “The Custom-House” of the transformative power of moonlight on the objects in a familiar room.6 In James’s case, as in Pennell’s, we can see the operation of the imaginative faculty on familiar scenes in a well-traveled cityscape. “Do your own London,” James had written to Pennell, “and it will be sufficiently mine.” If James felt his own work at times to be insufficiently pictorial, as he had told the editor of the Century, Pennell’s pictures filled in the gaps in ways that complemented and expanded the text. James might not have had his Sargent, but in Pennell he found a skilled and responsive collaborator whose experiments with form and perspective would continue to dovetail with his own.

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In their projects together Pennell was typically the entrepreneur and initiator. No sooner had Pennell received James’s note of extravagant praise than he sent the author his suggestions for expanding the “London” sketch into an illustrated book of essays. James declined the offer, although a collection on James’s travels in England would eventually come to fruition, owing largely to Pennell’s persistence. Your ingenious proposal about refurbishing the little “London” with etchings certainly deserves to be talked over—though I must say that it strikes me, on the whole, more than tempts me—that is more than presents itself as feasible from my own literary point of view. For instance I shld. be unhappy for the article to go into a book tel quel—without a certain amount of amplification—the reinclusion of omitted but now vanished paragraphs and pages etc. These I don’t see my way to recover or re-create, at least just now. (As it stands it’s too short and slight.) But I will explain and we will thrash it out. I will let you know as soon as I come back— about the 20th—and perhaps you will come to lunch. Many thanks meanwhile for the broaching of the idea. (December 8, 1888; Pennell Collection, Box 234)

In time, Pennell took up the author’s invitation to lunch at de Vere Gardens. In his memoir, The Adventures of an Illustrator: Mostly in Following His Authors in America and Europe (1925), Pennell recalls this initial meeting with James, whom he found, he says, working in the heat in a darkened room and stripped down to his red undershirt: “He told me he was setting Daumier in his place in the Art World by an article [the Daumier essay was published in the Century in January 1890 and reprinted in Picture and Text], and I, with one of those inspired bursts of cheek which come to me sometimes, told him that he was not able to do so. He was somewhat surprised.” Pennell allows as how the luncheon did not go well (259–60). Like James McNeill Whistler, whose ardent disciple and biographer he became, Pennell disapproved of writers making pronouncements about art, although as an artist he had no problem declaring himself a writer. Pennell turned out numerous volumes (often collaborating with his wife, Elizabeth Robins Pennell, a noted travel and cookbook writer and art critic)7—including several influential monographs on etching, lithography, and drawing, as well as his own travel books—at times showing as little regard for civility as for syntax. Pennell’s autobiogra-


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phy is a valuable record of his collaborations with famous authors, full of insights into the practice of modern illustration. It is also a vehicle for taking potshots at colleagues who didn’t measure up to his exacting standards and an extended racist screed against minorities and recent immigrants to the United States. The following excerpt should suffice to give the flavor: James’s renunciation of his American citizenship was a curious performance very much appreciated by the British; but then it is only what we advocate the dagoes, Russian Jews and mongrels who have overrun this land should do. James was a valuable asset to Great Britain; these degenerates are a curse to us. (266–67) 8

Pennell worked with a host of well-known writers and seems to have found ways to offend them all. Of Pennell’s collaboration with Mariana Van Rensselaer on a series of articles for the Century on the cathedrals of England and France, Arthur John writes, “Author and illustrator were often at odds in this series, for Van Rensselaer conceived of her work as an architectural study, while Pennell’s eye instinctively caught the more picturesque angles of the buildings” (167–68). In his autobiography Pennell expatiates: Mrs. Van Rensselaer had sent me a list of subjects I should draw to illustrate her text. Now it is all very well for the author to select subjects, but I have, in a lifetime of experience, scarce found an author who had the faintest idea of what could be illustrated. I generally end by ignoring them. If the manuscript is ready, or the book to be illustrated has been issued, I read it carefully, which is more than most professional illustrators do. (171)

In fairness we should note that however much he resisted the restraint, Pennell’s drawings for Van Rensselaer were by far his most precise architectural renderings (Figure 85). Even William Dean Howells, an otherwise avuncular presence, locked horns with the artist during their several collaborations. The Century’s editor arranged for Pennell to join Howells in Italy against the author’s objections. In his memoir Pennell recalls Howells making various suggestions for sketches during their travels, all of which the artist studiously ignored. Still, by the end of the trip Pennell wrote home to his wife, “I am getting along very much better with him than

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Figure 85. “Peterborough Cathedral. —The West Front, and the Bishop’s Palace.” Illustration by Joseph Pennell for Mariana Van Rensselaer’s English Cathedrals (1892).

I did at first—and if he wasent [sic] going to Venice next week—I would probably fall desperately in love with him” (Life and Letters of Joseph Pennell 1: 86). With Howells’s biographers we can conclude that the results must have satisfied the two men, since they worked together on several more travel projects, including a new edition of Italian Journeys, which had first appeared in 1868 without illustrations (Goodman and Dawson 240). It is particularly instructive to compare how James and Howells essayed the travelogue, as the two authors often covered the same ground, sometimes within the same time frame, and eventually with the same artist. “Mr. Howells has an eye for the small things of nature, of art, and of human life,” James wrote in his review in 1868 of the earlier edition of Italian Journeys, calling the author “a gentle moralist, a good deal a humorist, and most of all a poet.”9 Where James is typically a solitary traveler, generally leaving out of his account the traveling companions he names in his letters, Howells is familiar, anecdotal, and approachable, his first-person plural the voice of a family man. (“Howells is a howling swell,” Pennell wrote home to Elizabeth, “very impressive and


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also very jolly when you can get him alone which isent very often” [Life and Letters 1: 82]). If, in his travel essays, Howells can be a touch condescending to the locals—a collection of cunning cicerones and demure virgins worthy of Browning—all the same he likes to engage them in the kind of bantering encounters for which James showed little inclination. To suggest some of the differences between the two authors’ approaches to the travel genre, and the ways in which their illustrators accommodated them, I offer the example of one of Howells’s more personal efforts, the charming but slight A Little Swiss Sojourn (1892), a volume of magazine articles reprinted in the Harper’s vest-pocket-sized Black & White Series, which sold for 50 cents apiece. Sojourn records the mundane particulars of pension life, its menus and tariffs and amusing habitués, including assorted domestics and a large lounging dog named Poppi. The winsome quality of the book finds apt illustration in the accompanying pen-and-ink line drawings by Charles S. Reinhart, an artist whose frequent contributions to travel literature were noted in the previous chapter. Reinhart’s vignettes are a comfortable match for Howells’s text: they’re intimate in scale, figure centered, minutely observed. Like many professional illustrators, Reinhart had become adept at designing with printing limitations and book dimensions in mind; his original pen-and-ink drawings for the book, three of which are now in the Cabinet of American Illustration at the Library of Congress, are small-scaled, neat and assured, necessitating little reduction or loss of detail in reproduction. Figure 86 shows one of Reinhart’s original drawings for A Little Swiss Sojourn; Figure 87 reproduces the cover of the book in actual size. Interestingly, when Joseph Pennell turned to the illustration of Howells’s Italian travel books (Figure 88 is a representative example), he adapted his descriptive style to the author’s in like fashion. Pennell’s sketches for Howells are less anecdotal and figural than Reinhart’s, but they consistently demonstrate a similar regard for fine line and close detail. We know that Pennell was extraordinarily gifted at modifying his techniques for a variety of projects: this protean quality is what makes his often-undated work difficult to place chronologically.10 Obviously, Pennell’s selection of tools and methods for a given assignment was determined by many factors, including the suitability of the medium to

Figure 86. Original pen-and-ink drawing by Charles S. Reinhart for William Dean Howells’s A Little Swiss Sojourn in Harper’s Monthly, March 1888. Courtesy Library of Congress Cabinet of American Illustration.

Figure 87. The cover (actual size) of William Dean Howells’s A Little Swiss Sojourn (1892).


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Figure 88. “Herculaneum.” Illustration by Joseph Pennell for William Dean Howells’s Italian Journeys (1901).

the scene and his infatuation with certain materials at different periods in his career—for example, thick Russian charcoal from 1901 on; and colored chalks, pastels, and colored wax crayons on textured or colored paper for several projects executed between 1904 and 1909, including James’s Italian Hours (Blood and Morenus). We can generalize, however, that Pennell’s drawings for Howells’s Italian Journeys and Venetian Life are comparatively restrained, whereas his work for James tends to be more allusive and gestural, whatever the medium. Contrast the sketch in Figure 88 (above) with any of the illustrations Pennell made for James, beginning in 1888 with the “London” essay and continuing through 1909 with the illustrations for Italian Hours reproduced later in this chapter. The pictures for Howells’s Journeys are tight little drawings, mostly in pen and ink, with tremulous outlines, short hatching strokes rather than shaded areas, and an even distribution of detail. In his autobiography Pennell cites among his artistic influences the contemporary European masters of drawing—Martin Rico, Mariano Fortuny, and Daniel Vierge—and nowhere are the traces of their careful draftsmanship more evident than in his work for Howells. Without

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wishing to overstate the case, I would maintain that Pennell’s choices reflect his effort to suit the authorial voice. One cannot envision the artist applying the more deliberate and particularized “Howells” style to the James projects, any more than one can imagine Pennell informing his wife, as he had written of Howells, that he was about to fall “desperately in love” with the formidable Master. Pennell’s “impressionistic” dash—a descriptor James would apply more than once to Pennell’s art—was just what James advocated over exactitude, as we’ve seen in his introductory letter to the artist. The author’s eschewing of “neat, definite, photographic ‘views’” would be echoed years later in his advice to Alvin Langdon Coburn concerning the photographed frontispieces for the New York Edition. James would caution Coburn to avoid obvious and overspecific scenes in favor of what he described in the final volume of the New York Edition as a generalized “‘set’ stage with the actors left out.” Coburn’s frontispiece for volume 1 of The Princess Casamassima (Figure 89) is characteristic of his evocative approach to the scenes James specified in his letters. Pennell’s work for James shows the same tendency toward moody, unpopulated set pieces rendered with suggestive lights and shadows. Like Coburn’s photo graphs, Pennell’s pictures for the author Figure 89. Alvin Langdon Coburn’s photograph “The effectively merge picDome of St. Paul’s” for the New York Edition of James’s turesque and moderncollected works. Courtesy of the Harry Ransom Huist elements. manities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.


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Pennell perceived in James a heightened artistic sensibility that distinguished him from other writers. He remarked that James’s taking the trouble to write him a letter of praise for the “London” pictures was “a great deal more than most authors do; but then James was more than most authors, that is, more of an artist, for he did try, moping in Hunt’s studio, to become a painter, but, like his brother, failed” (Adventures 258). Pennell’s oblique reference here is to the months Henry and William spent in William Morris Hunt’s Newport studio in 1861, as recalled by Henry in Notes of a Son and Brother. His sniping aside, Pennell suggests that his collaboration with James was rooted in the regard each had for the other’s craft as well as in the writer’s avowed sense of fraternity with his “brothers of the brush.” Continued correspondence between the two men over the years corroborates a history of professional consultations and social calls, invitations to luncheon in Rye and tea in London (the latter sometimes issued by Mrs. Pennell, who seems to have supplied the social graces her husband lacked). Pennell’s verbal sketches of James in his memoir are also worth mentioning in this context for amusing evidence of a long-standing if intermittent relationship. There is James escorting Pennell on a walking tour through Rye, lamenting that the town was overrun with arty and theatrical females, whom he describes as “sad wantons, one of whom was not without a pale cadaverous grace.” (Surely these are the “lady pupils” who set up their easels in Rye’s ancient doorways and the “very celebrated lady” of the theater who swoops into the village, all portrayed in an essay on Winchelsea and Rye that Pennell was later to illustrate for James’s English Hours.) The author accepts tips from Pennell as to “points of view” for his upcoming trip to America in 1903 but declines the artist’s suggestion that he survey New York from the top of the Singer building. Pennell’s mimicry of James’s response bears witness to the hours the two men logged together: But for you, they are yours to draw, but—ah—oh—just to think of it—difficult, yes, no, impossible, forty skyscrapers—each forty stories—each story forty windows—each window forty people—each person forty tales—My God—maddening—what could I, or am I—yes—certainly, no, of course—do with such a thing. (Adventures 264)11

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James is glimpsed in later years in the Pennells’ London flat, seated by the fireside with G. B. Shaw, J. M. Barrie, and John Galsworthy; conversing with Pennell on the balcony of the Reform Club; and at one memorable dinner in 1912, eating haggis and wearing a foolscap he had pulled out of a Christmas cracker (264). Pennell concludes from these brief encounters, “If James did not altogether like the books, I think he eventually came to like me.” Both assertions strain credulity. James surely found the artist prickly and contentious. (As who did not? Even Elizabeth Pennell admits that her husband’s “habit of speaking the truth kept the many away” [Life and Letters 1: 217]). Moreover, his view of Pennell must have soured as he became convinced he had not received his fair share of the proceeds for the travel books from their English publisher, William Heinemann, with whom the Pennells had a close personal and professional relationship. James and Heinemann had broken off business dealings in 1899 after James employed an agent over Heinemann’s objections, and James had only warily resumed his publishing arrangement with Heinemann for the travel collections, which were copublished with Houghton Mifflin in America. Regarding the dispute over royalties, John St. John quotes from James’s letters of February and March 1909 in the Heinemann company archives: While preparing the third of the travel books, [James] found it necessary to write to Heinemann that “I have been waiting in vain for you to give some sign of remembrance that all this while I have had from you in respect to its two predecessors . . . not only not a single shilling but no account, report, statement or explanation of any sort. Have your losses on my volumes of fiction swallowed all profits, for me, of these books too, and is that to be the case with these Italian Hours as well? . . . I have had these several years considerable sums from Houghton Mifflin & Co., semi-annually, on the American sales of each.” His letter written a week later suggests inefficiency rather than duplicity on the part of the firm: “I can find no record nor précis of any contract or agreements between us about these two books, and I seem to remember none—nothing but more or less informal letters which I seem not to have kept. . . . I can only hope Pennell hasn’t consumed all my profits.” (St. John 69)

In light of the foregoing it is reasonable to conclude that James’s recognition of the artist’s contributions to the travel books and to their


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profits (in the United States, at least) must have been sufficiently persuasive to override whatever other objections he had to Pennell and his English publisher. Pennell’s voluminous files of correspondence with Heinemann reveal the pivotal role the artist played in realizing these projects. Elizabeth Pennell recalls that her husband’s plan was “to revive the travel books of the modern masters, hitherto published without illustrations,” books like Howells’s Italian Journeys and James’s A Little Tour in France, the latter originally published by James Osgood in 1884. “To Heinemann, the English publisher of Henry James’s ‘Little Tour in France,’ Pennell suggested: Why not an illustrated edition?” (Life and Letters 1: 341, 339). Pennell’s files confirm that the artist approached Heinemann and Houghton Mifflin about joint publication of an illustrated edition of James’s Little Tour. In December 1899, Sydney Pawling (known as the “practical partner” at the Heinemann firm [Whyte 203]) lets Pennell know that his “letter in reference to Henry James’s book came too late for [William] Heinemann to see” but will be “presented to him in the new year.” In January 1900, Pawling writes that he has had “an encouraging cable from Houghton’s with regard to the James book.” From Rome several months later, Heinemann himself writes that he envisions more than one edition of the book on the basis of the pictures alone: “Pawling asks about the size of the drawings for ‘The Little Tour in France’. . . . I cannot say what Houghton will want and I rather fancy I may care to do it bigger first and smaller later. As they are to be reproduced in Process, I, therefore, suggest that you make them amply large to allow of considerable reduction.” By July, the Heinemann office sends along to Pennell Houghton Mifflin’s half of the payment for the drawings. In November, Pawling, too, envisions another edition of the book, again based on Pennell’s contributions: “We think in view of a possible new edition at some future time of ‘A Little Tour in France’ that it would be well for us to have a record of the six or seven unused drawings, so we are having them photographed before returning them to you.”12 For his biography of William Heinemann (1929), Frederic Whyte asked Pennell’s widow to contribute recollections of her husband’s relationship with the publisher. Her comments are worth quoting for the

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greater light they cast on the essential roles these two men played in the production of James’s book: [A Little Tour] was a book Joseph Pennell had always loved, partly because of this love for France, partly because he thought James had never written anything better. He learned at once how easy and liberal a publisher Heinemann was to deal with. There was no hard and fast agreement as to just how many drawings were to be made and published. . . . But I hardly need to explain that the cost of making a book increases if more drawings are reproduced and printed than were originally planned. Heinemann used many more in The Little Tour than he had expected to, simply because he knew they added to the beauty and attraction of the book. . . . So sure was the artist of the publisher’s sympathy that he did not hesitate to try new experiments with each new book. (Whyte 204–5)

Unlike Howells, who omitted all mention of Pennell’s illustrations in his preface to the reissued Italian Journeys, James publicly acknowledged Pennell’s artwork as a motive for bringing forth a group of essays that were, many of them, decades old and of little interest to the public without the pictorial additions. In his prefatory note to the reissued Little Tour (1900), James explicitly invokes the language of visual art to describe his text, and his analogy speaks for the reciprocity he saw between the pictures and essays that had been conceived (originally for the Harpers, who backed out of the project) with illustrations in mind.13 The essays, he writes, “are impressions, immediate, easy, and consciously limited; if the written word may ever play the part of brush or pencil, they are sketches on ‘drawing-paper’ and nothing more.” He continues, I have too much appreciated—for any renewal of inconsistency—the opportunity of granting them at last, in an association with Mr. Pennell’s admirable drawings, the benefit they have always lacked. The little book thus goes forth finally as the picture-book it was designed to be. Text and illustrations are, altogether and alike, things of the play of eye and hand and fancy—views, head-pieces, tailpieces; through the artist’s work, doubtless, in a much higher degree than the author’s. (CT 1: 3–4)

Years earlier, commenting on the original edition of the book brought out by Osgood in 1884, Howells had written to James that it was “a more absolute transference to literature of the mood of observation than any-


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thing else I know.”14 James wrote to Osgood’s partner, Benjamin Tick nor, that the volume was of “a light nature.”15 The authorial persona in the French essays is more sentimental tourist than pensive pilgrim, one whose references to Murray’s, the Guide-Joanne, and Baedeker’s are as plentiful as his allusions to Balzac, Arnold, and Stendhal. Significantly, James observes of Stendhal, “his want of appreciation of the picturesque— want of the sketcher’s sense—causes him to miss half the charm of a landscape which is nothing if not ‘quiet,’ as a painter would say, and of which the felicities reveal themselves only to waiting eyes” (CT 1: 184). In contrast, James’s writing in the essays on France is self-consciously pictorial, scattered with frequent references to suitable “bits” for sketching. He remarks, for example, of a delightful prospect along the ramparts of Poitiers, “Here the river makes a shining twist which a painter might have invented, and the side of the hill is terraced into several hedges—a sort of tangle of small blooming patches and little pavilions with peaked roofs and green shutters. It is idle to attempt to reproduce all this in words; it should be reproduced only in water-colours” (138). And so it was—or at any rate in wash drawings, the medium Pennell employed for the majority of the book’s ninety-four illustrations. Pennell’s preferences were for pen-and-ink drawing and etching, and although he defended the experimental use of wash in modern illustration, he complained of the difficulties printers still had in reproducing the effects of watercolor (Life and Letters 1: 218–19). Even so, this was the only project for James in which he deployed the medium extensively. What I want to emphasize here are the means by which Pennell once more adapted his manner to the author’s, in this case to its unusual lightness of tone and its emphasis on the picturesque. Most of his pictures for the project were executed on cream paper in pen and India ink wash (sometimes over pencil), occasionally highlighted with white gouache. Pennell’s brushwork is loose and relaxed, nuanced and softened by tonal variations and ample passages of light. Whereas Pennell elsewhere liked to boast that he shrugged off his authors’ suggestions, he has clearly taken specific cues from James’s text.16 Here is James’s description of the market and “washing place” in Narbonne, along with the artist’s plein-air rendition of the scene (Figure 90): The Canal du Midi flows through the town, and, spanned at this point by a small suspension-bridge, presented a certain sketchability. On the farther side were the

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vendors and chafferers—old women under awnings and big umbrellas, rickety tables piled with fruit, white caps and brown faces, blouses, sabots, donkeys. Beneath this picture was another—a long row of washerwomen, on their knees on the edge of the canal, pounding and wringing the dirty linen of Narbonne—no great quantity, to judge by the costume of the people. (CT 1: 177–78)

Pennell’s original drawings for the book, three of which are now housed in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress, give further indication of Figure 90. “Narbonne: The Washing Place.” the artist’s penchant for workIllustration (wash drawing) by Joseph ing closely with the text and Pennell for A Little Tour in France (1900). the printer.17 On the verso of a view of Carcassonne (reproduced as the headpiece of this chapter), Pennell specifies in his distinctively loopy, cursive hand that the picture is to be used as a headpiece (Heinemann complied, though in the Houghton edition the image appears as a full-page illustration). On the verso of another sketch, the “Hospital in Beaune” (Figure 91; omitted in the Houghton edition), Pennell titles his work with a quotation from the text—“The strange immense apartment.” The full passage in James’s text reads, “The other room was a strange, immense apartment, lately restored with much splendour. It was of great length and height, and had a painted and gilded barrel-roof, and one end of it—the one I was introduced to—appeared to serve as a chapel, as two white-robed sisters were on their knees before an altar” (CT 1: 271). Pennell remembered visiting “every one of the places [James] mentions, on a bicycle, doing every drawing on the spot” (Adventures 260), and the evidence of these notes and illustrations substantiates his claim.


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Before examining the pair’s subsequent projects, I should mention a collaboration between Pennell and James that did not come off, although not for lack of interest on either side. On June 16, 1903, Frederick Macmillan wrote to James, “I was delighted to hear from you yesterday that you are inclined to consider seriously the suggestion I made to you a short time ago that you should write a book on ‘Aspects of London’ to be illustrated by J. Pennell.” Macmillan offered handsome terms and set no time limit for the manuscript. James assured him the following day that he would “combine & arrange with Pennell for the best advantage of each of us.” Repeatedly distracted with other projects, the trip to America in 1904, various illnesses, and finally the arduous work of the New York Edition, James held off for years, until Macmillan respectfully inquired—in April 1908!—about his “progress” on the book, for which “Pennell has produced an enormous mass of illustration” (Moore 203–4, 205, 208). In July 1909, James told his brother William: I am having at last to come to the point of doing for the Macmillans the “London”—more or less impressionistic & with drawings by Joseph Pennell—that I long ago contracted with them for & that it has been ever since convenient, & necessary, for me to hold off from (the agreement as to time I having made from the 1st an easy one.) I shall enjoy doing it when once I buckle down, & the terms being very good, & the possibility of tourist &c sale big, the profit may be very great. Only meanwhile the Theatre has been loudly knocking in my door. (LL 481)

Figure 91. Joseph Pennell’s “Hospital in Beaune” for A Little Tour in France (1900).

The London book never came about; but in the interim the writer worked with the art-

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ist to produce English Hours (1905) for Heinemann. Perhaps in response to James’s foot-dragging on the Macmillan project, Pennell once more seems to have solicited his publisher’s interest in a refurbished collection of James’s essays. As early as December 16, 1903, Ferris Greenslet of Houghton Mifflin wrote, “Mr. Heinemann discussed your proposed volume of Mr. James’s English sketches with us when he was here a few months ago, and we assured him then of our interest in the matter, and our readiness to publish it in conjunction with him. When do you expect to have the drawings ready?” (Pennell Collection, Box 229; italics added). Ultimately Pennell would produce ninety-two illustrations for the book. Predictably, though, English Hours had to be nudged to completion, as both artist and author were engaged in other projects. On June 23, 1904, James urged Pennell, who had been working with Maurice Hewlett on The Road to Tuscany (1904), to hurry with additional drawings for English Hours. Four days later James noted rather pointedly, “It gives me great pleasure to learn that you are getting on so well with your little series of masterpieces, and my impatience to behold them will steadily grow from this hour” (LL 401–2). Pennell must have immediately mailed a propitiatory offering of etchings for James’s private collection, for on June 30 James sent a note of warm praise for the gift. The artist had long since become My Dear Pennell.18 I have delayed too long—in delaying a day—to thank you for your beautiful offering of etchings, which I receive with lively gratitude and appreciation. They strike me as things of the greatest art and beauty, and I am delighted to have them from your hand. What an affinity has not your genius with the character of London, and how you bring the latter to knowledge, so to speak, of itself. I am promptly framing 2 or 3 of these plates—the St. Paul’s and the Waterloo Bridge notably—so as to have them always before me. And I am sending by this post too the 2 additional pieces I promised—that is by this or by the very next. (Pennell Collection, Box 234)

James finally dug up the two additional promised articles, the previously published “Old Suffolk” and “Winchelsea, Rye and ‘Denis Duval,’” and in sending them to Pennell added, “Of course I shall be delighted to see you here when you come, as you obviously must, to do a drawing or two, or three.”


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At this point I do not think it would be belaboring the matter to contrast James’s give-and-take with Pennell regarding pictorial decisions with his earlier correspondence (among Pinker’s papers at Yale) concerning the original publication of this same “Winchelsea, Rye, and ‘Denis Duval’ essay in Scribner’s Magazine in January 1901. My objective in doing so is to highlight significant differences between two visual treatments of the identical subject. On September 1, 1899, James wrote to Pinker, “Some months ago I offered to Mr. Burlingame, editor of ‘Scribner’ (on his writing to me after receiving from you a short tale of mine—to tell me he was very glad to have it of me) a paper on the picturesque aspects of this place, region, etc: to which he replied that he would with pleasure take it, though he should prefer it should not be illustrated.” Yet a few weeks later, on September 28, Burlingame informed Pinker that he had received James’s article (for which he could only pay forty pounds, less than for one of James’s stories),19 and continued, “I am writing to Mr. James today about the possibility of giving some suggestions to an artist contributor of ours, who is now in England, for a drawing of Winchelsea and Rye” (Za James, Box 1). It is of course possible that on receipt of James’s article Burlingame changed his mind about not including illustrations. More likely, though, the editor was just as avid as ever for pictures, and James had either mistaken or wishfully misrepresented his own disinclination as Burlingame’s. In the event, James’s “Winchelsea” article for Scribner’s was illustrated by Ernest C. Peixotto, an artist of note and a Scribner’s regular who worked on numerous travel articles and books for the firm. Peixotto made exacting pen-and-ink drawings after the fashion of Continental draftsmen like Vierge; these are typically small vignettes, centered on the page and cushioned in expanses of white (Figure 92). Their appeal derives from the artist’s characteristic reserve and refinement of unshaded line, qualities nicely suited to Edith Wharton’s patrician account of her travels in Italian Backgrounds (1905), a book she considered her “scholarly” answer to impressionistic travelogues by “the cultured dilettante type” (Backward Glance 140). But Peixotto seems out of step with James’s discursive ramblings in Winchelsea and Rye, whether he’s working in black line or halftone (he used both for this essay). Compare Peixotto’s naturalistic rendering of

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Figure 92. E. C. Peixotto’s “By the Port of Lovere” for Edith Wharton’s Italian Backgrounds (1905).

Mermaid Street, Rye (Figure 93), for the essay in Scribner’s with Pennell’s looser, freer handling of the same scene four years later for En glish Hours (Figure 94). The differences between the two treatments, and James’s habitual preference for the latter, account in part for James’s invitation to Pennell to redraw the scene when the article was collected in book form. Generally speaking, then, where James had attempted to block illustrations of his various travel articles, he invited, made room for, and acknowledged Pennell’s contributions to the books. As he had done in A Little Tour, James points to Pennell’s role in the production of English Hours in his brief preface to that volume. He explains that his papers, having all appeared as magazine articles, some of them collected in an earlier book, Portraits of Places (1883), “have been here once more placed together, for the great advantage they will be felt to derive from the company and support of Mr. Pennell’s illustrations” (CT 2: 3). For this book, too, Pennell produced a distinctive visual language— but here, apart from the foregoing comparison of Peixotto and Pennell, I make no great claims for the latter’s special sympathy with the text. I


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have noted how Pennell continually experimented with the possibilities of various media, implements, and textured or colored papers. His bold, angular, rather heavy-handed drawings for English Hours are reminiscent of his drawings for Hewlett’s book on Tuscany of the year before and will be echoed in his illustrations for Sidney Dark’s book on London (1924); for all three projects he employed the same medium, Russian charcoal. Pennell’s drawings for English Hours seem to have been inspired by his enduring infatuation with the velvety blacks and painterly effects of Russian charcoal as much as by the desire to complement James’s essays.20 Occasionally in English Hours Pennell does deploy the medium to good effect, as in a sketch of Salisbury Cathedral (Figure 95), where the artist has evenly applied broad areas of charcoal over heavy laid paper to create texture and has erased the charcoal at intervals to relieve dark passages. More often, though, the treatment overwhelms the subject. Witness Pennell’s cramped, murky vision of St. Paul’s (Figure 96), and a slightly menacing lane in Green Park (Figure 97)—the latter at odds with James’s description: “I have a weakness for the convenient, familiar,

Figure 93. “Mermaid Street, Rye.” Illustration by E. C. Peixotto for James’s essay “Winchelsea, Rye, and ‘Denis Duval’” in Scribner’s, 1901.

Figure 94. Joseph Pennell’s Mermaid Street tailpiece sketch for English Hours (1905).

Figure 95. “Salisbury Cathedral.” Illustration (Russian charcoal on textured paper) by Joseph Pennell for English Hours (1905).

Figure 96. “St. Paul’s, from Ludgate Hill.” Illustration by Joseph Pennell for English Hours.

Figure 97. “In the Green Park.” Illustration by Joseph Pennell for English Hours.


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treeless, or almost treeless, expanse of the Green Park, and the friendly part it plays as a kind of encouragement to Piccadilly” (29). Pennell’s aggressive style in English Hours proves best suited to the depiction of modern industrial scenes (Figure 98), two of which are used to illustrate James’s uncharacteristic foray, in an essay reprinted near the end of the book, into “a populous manufacturing region, full of tall chimneys and of an air that is grey and gritty” (223). James’s report of his visit to a workhouse, a “grim-looking charitable institution” of Dickensian outline, provides a bleak contrast with more typical descriptions elsewhere in the book of cathedrals and country houses in leafy environs. Years later, in a catalogue note for a series of lithographs by Pennell titled “War Work in England” (1916), H. G. Wells commented on the artist’s depiction of “the huge industrial apparatus that is thrusting behind and thrusting up through the war” and on the warning implied by “blacknesses like these, enormities and flares and towering threats” that dwarf the figures of the workmen (n.p.). Wells’s note might serve equally to describe Pennell’s dramatic handling of the industrial scenery in English Hours. The painterly medium of Russian charcoal allowed the artist to approximate the richly saturated effects of lithography. English Hours sold moderately well, paving the way for another joint venture. In August 1908, as he continued to revise his work for the New York Edition, James wrote to Howells Figure 98. “A Factory Town at Night.” An industrial scene by Joseph Pennell for English Hours (1905).

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of the new project, a collection of his Italian essays, motivated, as he said, by the flatness of his pocketbook: I am just beginning to re-do (on a meager understanding with Houghton & Mifflin, re-attenuated by the involvement of Pennell) certain little old Italian papers, with titivations and expansions, in form to match with a volume of “English Hours” re-fabricated three or four years ago on the same system. . . . The system has succeeded a little with “English Hours;” which have sold quite vulgarly— for wares of mine; whereas the previous and original untitivated had long since dropped almost to nothing. (LL 464)

We might say that with Italian Hours Pennell returned to form— twice. The book appeared in two versions. In October 1909 Heinemann brought out a deluxe edition with thirty-two sepia illustrations plus thirty-two pastel drawings printed in the trichromatic process, still something of a novelty in the publishing world. A month later Houghton Mifflin released the book in the United States with the color plates but omitted the monochromes. Visually, the two sets of images are quite dissimilar, although as David Bland observes, Pennell attempted to link the color plates to the monochromes by the use of colored paper that provides a uniformly dark brown background (307). I have proposed in this chapter that regardless of the materials and techniques that Pennell (or his publisher) was experimenting with at the time, his work spoke more directly to James’s texts than illustrations by other artists had done. Again, this affinity becomes apparent Figure 99. “St. Mark’s and the Campanile.” when we consider the way Illustration for James’s essay “Venice” in the two of the essays collect- Century, November 1882.


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Figure 100.”Rialto Bridge.” Illustration for “Venice” in the Century, November 1882.

ed in Italian Hours originally appeared in the magazines, with illustrations by other artists. In 1882, James’s essay “Venice” was published in the Century with numerous illustrations by various hands, including the inevitable views of St. Mark’s and the Rialto Bridge (Figures 99 and 100). A decade later, James wrote a piece for Scribner’s titled “The Grand Canal,” which would also be reprinted in Italian Hours. The Scribner’s article was a case of the pictures preceding the commissioned text. When he submitted the essay to Edward Burlingame at Scribner’s, James explained that he had ignored the drawings (by Alexander Zezzos) that the editor had sent him. I didn’t write to thank you for the little pictures you sent me so many weeks ago, and I am afraid you will think my paper doesn’t much conform to them. I didn’t write because I was expecting to let you know much sooner that my paper was starting—but in the event I had to wait to go to Venice. There it was not on the cards for me to obtain much inspiration from the little pictures—it came if it came at all, from the bigger ones. In truth I can’t write for illustration, I am too greedily jealous for my own prose. (Letters 3: 393)

The published article nevertheless appeared with the Zezzos drawings, two of which are shown in Figures 101 and 102.

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Figure 101. “The Bridge of the Rialto.” Illustration by Alexander Zezzos for James’s essay “The Grand Canal” in Scribner’s, November 1892.

Figure 102. “Ganzer—A Retired Boatman Who Assists Gondolas at Landing Places.” Illustration by Alexander Zezzos for “The Grand Canal” in Scribner’s, November 1892.

By way of contrast, consider a pair of illustrations (Figures 103 and 104) furnished by Pennell when these two “Venice” essays were revised for Italian Hours. Alongside Pennell’s wonderfully allusive etchings, the earlier pictures appear literal-minded and commonplace. The magazine illustrations portray picturesque local “types” and standard scenes in a photographic style reminiscent of brochures for the Cook’s tourists James routinely met in his travels with a mixture of horror and disdain. James had satirized such perfunctory and hackneyed Venetian travelogues in The Portrait of a Lady (1880–81), in his description of Henrietta Stackpole’s magazine “letter,” which for all Henrietta’s longing to depict the “interior life” of the Continent consists of “a conscientious account of the gondolier, the Piazza, the Bridge of Sighs, the pigeons and the young boatman who chanted Tasso” (Portrait 332). The essays collected in Italian Hours were written over the course of more than three decades, between 1873 and 1909, but even in the earliest pieces it is clear that the sympathetic reader James has in mind

Figure 103. Joseph Pennell’s etching of the Rialto Bridge, included in the Heinemann edition of Italian Hours (1909).

Figure 104. “Riva Schiavoni, Venice.” Etching by Joseph Pennell in the Heinemann edition of Italian Hours (1909).

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is assumed to have visited these sights more than once, in print if not in person. In his “Venice” essay of 1882, the author goes so far as to identify the reader’s perceptions with his own through his use of the second-person familiar: “You are tired of your gondola (or think you are) and you have seen all the principal pictures and heard the names of the palaces announced a dozen times by your gondolier, who brings them out almost as impressively as if he were an English butler bawling titles into a drawing-room. You have walked several hundred times round the Piazza and bought several bushels of photographs” (CT 1: 290). For James as for Pennell, the challenge was to depict customary scenes without adopting the viewpoint of the commis-voyageur or the hack journalist. In the Italian essays, the setting—light and atmosphere, architecture and landscape—becomes paramount. As Fred Kaplan points out, James thus “assured his American readers that the totality of the Italian experience was best embodied in and represented not by single or even collected works of art but in the combination of the natural and the artistic” (Traveling 10–11). In revisiting famous sights along the tourist route, author and artist are both intent on capturing the richly suggestive ambiance of the place. Take Pennell’s etchings of the Rialto and the Riva Schiavoni (Figures 103 and 104), both executed in 1883, according to Wuerth’s catalogue raisonné, but impressed into plausible service for Italian Hours. Pennell’s Whistlerian views are spare and distant, the features of the foreground and its human inhabitants having been reduced to calligraphic notations in the hazy light of a wet Venetian afternoon. The printer—very possibly the artist himself, who preferred to do his own printing—has not wiped the plate clean but left a skim of ink, or plate tone, that darkens at the perimeter and emphasizes the frame. What registers most forcefully to the viewer’s apprehension is that this is an imaginatively reconstituted vision of a well-known scene. The same must be said of James’s verbal sketches of these scenes. In the Preface to The Aspern Papers, James writes that the bare facts that inspired his story were “more distinct and more numerous than I mostly like facts: like them, that is, as we say of an etcher’s progressive subject, in an early ‘state.’ Nine tenths of the artist’s interest in them is that of what he shall add to them and how he shall turn them” (LC 2: 1176). In


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her phenomenological reading of James’s Italian Hours, Bonney Mac Donald shows how James’s descriptive methods in the travel book parallel his brother William’s ideas regarding the interaction of the sensorial world and the observer’s imaginative perception: “With an emphasis on receptive vision, multiplicity of impression, tactile experience, and . . . the ‘gestalt of the picturesque,’ Henry James gives voice to the concrete and tactile nature of full consciousness—to the ‘worldliness,’ as William James wrote, ‘of thought’” (47).21 The following passage from Italian Hours illustrates how Henry James impresses on the reader an awareness of the shaping force of consciousness on the observed scene, an active spectatorship on the part of both writer and reader that Agnew calls “an appropriative gesture of the mind” (83). In the opening essay of the book, James protests, I must not, however, speak of St. Mark’s as if I had the pretension of giving a description of it or as if the reader desired one. The reader has been too well served already. It is surely the best-described building in the world. Open the Stones of Venice, open Theophile Gautier’s Italia, and you will see. These writers take it very seriously, and it is only because there is another way of taking it that I venture to speak of it; the way that offers itself after you have been in Venice a couple of months, and the light is hot in the great Square, and you pass in under the pictured porticoes with a feeling of habit and friendliness and a desire for something cool and dark.

What follows this demurral is a bravura demonstration of how the author circles the shopworn subject, approaching it obliquely, by indirection, until by small suggestive touches—Wharton was to speak of his “miracle of shifted lights and accumulated strokes”—the flickering image begins “solidifying under the turn of his lens” (Backward Glance 194). St. Mark’s owes nothing of its character to the beauty of proportion or perspective; there is nothing grandly balanced or far-arching; there are no long lines nor triumphs of the perpendicular. The church arches indeed, but arches like a dusky cavern. Beauty of surface, of tone, of detail, of things near enough to touch and kneel upon and lean against—it is from this the effect proceeds. . . . But if you cannot paint the old loose-looking marble slabs, the great panels of basalt and jasper, the crucifixes of which the lonely anguish looks deeper in the vertical light, the tabernacles whose open doors disclose a dark Byzantine image spotted with dull,

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crooked gems—if you cannot paint these things you can at least grow fond of them. You grow fond even of the old benches of red marble, partly worn away by the breeches of many generations and attached to the base of those wide pilasters of which the precious plating, delightful in its faded brownness, with a faint grey bloom upon it, bulges and yawns a little with honourable age. (CT 1: 295–96)

The great meeting point for James and Pennell is their shared fascination with atmosphere and perspective. Both show preference for the unpeopled landscape, for the set stage without actors, as James would say in his instructions to Coburn. Where other artists presented in the foregoing pages approach their subjects at ground level, as it were, Pennell, like James, typically adopts a superior, detached vantage point from which figures appear incidental and unformed, if they appear at all. Reconsider Figure 104 in light of James’s strikingly similar verbal depiction of the view from the window of his lodgings on the Riva Schiavoni: Fortunately for the present proser the weather wasn’t always fine; the first month was wet and windy, and it was better to judge of the matter from an open casement than to respond to the advances of persuasive gondoliers. Even then however there was a constant entertainment in the view. It was all cold colour, and the steel-grey floor of the lagoon was stroked the wrong way by the wind. Then there were the charming cool intervals, when the churches, the houses, the anchored fishing-boats, the whole gently-curving line of the Riva, seemed to be washed with a pearly white. (298)

James’s viewpoint is characteristically that of the isolated observer at the window—as he describes various scenes of writing in the Pre faces—in a succession of rooms overlooking the Riva Schiavoni, the Piazza Santa Maria Novella, the Rue de Luxembourg. Elizabeth Pennell points out that her husband chose residences and hotel rooms on a high floor with an open prospect, and it was from this perspective that his illustrations were usually drawn. She describes Pennell making one pastel after another in Venice: “His rooms on the Riva looked to the Salute and the Dogana and he studied that stately group of buildings in their ever-changing light—in the pale violet dawn, the rare greys of a cloudy day, the burning red of the setting sun—recording with masterly swiftness his impressions of the effects that came and went as swiftly” (Life and Letters 2: 346). The act of description reveals the window of vision,


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whether in the house of fiction or the more temporary lodgings of the displaced American traveler. The very structure of Italian Hours is proof of the multiplicity of vision. Venice is revisited in five successive essays, Rome in six, and so on; and it is altogether fitting that the book should have been issued with two sets of illustrations, in color and monochrome. It is likely that for this project, too, Pennell once again provided the impetus. The artist had been much taken with the possibilities of color printing as early as the turn of the century. In January 1900, Carl Hentschel, owner of a photoengraving firm based in London, wrote to Pennell (apropos an article Pennell had written on the subject) of his interest in three-color photography, an infant process that he predicted would become “a leading factor in modern book illustration.” In June he sent a proof of a Japanese print reproduced in what he called his “colourtype,” a multiplate process in three printings, soliciting Pennell’s opinion (Pennell Collection, Box 229). A publisher like Heinemann, as we have seen, would have been eager to promote novel printing techniques like the tricolor process in combination with sepia-toned drawings and etchings. Pennell had used the medium of colored chalks and wax crayons in an earlier book on Venice, Francis Marion Crawford’s Salve Venetia: Gleanings from Venetian History (Macmillan, 1905). We know that James had this book in his library (it is listed in Edel and Tintner); and it may well have been given him by the artist himself, perhaps with a view to a similar project with James. Whatever the case,22 we can say that the medium lends itself to James’s Italian Hours, which, more than his other travel books, records his vivid sensations of “the splendour of light and colour,” whether the “pink of the old wall” sinking into a “patch of green water” in a canal, or the “absurd orange-colored paper” of his sunlit rooms overlooking the Arno, or the skyline of the Colosseum “silvered by the blue air.” Elizabeth Pennell notes that her husband “drew with his pastel sticks on brown paper in as simple lines and as few colors as possible” to accommodate the unreliable quality of color reproduction and printing of the time. Despite this “somewhat conventionalized scheme” (Pennell, An Account 28), he managed to convey, for example, the liquid and reflected light of Venice by applying delicate parallel lines of color

Figure 105. “Flags at St Mark’s, Venice.” Illustration (pastel on brown paper) by Joseph Pennell for Italian Hours.

Figure 106. “A Narrow Canal.” Illustration (pastel on brown paper) by Joseph Pennell for Italian Hours.


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to airy vignettes that sit high on the page and seem to vaporize at the edges (Figures 105 and 106). The Heinemann edition of Italian Hours sold for the princely sum of twenty-five pounds, the Houghton boxed edition for seven and a half dollars. Obviously, these special printings were marketed to well-off consumers for whom superfluity was a sign of prestige; but the showiness of the luxury product should not overshadow for us the more ambitious project Pennell and James had carried out. Elizabeth Pennell tells us that her husband’s guiding idea was to produce a volume “convenient for the traveler to carry, well made, well written, well illustrated, and issued for a reasonable sum” (Life and Letters 2: 338). In the process, James and Pennell introduced into the travelogue a new “type” of American abroad, in contradistinction to Twain’s stumbling Innocents and wouldbe cosmopolites like Dr. Sloper of Washington Square, whose joyless trek through featureless European capitals with his unhappy daughter is the reflection of a barren inner landscape. The Prefaces James produced between 1907 and 1909 for the New York Edition are unquestionably the summary achievement of his critical career, his last great attempt to create a wider and more receptive audience for his work. But during roughly the same period James was embarked on a parallel and complementary critical project as he revised and reissued his travel essays. In their European sketches James and Pennell reimagined modern American readers as the colleagues collectively addressed as “you” in Italian Hours: worldly, aesthetically alive, motionlessly seeing. These were the traveling companions James envisioned as the ideal audience for his fiction.

Epilogue

T

of one of James’s last stories, “Julia Bride” (1908), offers a fitting coda to this study, not least because it reprises the author’s vexations at this stage of his career with editors, publishers, and illustrators. Just as significant, the story and James’s Preface for it constitute a final authorial appeal to an American public that was just beginning to show signs “of responsible consciousness, of roused and reflective taste” (LC 2: 1267). The seed for the story had been planted by J. Henry Harper, who urged James in 1894 to do another Daisy Miller for his magazine (Notebooks 100). James dropped the idea, only to take it up a dozen years later. Like “Miss Gunton of Poughkeepsie” (1900), “Julia Bride” was indeed a revisiting of Daisy, his earliest and most successful portrait of an American ingénue, and an obvious attempt to win back some of her audience. Between 1906 and 1908 he drastically cut down the story three times to suit the Harper editors. Only after the firm’s director, Colonel George Harvey, interceded on James’s behalf did the tale finally appear in the Monthly in March–April 1908, accompanied by four halftone reproductions of gouaches by William T. Smedley, a staff artist who specialized in contemporary scenes of New York life. Further frustrations with the publisher ensued. According to Pin ker’s correspondence with Harper’s (Harper & Brothers Records, Series 1, Box 7), James protested the firm’s plan to release the story again in book form; the author considered the material too slight for a single volume, and he didn’t want the “less important book” to overshadow a new novel he expected to deliver to Harper’s the following year. Harper’s management responded by agreeing to defer the volume until after publication of the promised novel (which never materialized), and thus “Julia Bride” came to be reissued in September 1909 as a handsome little h e t r o u b l e d p u b l icati o n h ist o ry

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book with Smedley’s original illustrations, two of which are shown in Figures 107 and 108. At the same time, “Julia Bride” appeared in still another venue, volume 17 of the New York Edition. The volume was a last-minute decision on the part of Scribner’s. On December 19, 1908, James wrote to A. L. Coburn, who happened to be in New York at the time, to commission a photograph for it, and as usual he specified the subjects he had in mind: “either of some bit of the Park or of the Metropolitan Museum. . . . I am wondering if you can’t make a sort of the [sic] picture of the first or opening Hall & staircase as I remember it—& as the first page or two of the story glances at it. Or of one of the picture-rooms—later on?” (Correspondence, Henry James Papers, Box 6).

Figure 107. “The young man had left her, smiling, looking back.” Illustration by W. T. Smedley for “Julia Bride” (1908), showing the grand staircase of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The picture was reproduced as the frontispiece and cover art for the dust jacket of the book version (1909).

Figure 108. “He says I was good to him, Mrs. Drack.” Illustration by W. T. Smedley for “Julia Bride,” showing a picture gallery in the Metropolitan Museum.

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Coburn’s photograph is a fairly straightforward affair, showing the central portion of the southwestern facade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which had been completed in 1879. Yet James evidently regarded this as the one real failure among all the photographs for the Edition, for a month later, on January 22, 1909, he wrote to Coburn, “This morsel of the Museum will quite serve our turn—it had all your technical merit, and it’s not your fault if the subject, quite prescribed and imposed by our fatal conditions, isn’t more entrancing” (Box 6). Granted, Coburn’s soft-focus view of the museum facade displays neither his characteristic play of light and shade nor his signature Japonesque composition. Still, James’s dissatisfaction was not with the technique but with the subject matter, specifically with Coburn’s failure for one reason or another to frame the scenes suggested to him. Smedley’s illustrations, depicting precisely these scenes, speak more meaningfully to James’s distinctly contemporary subject, as well as to his insistent tone of sociological inquiry in both the story and his Preface for it, than does Coburn’s blurry evocation. In his Preface to volume 17, James explains why his “re-invoked” ingénue (whom he imagines saying “Here we go again!”) required a more detailed and current local setting than he normally provided: I really didn’t take her for particularly important in herself, and would in fact have had no heart for her without the note, attaching to her as not in the least to poor little dim and archaic Daisy Miller, say; the note, so to call it, of multitudinous reference. I had had, for any confidence, to make it out to myself that my little frisking haunter, under private stress, of the New York public scene, was related with a certain intensity to the world about her. . . . What if she were the silver key, tiny in itself, that would unlock a treasure?—the treasure of a whole view of manners and morals, a whole range of American social aspects? (LC 2: 1265–66)

The story commemorates the “New York public scene” as James had described it in The American Scene (1907), the record of his tenmonth sojourn in the United States in 1904–5. James had been struck during his visit by the fluidity of his native country’s rapidly shifting mores and the permeability of its social boundaries. He saw the idea of transformation embodied in the “polyglot” visitors to the newly created

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Central Park, with their “air of hard prosperity, the ruthlessly pushedup and promoted look worn by men, women and children alike” (CT 2: 502). He perceived a parallel change in American cultural institutions like the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Having been relocated uptown from its original quarters on Fourteenth Street, the museum had become a “Palace of art, truly, that sits there on the edge of the Park.” More important, it was still in the process of remaking itself, discarding past curatorial mistakes with the help of new endowments and more educated standards of taste. The tangential milieus of the public park and the palace of art both prompted James to wonder what new money and ambition would do “for art, selection, criticism, for knowledge, piety, taste” (CT 2: 514). James uses the two settings in “Julia Bride” to describe a nascent awareness—an awareness at once moral, social, and aesthetic—not simply on the part of his fictional heroine but on the part of the national consciousness itself. Smedley’s illustrations give concrete form to the fictional motif of social and aesthetic liminality and transition. James’s heroine is first shown gazing down at her high-caste suitor, Basil French, from the top of the grand museum staircase, which had been created along with the Met’s revamped Fifth Avenue facade in 1902. She reappears in a gallery of European paintings (“the great shining room, with its mockery of art and ‘style’ and security, all the things she was vainly after” [CS 5: 675]), where she vouches for her divorced stepfather’s character so that he can marry Mrs. Drack, the substantial woman by his side. Julia is next shown on a bench in Central Park with a former fiancé—one of six!—on whose discretion about their shared romantic history Julia’s marriage depends. Murray Brush is, alas, yet another social striver seeking to marry “up,” and his own grasping ambitions will ultimately dash Julia’s hopes of breaching “the grand square forecourt of the palace of wedlock” (669). Julia Bride made her appearance three decades after Daisy Miller, and her story tells us what had happened in the interim not only to James’s American ingénue but to his readers and the medium through which he addressed them. The faint but steady thrum of the “new” journalism can be felt behind the events of the narrative: The adventures of Julia’s much-divorced mama have been played out in the courts and written up

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for public consumption; and already the daughter’s beautiful features, if not yet her serial engagements, are known to strangers like Mrs. Drack. News of Daisy’s minor youthful indiscretions in Schenectady did not follow her abroad in 1878; but Julia’s lurid family saga will stretch all the way from North Dakota to New York thanks to what James called (in volume 18, for which “Julia Bride” was originally intended) the “deadly epidemic of publicity,” by which “any rash word, any light thought that chances to escape us, may instantly . . . find itself propagated and perverted, multiplied and diffused” (LC 2: 1284). Of course, James’s short stories depended for their life on the dread reverberation of the popular press. It is particularly telling that in the same Preface to volume 18 James describes another late tale—one he had similarly cut down to magazine length but still could not sell—as a “beggar” haunting “the cold avenues of publicity.” Brevity, easy readability, lively pictorial accompaniment in the form of drawings and photographs, advertisements and chromos: these were the conditions attached to modern periodical publication. We have seen how writers like James, Howells, and Wharton fictionally thematized the contest between traditional literary values and the comparatively debased standards of American “newspaperism.” The illustrations, by virtue of their presence among the pages of the authorial text, define the uneasy transitional status of high literary figures in the era of the magazine revolution. Few of James’s illustrators—Coburn, Greiffenhagen, and Pennell are notable exceptions—were able to transcend the limitations of time, genre, and medium set by periodical publication. Even so, illustrations like those for “Julia Bride” situate James’s fiction within the wider cultural phenomenon of a rising middle-class readership brought into closer relation to art and literature through the “educative” and above all visual medium of the periodicals. Together with the pictures discussed in the foregoing chapters, these images trace the history of an audience that was both represented and constructed in the pages of the magazines.

Notes

Chapter 1 Chapter opening illustration: Headpiece for “Broken Wings” in the Century Illustrated Magazine, December 1900, drawn by F. C. Gordon. 1. PT 1. 2. As Miller goes on to argue, “These conditions are essential to the meaning of James’s work, not adventitious to it” (Illustration 14). 3. For studies concentrating on the history of literacy in the United States, see the titles by Nina Baym and Michael Lund and the collections edited by Cathy N. David son and Emory Elliot et al. 4. On “parlour literature,” see Barbara Sicherman’s essay, “Sense and Sensibility: A Case Study of Women’s Reading in Late-Victorian America,” in the collection edited by Davidson. The essay in Cavallo and Chartier by Martyn Lyons, “New Readers in the Nineteenth Century: Women, Children, Workers,” briefly treats the tradition of “oral reading” in England. Howells’s letters to James provide numerous references to the family practice of reading aloud: see Anesko, Letters. 5. Lund discusses the activities of reading in installments and group discussion during the intervals, and the ways in which “the context of this social pattern framed the meaning of literature” (101). The Reading Experience Database (1450–1945), an online project of the UK Open University, provides a wide range of excerpted reading testimonies, such as the following examples of British working-class readers’ responses at midcentury to the rise of serialized and illustrated fiction: Henry Mayhew’s interviews (c. 1840–55) with costermongers who regularly read aloud and discuss among their peers various illustrated serials (Record 1257). Thomas Okey’s recollection of circulating “penny bloods” and cheap weeklies among his schoolmates, c. 1870, and impatiently awaiting the next installments: “What it did was to evoke the reading habit. . . . I can even today visualize the number I read . . . and the front page illustration” (Record 12094). Thomas Catling’s description of a reading group of fellow printers and compositors formed in the 1850s: “There were no free libraries, so the younger hands joined with me in starting a ‘Literary Fund’ of our own, towards which each paid

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three-halfpence a week. . . . In our little club the ‘Cornhill Magazine,’ from its start under Thackeray’s editorship, was read and discussed; also Dickens’s successive productions” (Record 7001). 6. Martin Meisel calls illustrations an “aide-memoire” to help readers bridge the intervals between monthly installments (53). Philip V. Allingham, writing for the Victorian Web about the illustrations for Thomas Hardy’s work in the periodicals, observes, “These pictorial influences [on readers], however, have been weighed by only a handful of modern critics, who have experienced his novels in volume rather than in magazine format. Even when a modern attempts to experience Hardy as his first nineteenthcentury readers would have done, reading the chapters in their original serial groupings and pausing to reflect and anticipate as the magazine readers would have done, without the illustrations that initial reading cannot be recreated.” 7. J. R. Harvey analyzes the contributions of H. K. Browne (“Phiz”) to the novels of Dickens in chapters 5 and 6 of Victorian Novelists and Their Illustrators and discusses George Cruikshank’s work for Dickens in chapter 2 of his study. 8. Here and in the following paragraph, sources consulted for information on the history of periodicals include Alden, Burlingame, Elliot, Exman, Harper, John, Mott, Price and Smith, and Sedgwick. 9. The spelling was changed to Harper’s Bazaar in 1929. 10. Preface to the New York Edition of The Golden Bowl (LC 2: 1326). 11. Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes appeared in thirty-four installments, with sixteen illustrations by William Allen Rogers, in Harper’s Weekly in 1889 and was reprinted in one illustrated volume in 1890. The illustrations are discussed in Prettyman 179–95. 12. Harper Archives, Library of Congress 0809S (part 1); material stored offsite. 13. From one of his series of “American Letters” for Literature magazine. June 11, 1898 (LC 1: 684). 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 683. 16. In his introductory comments to the facsimile reprint of Italian Villas, Henry Hope Reed mistakenly assumes that Wharton’s text preceded Parrish’s pictures: “It was most fitting that the Century Company . . . should have chosen him to illustrate the book. Yet Edith Wharton accepted his illustrations under protest; she wanted garden plans!” (Wharton, Italian Villas vii). 17. The illustrations for Washington Square are discussed briefly in Chapter 4. 18. In a frequently quoted letter from August 27, 1892, for example, James writes somewhat disingenuously to Robert Underwood Johnson, associate editor of the Century, “I’ve ceased to care to write about painters. . . . I care more & more for literature—& that crowds them out. I wish the Century did too, & that it wasn’t so much of a picture book. There never ought, to my sense, to be pictures with a good text” (Letters 3: 250–51). Yet that same year finds him publishing numerous illustrated stories, in the English Illustrated Magazine, Cosmopolitan Magazine, and the Graphic, in addition to an illustrated travel piece, “The Grand Canal,” for Scribner’s.

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19. In a letter written on January 19, 1908, rebuffing Frederick Solger’s offer to dramatize The Other House, James recalled the process by which he had converted his play into fiction: Having occasion to “serialise” rapidly and at short notice, a novel of moderate length, I applied the idle little play to that use by the simple expedient of calling the Acts Books and “writing in” such an amount of scenic indication and comment as would make a sort of equivalent or substitute for very good acting. . . . In these interlineations it is quietly locked up, but could step out of them at need as easily as a bather in a full tub steps, his bath ended, out of the water. I am quite capable, in this case, of giving him, myself, a hand toward that simple act. (Reinhold Solger Papers [1840–1944], Library of Congress Manuscripts Division)

A year later James converted the novel into the play he had envisioned but failed in his efforts to get the piece mounted. 20. In her discussion of “Greville Fane,” James’s story of a writer shamelessly exploited by her unappreciative children, Christina Albers writes, “The Illustrated London News made its sense of things quite clear in the decorated title that headed the tale, incorporating an allegorical scene of a woman pushing a grindstone accompanied by a smiling boy with a whip and a smiling young woman with a fan” (346). 21. Edel also discusses the publication history of the novel in the introduction to his edition of The Other House. According to the detailed scenario recorded in his notebook on December 26, 1893, James originally considered having the villain of the tale, Rose Armiger, administer poison to the child she murders (Notebooks 80–82). 22. Along the same lines, several readers have suggested that James had conceived the sensationalistic plot of his story “Georgina’s Reasons” (1884) with the audience of the American tabloid the New York Sun in mind (Edel, Life 3:119; Johanningsmeier; Kaplan 286). Regarding the influence of magazine pictures on James’s fiction, in an essay written in 1941, Robert Lee Wolff suggests that James’s mise-en-scène for “The Turn of the Screw” (1898) was inspired by a stand-alone illustration that had appeared years earlier in the same issue of Black and White magazine (Christmas 1891) that contained James’s story “Sir Edmund Orme.” The picture shows a boy and girl crouched beneath a tree, looking across a lake at a vaguely gothic and turreted house from a window of which shines a “ghostly light.” Wolff speculates that James revived this image as his setting for the famous anecdote that Archbishop Benson related to him in 1895. 23. See chapter 5 in West on the rise of the literary agent. 24. Excerpts from the Pinker letters are quoted in the article by Alan B. Donovan for the Yale University Library Gazette and in Philip Horne’s essay in Modernist Writers.

Chapter 2 Chapter opening illustration: Headpiece for “Brooksmith” in Black and White, May 2, 1891. 1. The terms of representation here are Meyer Schapiro’s. See his Words, Script and Pictures. 2. In letters James wrote around this time to Elizabeth Robins, the actress he had chosen to play Mme de Cintré in his stage version of The American (and his likely inspiration for the ingénue in “Nona Vincent”), he complains about the short attention span of English theatergoers, whom he contrasts with their more intellectual French counterparts. His comments might serve as well for his assessment of the magazine

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audience: “The only thing the English public will look at for a moment is the intensely simplified—the quick, instant, obvious, visible, tangible—the thing that jumps down your throat” (June 25, 1891; Robins 39). 3. With the use of photomechanical processes, the artist’s work, now comparatively unhampered by the engravers who acted as translators (and sometimes manglers) of the original drawing, was presented to the reader in less mediated form. As a result, during the period when James was becoming a “name,” illustrators, too, were becoming public figures. Joseph Pennell, Edwin Abbey, and Charles Reinhart were among the first generation of American illustrators to win recognition in Europe. Pennell recalled in 1923, “An illustrator receives more publicity from a magazine which publishes illustrations than any other artist, for though large numbers of people may see in one city an art exhibition, an illustrated magazine is an art gallery for the world— or was in those days, now I fear the illustrator must do other work to be remembered” (Adventures of an Illustrator 101; for more on Pennell’s memoirs, see Chapter 5 of this book). The increased visibility of the popular artist posed another threat to the authority of the written text. 4. Letters to James in the final volume of an incomplete series of letterbooks from the A. P. Watt and Son Records, vol. 25 (1891), letters 188, 215, 390, 435, 529. 5. From the James correspondence at Yale and quoted in Chapter 4 of this book. 6. Although not connected in obvious ways to the story, the sketch invites interpretation from the reader, after the fact, for according to common practice headpieces were made to allude, in the manner of an epigraph, to a theme in the story that follows. Is this sketch an emblem of the butler Brooksmith’s devotion to his employer, which outweighs monetary considerations, or perhaps a reference to the financial responsibility the employer’s friends should have assumed (but did not) for the butler’s welfare after his master’s decease? In any case, I have chosen the picture as the headpiece for the present chapter because it advertises the iconic status of the now-famous author and describes so succinctly the balancing claims of art and commerce, a theme that becomes more prominent in his magazine productions from this point forward. 7. Over the years, interpreters of “Brooksmith” have debated the meaning of James’s oblique social commentary in the story: Are the narrator’s comments about Brooksmith’s knowing his “place” a reflection of the author’s sentiments or merely the narrator’s? Among those contributing to the discussion are Rory Drummond, Maxwell Geismar, Q. D. Leavis, S. Gorley Putt, K. B. Vaid, and Edward Wagenknecht. 8. Not incidentally, this Master tells a provocative anecdote about Lord Byron in Italy, as James himself had done in The Aspern Papers. Tintner interprets the devotion of servant and master in terms of a literary anecdote, that of Voltaire’s loyal secretaries caring for the author—whom James invokes in comparing Offord to “the dying Voltaire” (Museum World 214–16); Denis Flannery reads the attachment of the two men as essentially homoerotic. 9. See Rosenberg x, 79–81. 10. Indeed, the pictorial illustrations of fiction that proliferated during this period have been seen as stand-ins for the intrusive author, guiding and leaving space for readers to pause and become conscious of their own acts of reading. See Schnei-

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rov and Hochman for excellent analyses of changes in the nature of the author-reader relationship in the last quarter of the century. 11. British rights confirmed in James’s letter of May 11 in the James B. Pinker and Son Records. 12. May 1899 advertisement pictured on Cornell University’s HEARTH Web site; in an e-mail message to the author on March 20, 2009, the director of the site confirms that Cornell’s run of Bazar, and thus its online archive, does not extend beyond this point. 13. And in cases when these stories concerned working- or lower-middle-class characters, as, for instance, in Mary E. Wilkins’s series of New England tales or Jack London’s improbable appearance in Bazar in 1900 with a story about the gold rush, the fortitude of the working-class heroines still accords with the magazine’s projected image of admirable womanhood. 14. In the introduction to her Woman’s Manual of Parliamentary Law (1893), Harriet R. Shattuck addresses herself to the relatively recent phenomenon of national women’s clubs and societies in terms of the need for overcoming traditional notions of female “performance”: “Unlike the men, who almost from childhood” have learned how to manage debate, “the majority of women spring full-grown into the arena of public debate, and must offset the lack of an early and natural training” (iv). 15. Herter, a scion of the influential Herter Brothers family of cabinetmakers and interior designers, specialized in murals, still lifes, and society portraiture, in addition to magazine illustration. Like many other American artists of his generation who entered the revived field of illustration, Herter had developed a version of the PreRaphaelite style during his studies in Paris. Decors in his illustrations are distinctly in the Aesthetic mode. 16. Some subscribers might even have noted a resemblance between the interiors in Herter’s illustrations and a photograph that had appeared in August in the pages of Bazar showing Herter’s own home, furnished “artistically” with Japanese prints, art pottery, and wicker furniture, according to the current rage for decor in the Aesthetic style. 17. Tintner in “An Illustrator’s Literary Interpretations” and Museum World thoughtfully analyzes the interpretive work of La Farge’s headpiece but makes no mention of Pape’s full-page illustration for the story. 18. See, for example, Edel’s biography (vol. 5) and his introduction to the tale in Stories of the Supernatural, as well as discussions of the story in Bruce R. McElderry and S. Gorley Putt. Hugh Stevens is one of several readers who view James’s resistance to his own biographers in terms of the author’s ambivalent sexuality. He reads “The Real Right Thing” as a dramatization of James’s response to the recent biography of John Ad dington Symonds (Symonds having already served as the model for “The Author of Beltraffio”). 19. Meanwhile, other American writers of the time were responding in similar fictional terms to the menace of media attention in the age of the magazine revolution. In Willa Cather’s early tale “The Count of Crow’s Nest” (published in 1896 in Home Monthly), the inheritor of a collection of private letters by various public figures successfully blocks his daughter’s attempts to publish them. Edith Wharton excoriated modern tabloids in a story called “The Quicksand” (Harper’s Monthly, 1902). In

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addition, Wharton wrote a dialogue in which two famous authors try to win back letters they had exchanged years earlier (“Copy,” Scribner’s, 1900), and she decried the posthumous publication of a female author’s correspondence in The Touchstone (1900). 20. Why Seek Ye the Living among the Dead? (1905), inspired by Saint Gaudens’s figure of Victory for the Sherman Monument in Manhattan. See Brandywine River Museum, “Howard Pyle and the American Renaissance,” introduction to the exhibit. 21. Ibid. 22. Here and in the following discussion, Pyle’s comments, cited in Abbott 215, 125–26, are quoted in Pitz 138, 186. 23. Sources consulted for this discussion of advertising include, in addition to the estimable Mott, studies by Michele H. Bogart, Edward E. Chielens, Ellen Gruber Garvey, Richard Ohmann, Thomas Richards, Jennifer Scanlon, Matthew Schneirov, and Christopher P. Wilson. 24. Scholarly literature regarding “Paste” is relatively sparse, focusing on James’s borrowings from Maupassant (see, for instance, Bernard Knieger, Q. D. Leavis, S. Gorley Putt, T. M. Segnitz, and Adeline Tintner [Museum World ]). Critics have shown that James borrowed not just from “The Necklace” but from Maupassant’s “Bijoux,” usually translated as “False Jewels.” In his essay on Maupassant for the Fortnightly Review (March 1888), James singles out the author’s contemptuous vision of human conduct and his concentration on the “sexual impulse” as the prime mover of human behavior. Maupassant, says James, “at once so licentious and so impeccable,” “peeps behind curtains” at “ugly, dreary, shabby, sordid” lives, particularly those of his female characters, who “are a mixture of extreme sensuality and extreme mendacity” (LC 1: 521–49). James’s additions to Maupassant in “Paste” chiefly concern the evolving consciousness of his protagonist, a governess, who alone among her “betters” possesses what Maisie and her old governess would call a moral sense. Indeed, critics from Howells onward have tended to regard James’s formal concerns as indivisible from the ethical questions he poses: most recently, David Golumbia writes that “ethics in various forms functions as an important component of James’s aesthetic—that is, there are a variety of ethical imperatives, of statements about finding and living ‘the moral life,’ or at least ‘a moral life,’ contained in James’s work” (158). 25. In his review of The Soft Side—the collection in which “Paste” eventually appeared—Howells singles out “Paste” and several other stories for their air of delicate perfume. “Not since English began to be written,” he concludes, “has it so clearly embodied a literary intention of such refinement, or so unerringly imparted a feeling of character. In a time when the miasms of a gross and palpable fable are thick about us, this exquisite air breathes like a memory and a prophecy of days when fiction was and shall be valued for beauty and distinction” (“Editor’s Easy Chair,” Harper’s Monthly, January 1901: 319). One wonders whether Howells could have framed his argument this way if he had been writing about the story as it appeared in its original setting. 26. This optimism on James’s part regarding the Century was unfortunately premature. The magazine would turn down serial rights to both The Ambassadors (which had also been rejected by Bliss Perry of the Atlantic, the editor having been dissuaded by the falling off of James’s readership) and The Golden Bowl, despite James’s promise

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that he would “heroically cut it for this purpose” (see Century Company Records, Pinker correspondence). 27. Christina Albers sums up: “Apart from Putt, who suspects James’s motives in criticizing society, critics have generally reacted approvingly to the tale’s reflection of James’s experiences as a writer” (92). 28. Lawrence wrote to Greiffenhagen of An Idyll that “it moves me almost as much as if I were fallen in love myself. Under it’s [sic] intoxication, I have flirted madly this christmas; I have flirted myself half in love; . . . it is largely the effect of your Idyll that has made me kiss a certain girl till she hid her head in my shoulder” (from The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. James T. Boulton, qtd. in “Reminiscences from Bridle and Brush”). 29. Some of them, like the Pre-Raphaelite disciples J. W. Waterhouse and J. W. Godward, were Greiffenhagen’s neighbors in the artists’ enclave of the Bolton Street studios where he started out. The “starter studios” are described by Godward’s biographer as “claustrophobic,” suggesting another source of inspiration for Greiffenhagen’s cramped picture (Swanson). 30. Tintner (Museum World 142–47) sees paintings like Burne-Jones’s The Mill reflected in James’s description of the dream retreat in “The Great Good Place.” The protagonist of that story, an elderly and celebrated author, escapes from the distractions of the modern world to a fantasy realm of cloistered monastic life, where his quarters look out on a view reminiscent “of some old Italian picture, some Carpaccio or some early Tuscan, the representation of a world without newspapers and letters, without telegrams and photographs, without the dreadful, fatal too much” (CS 5: 169). 31. For other articles of the time on the subject of poster art, see Matthews, Bunner, and “N. N.” [Elizabeth Robins Pennell]. 32. We have seen him weigh in briefly on the popularity of “decadent” posters in his description of the artist’s widow in “The Real Right Thing.” In “Greville Fane” (published in the Illustrated London News in 1892), he appears to lampoon the Millais phenomenon—and to take a sly swipe at the Illustrated London News, the tabloid that bought the Bubbles painting—for in the final scene of the story the narrator and protagonist are at an Academy exhibition, gazing at “the picture of the year,” an obvious example of sentimental kitsch called Baby’s Tub. James in turn became a subject of discussion in the reviews of the “decadent” environment of the Yellow Book (see Mix 87–100). Jonathan Freedman quotes criticism in the American press of the “bad company” James kept in the Yellow Book, an enterprise that placed the author, according to one writer in the Atlantic, “inextricably in the decadent ranks” (177n). James would write to his brother William of the Yellow Book, “I hate too much the horrid aspect and company of the whole publication. And yet I am again to be intimately—conspicuously—associated with the second number. It is for gold and to oblige the worshipful Harland [the editor of the Yellow Book]” (Letters 3: 482).

Chapter 3 Chapter opening illustration: Three woodcuts from Hans Holbein the Younger’s Dance of Death (c. 1523–25).

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1. In addition to the works by Donoghue and Tintner cited in the chapter, see discussions in Susanne Kappeler, Donna Przybylowicz, S. Gorley Putt, Edward Wagenknecht, and Viola Hopkins Winner. 2. That James was influenced by the “popular compilations” of Anna Jameson is underscored in his unsigned review of her memoirs in the Nation in 1878: “Mrs. Jameson deserves honorable remembrance from the many who were gently led along the storied entrance halls of art by her graceful and reverent touch. Books more learned, more searching, more strictly organized have been written since, but Mrs. Jameson made it clear to the narrowest capacity that the meaning of a picture was as much to be studied as its beauty, and thence followed, naturally, many things that have been specialized since her time” (uncollected rev. Dec. 19, 1878: 388–89). We may compare James’s comments with the dismissive review of the memoirs in Lippincott’s (January 1879), which mentions Mrs. Jameson’s travel, marriage, friendships, and the like but never specifies what she “labored diligently” at (Lippincott’s Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, January 1879: 135–36). 3. The inaugural issue of the magazine is commemorated in the first chapter of James’s Notes of a Son and Brother. 4. See, for example, Müller’s discussion of Holbein’s innovative spatial concepts in The Basel Years (28). 5. In his Life, Edel (3: 263) calls James’s direct address of the reader in chapter 25 of The Tragic Muse (“We have chosen, as it happens, . . . the indirect vision”) an “anomaly.” But the author inserts a similar address to the reader in “Flickerbridge,” when the young artist hesitates to write to his fiancée in the fear that she will ruin the place with her rave write-up: “[He] . . . relieved his mind in a letter to Addie, which, if space allowed us to embody it in our text, would usefully perform the office of a ‘plate.’ It would enable us to present ourselves as profusely illustrated. But the process of reproduction, as we say, costs” (CS 5: 429). In this brief aside, James seems to foreclose the possibility of pictorial “plates,” and indeed Scribner’s, having kept the manuscript for nearly two years, finally published the tale in 1902 without illustrations. 6. See Fredric Jameson’s foreword to Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: I am referring to the so-called crisis of representation, in which an essentially realistic epistemology, which conceives of representation as the reproduction, for subjectivity, of an objectivity that lies outside it—projects a mirror theory of knowledge and art, whose fundamental evaluative categories are those of adequacy, accuracy, and Truth itself. It is in terms of this crisis that the transition, in the history of form, from a novelistic “realism” of the Lukacsean variety to the various now classical “high” modernisms, has been described: the cognitive vocation of science would however seem even more disastrously impaired by the analogous shift from a representational to a nonrepresentational practice.” (viii–ix)

Susan Bazargan applies Jameson’s comments in her argument that in “The Real Thing,” “the basis of the artist’s dilemma is not the presence but the absence of the ‘real thing’ and its recoupment by simulation” (135). 7. Maud Ellmann refers to Lacan’s discussion of Holbein in her analysis “Power and Representation in The Ambassadors.” Miller invokes Holbein’s painting in his reference to “the great smudge of mortality across the picture” in his discussion of the


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novel (220). Phyllis van Slyck uses Lacan’s concept of “trapping the gaze” to “elucidate James’s fiction as a study of desire” (in Dewey and Horvath 218).

Chapter 4 Chapter opening illustration: Alfred Parsons’s “The Village Green, Broadway” in Picture and Text (1893). 1. Even allowing for recycled material (as in the case of catalogue notes on Abbey, Du Maurier, and Parsons, which were later incorporated into full-fledged essays), the list of James’s commentaries on illustration and its practitioners is extensive, beginning with “George Du Maurier and London Society” (Century, May 1883), which included seven of Du Maurier’s drawings for Punch and was reprinted, without illustrations, in Partial Portraits (1888). James was to write three more essays on Du Maurier—for Harper’s Weekly (April 14, 1894) and Harper’s Monthly (September 1897), and a section of “Our Artists in Europe” for Harper’s New Monthly (June 1889). “Our Artists” was James’s most extended commentary on illustration, comprising an introduction and six sections devoted in turn to Abbey (reprising James’s profile “Edwin A. Abbey,” which had appeared in Harper’s Weekly on December 4, 1886), Frank D. Millet, Alfred Parsons, George H. Boughton, George Du Maurier, and Charles Reinhart. This last section was followed up with a separate article in the Weekly (June 14, 1890) titled “Charles S. Reinhart.” The essays on illustration were revised for Picture and Text (1893), which also included James’s essays on Honoré Daumier (originally titled “Daumier, Caricaturist” and published in the Century in January 1890) as well as his paper “John S. Sargent” (originally appearing in Harper’s New Monthly in October 1887). James’s discussions of illustration in Literature magazine (1898), in the Preface to The Golden Bowl for the New York Edition (1909), and in his two autobiographical volumes (1913, 1914) round out the list. 2. To some extent, his work for the Harpers fell in with common practice among what Nancy Glazener calls the “Atlantic group” of elite magazines, namely, the tacit agreement among participants to promote one another’s work. 3. Such as its failure to furnish proof in timely fashion for The Awkward Age while The Ambassadors awaited publication. 4. The lengthy and troubled history of the story’s revision and publication, discussed in the Epilogue of this book, reprised all of James’s frustrations with the magazine market, corroborating once again James’s sense that his editors had cut him off at the knees. 5. The term “dealer-critic system” is introduced in Harrison White and Cynthia White, and elaborated (and revised) in Patricia Mainardi, Robert Jensen, and Pamela Fletcher and Anne Helmreich. 6. Dated simply February 13, James’s letter is catalogued in the Reinhart collection at Columbia’s Butler Library as [1888?]. The evidence pieced together in this chapter, however, shows that the letter had to have been written either in 1889 (at the earliest)—that is, before the publication of “Our Artists in Europe”—or in 1890, before the second, full-fledged essay on Reinhart appeared. Indeed, the second date is more likely, provided the attributed date of February 1, 1890, is correct for the earlier-

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quoted letter (in the Beinecke collection) from James to Osgood regarding the followup essay on Reinhart. 7. The canvas, Une épave, was essentially the kind of narrative painting James criticizes in his early reviews. Theodore Child’s praise of the painting in his review “American Artists at the Paris Exhibition” for Harper’s New Monthly (September 1889: 516) is slightly more muted: he calls the painting “irreproachably drawn and painted,” its composition “adequate,” the figures “life-like; the general aspect is effective in a realistic way.” James may be exaggerating his claims for the quality of the painting so as to introduce the commercial metaphor for illustration. 8. By this term I mean to describe a localized set of verbal and syntactical gestures, as distinguished from the “strategies of containment” by which Fredric Jameson characterizes politically charged language for controlling the threat of social change (see his Foreword to The Postmodern Condition). 9. For excellent documentation of the marketing phenomenon, see Burns (49–50). 10. Edel writes that Gosse’s account of the Broadway scene in 1886 “suffers somewhat from the tone adopted by all the late reminiscence-writers, who converted the middle-aged Henry into the figure they knew best in his old age” (Life 3: 155). 11. The discussion in “After the Play” gains further relevance in light of the fact that several of the Broadway artists designed sets and costumes for the theater—Millet for Mary Anderson; Abbey for John Hare’s Tosca; and Alfred Parsons, who was to do the sets for James’s Guy Domville (Simpson 573). In James’s story “Broken Wings,” the male protagonist designs costumes for a stage production, and in this fictional case as well, James makes the point that costumes and scenery are marginal to the theatrical production. 12. He was to write in the Preface for volume 10 of the New York Edition, “A short story, to my sense and as the term is used in magazines, has to choose between being either an anecdote or a picture and can but play its part strictly according to its kind. I rejoice in the anecdote, but I revel in the picture; though having doubtless at times to note that a given attempt may place itself near the dividing-line.” 13. James would have good cause for conflating these inexperienced viewers with the readers of his magazine fiction. A few years later, for instance, a reader wrote him to ask what Mrs. Pallant might have “said to the young man” at the end of his story “Louisa Pallant” (discussed later in this chapter). James replied with comic exasperation, “But that isn’t part of the story. . . . The primary thing is that she told him something, no matter what—which did make him give up. . . . You see, I have in the story told you all I can for the money. I am as ignorant as you, and yet not as supposing!” (Letters 3: 225). 14. James’s assessment of the burgeoning art market in these early papers on art is shrewd and far-sighted. His reviews bear witness to the shift during the last quarter of the century from upper-class patronage to a middle class of spectators and consumers brought into closer relation with the arts through new exhibition alternatives to the Salon and the Academy. In “The Picture Season in London” (Galaxy 1877, quoted earlier in this chapter), James remarks of the proliferation of venues, including the relatively recent outcropping of private galleries, that paintings hitherto purchased for the drawing rooms of manor houses are now available to a mass audience “by the simpler process of paying a shilling to an extremely civil person in a front shop and passing


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into certain maroon-draped penetralia . . . where a still more civil person supplies you with a neat literary explanation of the pictures, majestically printed on cardboard, and almost as clever as an article in a magazine” (Sweeney 137). 15. An interesting topic for another discussion is James’s participation in the “official” presentation of the author in various frontispieces, caricatures, and portraits. 16. Numerous invitations are preserved among Reinhart’s papers at Columbia. 17. By the same token, as she herself points out, Sedgwick allows more leeway with the term than Derrida and Butler. Sedgwick explains, Derrida and Butler seem to emerge from a juncture at which Austin’s syntactic taxonomies, which were originally both provisional and playful, can persist only as reductively essentializing; the move from some language to all language seems required by their antiessentialist project. Perhaps attending to the textures and effects of particular bits of language, as I try to do in many of these essays, requires a step to the side of antiessentialism, a relative lightening of the epistemological demand on the essential truth. (6)

See, too, Butler’s comments in her “Afterword” to Felman’s study. In this chapter I distinguish certain specific rhetorical techniques in the essays on illustration from the more characteristic circumlocutions and ambiguities of James’s fiction, particularly in the later phase, noted by so many readers. 18. See Janet Gabler-Hover.

Chapter 5 Chapter opening illustration: Joseph Pennell’s “Carcassonne” for A Little Tour in France (1900). 1. James would begin his commissioned biography of fellow expatriate William Wetmore Story (1903) in a similarly nostalgic vein, with an elegy for the romantic era of travel before Europe had become demystified and “made easy” for American tourists: “I think of the American who started on his Wanderjahre after the Civil War quite as one of the moderns divided by a chasm from his progenitors and elder brothers, carried on the wave as they were not, and all supplied with introductions, photographs, travelers’ tales, and other aids to knowingness” (Story 1: 10). 2. For discussion of William Gilpin and his imitators, see Batten 104–10. On the use of reproductions of Cole, Allston, and Turner in travel literature, see Bailey 92–111. 3. Agnew explains: “If it is commodity contexts that are sold and consumed, as the theory and practice of contemporary marketing suggest, then one motive that an advertisement or commercial can be said to call out in every instance is a cognitive one: the desire to master the bewildering and predatory imperatives of the market by an acquisitive or possessive gesture of the mind. Here, cultural orientation becomes one with cultural appropriation. We read clothes, possessions, interiors, and exteriors as representing more or less successful accommodations to a world of goods, and in doing so we rehearse in our minds the appropriation of that social world via the commodity. We consume by proxy. We window-shop” (73). 4. In his letter of January 31, quoted in the next paragraph of the text, Fraser continues, “As we have a series of drawings of two of the most prominent buildings, St. Pauls and Westminster, there would be no sense in our duplicating them; in fact,

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one of your drawings of Westminster (exterior) would very well serve as an illustration for James’s article” (Pennell Collection, Box 216). 5. John 183. 6. MacDonald, too, hears the Hawthornian note, although she reads the passage as a record of James’s “preference for the domestic privacy, subtlety, and enclosed atmosphere of English society, landscape, and interiors” (“Henry James’s English Hours” 406). 7. Pennell was married to the former Elizabeth Robins, not to be confused with the American actress Elizabeth Robins, whom James chose to play Mme de Cintré in his staged production of “The American” in 1891, and who, like Mrs. Pennell, eventually became James’s friend and correspondent. In a recent compilation of art criticism in the Nation, to which Elizabeth Robins Pennell was a frequent contributor (under the pseudonym of N. N.), Peter G. Meyer and Arthur C. Danto venture that Elizabeth Robins Pennell “may have been the first regularly published female art critic in American letters” and call her “quite the liveliest writer on art the magazine had published up to then and one of the liveliest and most insightful it has ever published” (48, xxvi). Mrs. Pennell’s art criticism is cited in Chapter 2 of this book. 8. Pennell’s prejudices were well documented. In the preface for his illustrated book The Jew at Home (1892), sketches from which had appeared the year before in the Illustrated London News, Pennell writes, “What may have made the Austro-Hungarian or Russian Jew the most contemptible specimen of humanity in Europe it is not my purpose to discuss. What makes him dreaded by the peasant, what makes him hated by the proprietor, what makes him loathed by people of every religion, and what makes him despised by his fellow-religionists of the better class who live with him and know him I have no intention of entering deeply into” (6–7). 9. Unsigned review, North American Review (January 1868): 336–39. 10. On Pennell’s choice of materials, see E. Pennell, Life and Letters 2: 344–46; and Blood and Morenus. 11. Much has been made of James’s waffling on the matter of Pennell’s possibly illustrating The American Scene. James’s letters to Pennell at the time, reprinted in the collections edited by Horne and Edel, along with uncollected letters in the Pennell files, are cautious but open ended. 12. Heinemann letters from December 20, 1899; January 18, July 16, November 15, 1900; Pennell Collection, Box 229. 13. According to James’s letters to Howells in October 1882, William Mackay Laffan, London agent for Harper’s, had commissioned the book but reneged once James had completed it (see Anesko, Letters 227, 238). James eventually serialized the essays in the Atlantic Monthly in 1883–84, after which they were brought out by James R. Osgood. Although both Bogardus and Graham maintain that Pennell had been assigned to illustrate the original edition, I find no evidence of this. The artist, his eye ever on posterity, saved every scrap of correspondence, but his files give no indication of earlier involvement with the book. 14. Howells to James, December 25, 1886; qtd. in M. Howells 1: 389. 15. James to Ticknor, May 23, 1884; Za James, Box 2.

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16. This is particularly evident in the Heinemann edition, which includes several drawings not found in the Houghton edition produced in the United States. The Library of America, to whose editions my page numbers refer for A Little Tour, English Hours, and Italian Hours, reprints the Heinemann text for A Little Tour—as well as a good number but not all of Pennell’s illustrations for the three books (the color drawings for Italian Hours, for example, are omitted). Illustrations in this chapter are reproduced from the original volumes and magazine issues. 17. I was fortunate to be guided through some of the treasures in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress by Katherine Blood, curator of fine prints. This chapter owes a good deal to her generosity and expertise. For detailed information on Pennell’s use of various media, see Blood and Morenus. 18. For many reasons, James’s relationship with the irascible Pennell would never achieve the intimacy reflected in his warm salutations to his subsequent collaborator, Alvin Langdon Coburn (“My dear young Alvin!”). To be sure, not all of Pennell’s work was to James’s liking; in a letter of January 6, 1910, to Clare Frewen, for instance, he notes that he is sending her a copy of “a fat book with bad pictures; between is old revived prose” (Correspondence, Henry James Papers, Box 7). The slighting reference to Italian Hours is all the more understandable given the author’s distrust of color printing—and, for that matter, of color photography; as he tells Coburn in October 1908: “You must let me confess to you that the other, your experiments in colour, don’t appeal to me, as an outsider, as yet” (Box 6). 19. According to Scribner’s payment cards for their illustrators (the card catalogue is now in the library of the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania), the firm paid artists with sums equal to or better than those they gave James. Peixotto received one hundred dollars for his drawing “Mermaid Street, Rye”; Zezzos got a minimum of seventy-five dollars apiece for the group of illustrations he provided for James’s “Grand Canal” essay. My thanks to Gail Stanislow of the museum for this information. 20. See E. Pennell, An Account 28. 21. See, too, The Historical Eye, in which Susan M. Griffin examines at length the ways in which William James’s psychological theories of perception illuminate Henry James’s fiction. 22. James may have been open to the color project because he had observed firsthand several years earlier the emoluments reaped by a best-selling author like Crawford (see IG 440).

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Index

Titles of works are by Henry James unless otherwise identified. Italic page numbers indicate illustrations. Abbey, Edwin Austin (Ned), 6; James’s admiration for, 15, 123, 126; James’s commentary on, 136, 143, 147–48, 149; James’s letter to, 129, 130; portrait of, 136; studios of, 140, 142, 144, 146 Adventures of an Illustrator, The (Pennell), 178, 216n3 advertisements: advertisement posters, 14, 55, 62, 77, 79, 82, 219nn31–32; artists and, 60; in Collier’s and other 10-cent periodicals, 60, 61; in Harper’s Monthly, 61, 62; in Leslie’s publications, 63–71, 66, 67, 68, 69, 82; in magazines, 11, 21, 53; readers and, 61, 62–63, 71 “After Holbein” (Wharton), 115 Agnew, Jean-Christophe, 170, 203, 223n3 Alden, Henry Mills, 5, 7, 32 Alma-Tadema, Lawrence, 144 Ambassadors, The (Double Portrait of Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve, Holbein), 88, 94, 113, 114, 127 Ambassadors, The (James), 88, 127 Amerbach, Bonifacius, Holbein’s portrait of, 102, 102–3 American Arts Review, 6

“American Illustration of To-Day” (Coffin), 160 “American Letters” (James, in Literature Magazine), 122, 214n13 American Scene, The (James), 127, 210, 224n11 Anderson, Mary, 144 Anesko, Michael, 124, 127 “Art of Fiction, The” (James), 119, 125 Artist’s Wife and Children, The (Holbein), 112, 113 Aspern Papers, The (James), 23, 55, 128, 168, 202, 216n8 “At Isella” (James), 90 Atlantic Monthly, 4, 6, 7, 16, 23, 27, 55, 126–27, 161 Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, The (Holmes), Pyle’s illustration for, 59 Awkward Age, The (James), 9, 18, 90, 127 Back of ‘The Priory,’ Broadway (illustration by Parsons, in Picture and Text), 142 Backward Glance, A (Wharton), 193, 203 Bacon, John H, “Brooksmith” illustrations by, 33–37, 35 Bacon, Margaret, Lady Butts, Holbein’s portrait of, 111–12, 112 Bailey, Brigitte, 170 Balzac, Honoré de, 83, 189 Barnard, Frederick, 126, 145

242

Index

Begley, Louis, 17 “Beldonald Holbein, The” (James): collaboration between reader and author required by, 85–86; Harper’s Monthly issue containing, 62; Hitchcock’s illustrations for, 86, 86, 87, 89–93, 94, 109–11, 117; James letter to Pinker regarding, 91, 98, 101–2, 106–9, 115–17, 119, 121; James notebook entry on, 90; as overlooked masterpiece, 83, 84 Benjamin, Walter, 4 Bennett, Arnold, 11 Benson, A[rthur] C[hristopher], 88 Benson, Eugene, 6 Berenson, Bernard, 111 Black and White (magazine, London), 18, 33–38, 107 “Black and White” (originally called “Our Artists in Europe,” James), 126, 130, 140, 144–45, 149–50, 152, 157, 165 Bogardus, Ralph F., 124, 145, 170 Bogart, Michelle, 11, 60, 145 Borus, Daniel H., 55, 56 Bostonians, The (James), 16, 72, 124 Boughton, George: Harper organization and, 123, 126; portrait of, 135; studio of, 142, 142, 145, 147, 148 Bourdieu, Pierre, 4 Bradley, Horace, illustration of “The New South,” 162, 164 Brady, Mathew, daguerreotype of James Sr. and Jr. by, 89, 165, 166 Brandywine school, 59 Bridge of the Rialto, The (Zezzos’s illustration for “The Grand Canal,” James), 199, 200 Broadway (Worcestershire village), James’s visits to, 125–26; Edmund Gosse on, 144–45, 147, 149, 150; James’s portrayal of village and residents, 138–45 Brodhead, Richard, 158 “Broken Wings” (James), 71–73; Greiffenhagen’s illustration of, 73,

73–74, 75–77, 79–80, 82–84; headpiece by F. C. Gordon for, 1, 21–22, 73; modernist techniques used in, 84; preface, 76 “Brooksmith” (James): headpiece for Black and White, 24; publication and illustrations of, 31–41, 35; title sketch for Harper’s Weekly, 33, 34 Brown, Joshua, 7 Browne, Hablot Knight (“Phiz”), 3, 25 Brownell, William C., 10, 14 Burlingame, Edward, 12, 193, 199 Burlingame, Roger, 11, 14 Burne-Jones, Sir Edward: cartoon by, 80; Greiffenhagen and, 77–80, 78, 80; James and, 79; The Mill, 80, 219n30; Phyllis and Demophoön, 78 Burns, Sarah, 137 Butler, Judith, 49, 223n17 Butts, Margaret Bacon, Lady, Holbein’s portrait of, 111–12, 112 Butts, Sir William, Holbein’s portrait of, 112 By the Port of Lovere (Peixotto illustration for Wharton’s Italian Backgrounds), 194 Camille, Michael, 31, 63 Carcassonne (Pennell illustration for A Little Tour in France), 168 Carr, Helen, 170, 176 Century Illustrated Monthly: artists regularly used by, 5; James on, 12, 20; James’s works in, 16, 23, 26, 72–74, 127, 142; “London” essay in, 171– 78; pictorial agenda promoted by, 4, 10, 161; staff correspondence with Pennell, 172–74; travel articles in, 177, 178, 199 Champney, Elizabeth W., 118, 119 Charivari (journal), 2 Chartier, Roger, 21 Chase, William Merritt: in Century atelier, 5; photograph of, 137, 139; photograph of his painting In the

Studio, 141; portrait of James Abbott McNeill Whistler by, 140 Chicago Tribune, 153 Christy, Howard Chandler, 60, 64, 65 Coburn, Alvin Langdon: The Dome of St. Paul’s, photograph of, 184, 204; “Julia Bride,” photographed frontispiece for, 209–10, 212, 225n18; New York Edition, photographs for, 73, 122–23, 165, 184 Coffin, William, 160 Collier, Robert, 51, 56 Collier’s Weekly: cover for (“Ambushed in Luzon”), 57; James’s works in, 19, 21, 26, 52–53, 55, 61–64; popular medicines, Adams’s series on, 70; promotion for, 52; revamped by Rob Collier, 19, 51–52, 56, 58; “Sport—Travel— Adventure” photo-feature, 57 Colvin, Sidney, 54, 61 commercialization of art and literature, debate regarding, 60–61, 63–65, 71, 81, 83 Congdon, Charles T., 13 Conrad, Joseph, 11, 75 Cooke, Rose Terry, 8 Copley, John Singleton, 100 Cornhill Magazine, 2, 4, 21, 42, 96, 127 Cosmopolitan Magazine, 12, 55, 137 “Cousin Maria” (retitled “Mrs. Temperly,” James): James’s view of illustration of, 125; juxtaposition with New South series, 162–63, 164; Reinhart’s illustration of, 125, 155– 57, 159, 160, 161, 163, 164 Cox, Kenyon, 146 Crawford, Francis Marion, 205 Criticism and Fiction (Howells), 8, 9 Cruikshank, George, 2, 25 Culver, Stuart, 85 Current Literature (journal), 63 Curtis, George William, 6, 11 Daisy Miller (James), 18, 127, 208, 210, 211

Index

243

Dance of Death (Holbein), 85, 90, 93, 115 Darmstadt Madonna, The (The Madonna of Mayor Jacob Meyer, Holbein), 94, 97 Daudet, Alphonse, 18, 32, 127 Daumier, Honoré, 2, 113, 123, 145, 178, 221n1 Dauncey, Elizabeth, Holbein’s study of, 110–11, 111 David Copperfield (Dickens), installments of, 2, 3 Dawn (Greiffenhagen), 78 “Death of the Lion, The” (James), 17, 39, 149 Dickens, Charles, 2, 3, 25, 39 Dome of St. Paul’s, The (Coburn frontispiece for The Princess Casamassima, vol. 1, New York Edition), 184 Drake, Alexander, 5 Du Maurier, George: in Harper atelier, 126; James on, 25, 122, 125, 148–49, 153, 155; portrait of, 135, 142; Punch illustrations, 2, 153, 154; Washington Square illustrations, 11, 127, 155 Edel, Leon, 17, 88, 123 “English Artists and Their Studios” (Monkhouse), 142 English Cathedrals (Van Rensselaer), Pennell’s illustration of, 180 English Hours (James): on image and mental impression, 177; James’s letter to Howells regarding, 198; on journals’ appeal, 2; Pennell’s illustration of, 185, 191–92, 194, 195, 195, 196, 197, 197 Erasmus of Rotterdam Writing (Holbein), 104 “Faces, The” (retitled “The Two Faces,” James): gender performance in, 48– 49, 51; Herter’s illustration of, 46, 47, 48, 50; James’s letters to Pinker regarding, 19, 20, 21, 42, 71; publication of, 41–42, 45–51

244

Index

Factory Town at Night, A (Pennell illustration for English Hours), 197 False Dawn (Wharton), 121 Fay, Gaston, and “The Story of a Masterpiece” frontispiece, 28 Felman, Shoshana, 151 “Flickerbridge, 20, 61, 143 Foister, Susan, 105 Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 64 Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly: advertisements in, 21, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70–71; Christy’s illustrations for “Paste” in, 64, 65; everyday operations and editorial practices of, 7; James’s publications in, 26, 63, 71; Miriam Leslie’s management of, 64–65; promotion for, 52, 53 Fraser, W. Lewis, 173, 174 Freedman, Jonathan, 83 Fried, Michael, 105 Fromentin, Eugène, 101 Frost, A[rthur] B[urdett], 5, 164 “Future of the Novel, The” (James), 58 Galaxy (periodical), 7, 27, 128, 131 Gallati, Barbara, 140 Ganzer—A Retired Boatman (Zezzos’s illustration for “The Grand Canal,” James), 199, 200 Gardner, Isabella Stewart, 111 Gilder, Richard Watson, 10, 72, 161, 173 Gisze, Georg, Holbein’s portrait of, 96 Glackens, William: “A Typical ToyShop Window,” 44; “Christmas Eve Games,” 43; illustrations for Bazar, 42 Glazener, Nancy, 37 Golden Bowl, The (James), 72, 123, 152 Golden Penny (magazine), 11 Gosse, Edmund, 17, 126, 144 Graham, Wendy, 170 “Grand Canal, The” (James), 199, 200, 214n18, 225n19 Green, Elizabeth Shippen, illustration

for “An Old Country House” (le Gallienne), 118 Greenslet, Ferris, 192 Greiffenhagen, Maurice, 60, 212; “Broken Wings,” illustration of, 73, 73–74, 75–77, 79–80, 82–84; Conrad’s Typhoon, illustrations for, 11, 75; Dawn, 79; An Idyll, 74; Little, J. Stanley, on, 82; Pall Mall Budget poster, 77, 79, 82 “Greville Fane” (James), headpiece for, 17, 215n20, 219n32 Griffin, Susan M., 128, 225n21 Harper & Brothers: artistic atelier of, 5; authorial recognition by, 5; “Beldonald Holbein” sent to, 91; essays on illustrators for, 123, 133–60, 221nn1–2; James’s relationship with, 20, 72, 91, 117, 126–30, 188, 208, 224n13; pictorial agenda of, 7 Harper, Joseph Henry, 10, 32, 126, 144, 161, 164, 208 Harper’s Bazar: cover of, 42, 43; fashion in, 46–7, 48, 50; features of, 42–45; Herter’s illustrations in, 46, 47, 48, 50; interpellated readers of, 44–45, 49–51; pictorial agenda of, 4; “The Faces” in, 20, 26, 41–42, 45–51 Harper’s Monthly Magazine: advertising in, 62; artistic atelier of, 5; authorial recognition by, 5; features of, 117–21, 157–58, 161; Hitchcock’s illustrations in, 86, 87, 109–11; Howells’s column in, 40; James’s work published in, 23, 32, 86, 91, 153; pictorial agenda of, 4, 7, 8, 11, 13; Pyle’s illustrations in, 59, 60; travel writing in, 157–58, 181; Weekly versus, 33 Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 6, 123, 221n1 Harper’s Weekly: “Cousin Maria” in, 125, 127, 161–65; features of, 161–65; James’s sketches of illustrators for,

15, 24, 123, 129, 131, 135, 136, 137; Monthly versus, 33; pictorial agenda of, 4, 7; promotion for Harper’s books in advertising supplement of, 136, 138; representation of African Americans in, 162, 164; title sketch for “Brooksmith” in, 34, 36, 123 Harvey, George, 208 Hassam, Childe, 146 Hazard of New Fortunes, A (Howells), 7, 13, 44 Heinemann (Firm), 186, 187, 190, 192, 198, 207, 225n16 Heinemann, William, 186, 188, 205 Hennessy, W. J., 27, 28, 28, 29, 29, 30 Hentschel, Carl, 205 Herculaneum (Pennell illustration for Italian Journeys, Howells), 183 Herter, Albert: background and artistic style, 217n15; Collier’s Weekly and, 52; “The Faces” illustrated by, 20, 46–50, 47, 48; interiors of, 217n16 Hervey, Mary, 88 Hewlett, Maurice, 118, 192 History of American Magazines (Mott), 117 Hitchcock, Lucius: “Beldonald Holbein” illustrations, 86, 86, 87, 89–93, 94, 109–11, 117; Tarkington’s The Conquest of Canaan, illustrations for, 110; Twain’s A Double Barrelled Detective Story, illustrations for, 110 Hochman, Barbara, 18 Holbein, Hans, the Elder, 89 Holbein, Hans, the Younger: The Ambassadors (Double Portrait of Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve), 88, 94, 113, 114, 127; The Artist’s Wife and Children, The, 112, 113; Dance of Death, 85, 90, 93, 115; The Darmstadt Madonna (The Madonna of Mayor Jacob Meyer), 94, 97; Erasmus of Rotterdam Writing, 104; Holmes, Oliver Wendell, on, 94; Jamesian fictional references apart from “Beldonald Holbein,” 90; James’s commentary

Index

245

on, 88–90, 97–102; James’s use of reader’s familiarity with, 85, 86, 93–97; Margaret Bacon, Lady Butts, 111–12, 112; The Merchant Georg Gisze, The, 96; Nikolaus Kratzer, Astronomer to King Henry VIII, 103, 104, 105; older women, portraits of, 110–15; parallels between James and, 89; Portrait of Bonifacius Amerbach, 102, 102–3; Portrait Study of Elizabeth Dauncey, 110–11, 111; portraits by, 96, 102, 104, 105, 111, 112, 113, 114 (see also titles of individual works); Punch cartoon, 88; Ruskin on, 95–96, 100, 102; San Paolo fuori le mura (detail—self-portrait with two sons, Hans Holbein the Elder), 89; Sir William Butts, 112; space and detail, use of, 104–5. See also “Beldonald Holbein, The” Holland, J. G., 5 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 59, 94 Homer, Winslow, 146 Hospital in Beaune (Pennell illustration for A Little Tour in France), 191 Houghton Mifflin & Co., 186, 187, 190, 192, 198, 207, 225n16 House of Mirth, The (Wharton), 10 Howells, William Dean: collaboration with Pennell, 179–84, 183, 187, 188; collaboration with Reinhart, 181, 182; at Cosmopolitan, 55; on illustration, 7, 13–14; illustrations of work of, 8, 59; on James, 22–23, 148, 157, 218nn24–25; James, correspondence with, 9, 10, 14, 15, 16, 52, 64, 91, 188, 197, 224nn13–14; on literature and the literary life, 56, 83, 117, 212; on magazines and their readers, 8, 9, 40, 44, 213n4; on “The Man of Letters as a Man of Business,” 83; “19th-century heroines” essay series for Bazar, 42, 45; “Stops of Various Quills” (Howells), Pyle’s illustration for, 59; travel writing, 158, 168, 171, 179–82

246

Index

Hoyt, Eleanor, 119, 120 Hunt, William Morris, 125, 185 Idyll, An (Greiffenhagen), 78 Illustrated London News, The, 11, 16, 18, 33, 82 illustrated magazines. See magazines illustration processes, 26–31, 56 In the Green Park (Pennell illustration for English Hours, James), 195, 196 In the Studio (Chase), photograph of, 141 Inman, John H., 161 Inventing the Modern Artist (Burns), 137 Italian Backgrounds (Wharton), Peixotto’s illustrations of, 10, 193–94, 194 Italian Hours (James), 183, 186, 198, 199, 200, 201, 203–7 Italian Journeys (Howells), 180, 183, 183, 187, 188 Italian Villas and Their Gardens (Wharton), Parrish’s illustration of, 10 Izzo, Donatella, 49 Jacobson, Marcia, 15 James Abbott McNeill Whistler (portrait by Chase), 140 James, Henry: on “business” of art and criticism, 129–33; Holbein the Younger, commentary on, 88–90, 97–102; on illustration of books and magazines, 1, 5, 12–13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 23, 24–25, 31, 85, 122–23, 158–59, 184, 188, 189, 199, 209–10; illustrators and artists, relationship with, 15, 123, 125–26, 129, 133, 140, 142, 144, 153; influences on his art criticism, 95–96; magazine industry during his formative years, 1–10; on Pennell, J., 186–87; 191, 194, 198; Pennell, J., correspondence with, 170–71, 172, 174, 177, 178, 185, 192; Pinker, J. B., correspondence with, 18–20, 72–73, 91; portrait of, 134; publishers, relationships with (see specific publishers,

publishing houses, and magazines); reader, relationship with and “construction of,” 14–17, 18, 38–41, 85–86, 121, 147–48, 200, 202, 207; Reinhart, C. S., correspondence with, 156–57; rhetorical ambiguity in, 124–25, 151–55; on travel writing, 169–72, 177, 183; works of (see individual titles) James, William, 2, 14, 18, 24, 126, 127, 165, 167, 185, 191, 203 “Jersey Villas” (retitled “Sir Dominick Ferrand,” James), 21, 55, 71 Johanningsmeier, Charles, 39 John, Arthur, 179 Johnson, Charles Howard, 11 Johnson, Robert Underwood, 171, 173 Jordan, Elizabeth, 42 “Julia Bride” (James), 127, 208, 209, 211, 212 Kaplan, Amy, 40 Kaplan, Fred, 9, 42, 202 Kratzer, Nikolaus, Holbein’s portrait of, 103, 104, 105 La Farge, John: border between illustration and fine art and, 146; in Collier atelier, 58; headpiece for “The Turn of the Screw,” 52, 53, 54, 217n17; James’s association with, 125 Lacan, Jacques, 113, 115 Ladies’ Home Journal, 4, 42 le Gallienne, Richard, 118 Lee, Vernon, 142 Leighton, Sir Frederic: portrait of, 137, 139; studio of, 138, 141, 142 Leslie, Frank. See entries at Frank Leslie Leslie, Miriam, 64, 65 “Lesson of the Master, The” (James), 55 Lewis, Suzanne, on reader response, 34 “Liar, The” (James), 23, 72 Literature (periodical), 25, 122 Little Swiss Sojourn, A (Howells), 158, 159, 181, 182

Little Tour in France, A (James), 168, 187–90, 190, 191, 194, 225n16 “London” (James): Pennell’s illustrations of, 171–74, 175, 176–77, 183; publication of, 171–74, 176–77, 191 “London Life, A” (James), 23 London Times, The, 5 “Louisa Pallant” (James), 23, 155, 156, 158, 222n13 MacDonald, Bonney, 203 Macmillan, Frederick, 125, 127, 191 “Madonna of the Ermine Mantle, The” (Champney), 118, 119 magazines: advertisements in, 4, 63–70; and art, 6, 7, 59; contents of, 4, 6, 11, 26, 40, 42, 43, 59; impact of, 2, 11; influence on young James, 2; massmarket versus quality journals, 51–52; proliferation and distribution of, 1, 3, 4, 40. See also individual titles Maitres d’Autrefois, Les (Fromentin), James’s review of, 101 Margaret Bacon, Lady Butts (Holbein portrait), 111–12, 112 Maupassant, Guy de: James’s borrowing from, 21, 27, 63–64; James’s criticism of, 64, 71, 218n24 McClure, Samuel, 58 McVicar, Harry W., 127 Merchant Georg Gisze, The (Holbein portrait), 96 Mermaid Street, Rye, Peixotto’s and Pennell’s sketches of, 194, 195 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 209, 210, 211 “Middle Years, The” (James), 39 Mill, The: Girls Dancing to Music by a River (Burne-Jones), 80, 219n30 Millais, John Everett, 2, 25, 82, 138, 219n32 Miller, David C., 12 Miller, J. Hillis, 2, 37 Millet, Frank D., 5, 123, 125–26, 135, 140, 144, 146, 147

Index

247

“Miss Gunton of Poughkeepsie” (James), 19, 21, 208 Mitchell, W. J. T., on the concept of the “metapicture,” 80–81 “Modern Warning, The” (originally “Two Countries,” James), 23, 155, 156, 158 “Modernism and Travel (1880–1940)” (Carr), 176 Monkhouse, Cosmo, 142 Moody, James, 117 Mora, F. Luis: Harper’s Bazar cover, 42, 43, 117; “The Madonna of the Ermine Mantle” (Champney), illustration of, 118, 119 “Mrs. Temperly.” See “Cousin Maria” Narbonne: The Washing Place (Pennell illustration for A Little Tour in France, James), 190 Narrow Canal, A (illustration by Pennell for Italian Hours, James), 206, 207 Nation, The, 4, 5, 97, 98, 100, 101 New Review, 128, 198 “New South, The” (featured series in Harper’s Weekly), 162, 164 New York Edition, The, 38, 63, 73, 85, 91, 122, 158, 165, 169, 184, 191, 196, 207, 209 New York Herald, 153 New York Times, 56 New York Tribune, 77 “Next Time, The” (James), 71, 77 Nikolaus Kratzer, Astronomer to King Henry VIII (Holbein portrait), 103, 104, 105 “Nona Vincent” (James), 29, 29–30, 39, 71 North American Review, 13, 95 Notes of a Son and Brother (James), 38, 103, 165–66, 167, 185 “Old Country House, An” (le Gallienne), 118 “Old Saint-Gothard, The” (James), 90

248

Index

“Old Suffolk” (James), 192 Once a Week (periodical), 2, 52 “Osborne’s Revenge” (James), Hennessy’s illustration of, 28 Osgood, James R., James’s letters to, 33, 129–31, 133, 157, 187–89, 224n13 Other House, The (James), 16–18, 22, 23 “Our Artists in Europe” (retitled “Black and White,” James), 126, 130, 140, 144–45, 149–50, 152, 157, 165 Outcry, The (James), 88 Paget, Walter, illustration for The Other House (James), 16, 22, 23 Pall Mall (magazine), 11 Pall Mall Budget (magazine), Greiffenhagen poster for, 77, 79, 82 “Pandora” (James), 107 Pape, Eric, illustration for “The Turn of the Screw” (James), 30, 53 Parrish, Maxfield, 5, 10, 59, 60 Parsons, Alfred: Broadway artists and, 140, 142, 142, 143, 144, 145; in Harper’s atelier, 5; James on, 143, 148; landscape art of, 143; Picture and Text, illustrations for, 122, 123, 140, 142; portrait of, 135; studio of, 142 Parsons, Charles, 5, 8 “Paste” (James), 21, 27, 63, 64, 65, 71 Pater, Walter, 142 Pawling, Sydney, 187 Pearce, Howard, 16 Peixotto, Ernest C.: in Century atelier, 5; James’s “Winchelsea, Rye, and ‘Denis Duval,” illustration of, 194, 195; Wharton’s Italian Backgrounds, illustration of, 10, 193, 194, 194 Penfield, Edward, 5 Pennell, Elizabeth Robins, 8, 178, 179–80, 185, 186, 187–88, 204, 207, 219n31, 224nn7 Pennell, Joseph: Adventures of an Illustrator, The, 178, 216n3; American Scene, The (James), illustration of, 224n11;

in Century atelier, 5; Coburn compared, 184; English Cathedrals (Van Rensselaer), illustration of, 179, 180; English Hours (James), illustration of, 191–92, 194, 195, 195–97, 196, 197; failed project with James for Macmillan, 191; on Howells, 179–80; Italian Hours (James), illustration of, 15, 198–202, 201, 204, 205–7, 206, 225n16; Italian Journeys (Howells), illustration of, 10, 181, 183, 183–84; on James, 178–79, 185–86, 197, 200; James’s appreciation of, 72, 212; James’s letters to, 170–1, 172, 174, 178, 192; James’s relationship with, 185–87, 225n18; lithographs, 197; A Little Tour in France, illustration of, 168, 188–91, 190, 191, 224n13; “London” (James), illustration of, 171–74, 175, 176–78, 183, 185, 191; on minorities and immigrants, 179, 224n8; publishers, correspondence with, 172–74, 187, 192; travel essays of James, illustration of, 10, 73, 169–72 Perry, Bliss, 19, 41 Peterborough Cathedral (Pennell illustration for English Cathedrals, Van Rensselaer), 180 “Phiz” (Hablot Knight Browne), 3, 25 Phyllis and Demophoön (Burne-Jones), 78 Piccadilly (Pennell illustration for “London,” James), 175 Picture and Text (James): artists’ essays in, 123–24, 145, 147, 178; artists’ portraits in, 133, 135, 138; Broadway in, 140, 145, 147, 178; cover of, 134; frontispiece of, 134; on illustration, 23; introductory essay, 126; Parsons illustrations in, 122, 123, 140, 142; publication of, 127 Pinker, James Brand: James’s letters to, 19–20, 41–42, 52, 72–73, 83, 91, 193; as James’s literary agent, 18, 41–42, 72, 193, 208

Port Tarascon (Daudet), James’s translation of, 32, 127 Portrait of a Lady, The (James), 200 Portrait of Bonifacius Amerbach (Holbein), 102, 102–3 portrait painting, 95–98, 100–106, 111–16 Portrait Study of Elizabeth Dauncey (Holbein), 110–11, 111 Portraits of Places (James), 194 Princess Casamassima, The (James), 16, 124, 176, 177, 184 Punch (periodical), 2, 88, 153, 155 “Pupil, The” (James), 16, 32, 75, 83 Pyle, Howard: The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (Holmes), illustration for, 59; in Collier atelier, 52; “Love and Death” (Pyle), illustration for, 59, 117, 118, 146; “The Real Right Thing” (James), headpiece for, 58, 58–62; “Stops of Various Quills” (Howells), illustration for, 59 Rawlings, Peter, 64 Rawson, Maud Stepney, 118 “Real Right Thing, The” (James), 51– 55; critical approach to, 27; layout with advertisements, 58, 60–62, 61; publication of, 19, 21; Pyle headpiece for, 58, 58–62 “Real Thing, The” (James), 33, 101, 107–8 Reinhart, Charles Stanley: Anne (Woolson), illustration of, 10; “Cousin Maria” (James), illustration of, 125, 159–65, 160, 163; European recognition of, 216n3; in Harper’s atelier, 5, 8; James’s essays about, 6, 130–33, 136, 145, 147, 148, 149–51, 152–53, 155, 157, 221nn1; James’s letters to, 132–33, 156–57; A Little Swiss Sojourn (Howells), illustration of, 159, 181, 182; “Louisa Pallant” (James), illustration of, 158; in Picture and Text (James), 123, 125,

Index

249

216n3; portrait of, 137; “Two Countries” (James), illustration of, 158 Reverberator, The (James), 127–28, 131, 140 Rialto Bridge, Venice: Pennell’s etching for Italian Hours (James), 200, 201; photo for “Venice” (James), 199; Zezzos’s illustration for “The Grand Canal” (James), 199, 200 Richards, Thomas, 70 Riva Shiavoni, Venice (Pennell’s etching for Italian Hours, James), 200, 201 Roosevelt, Theodore, on James, 56 Ruskin, John, 95–96, 100, 102 “Sacred Fount, The” (James), 14 Salisbury Cathedral (Pennell illustration for English Hours, James), 195, 196 Salve Venetia (Crawford), 205 San Paolo fuori le mura (detail—selfportrait with two sons, Hans Holbein the Elder), 89 Sander, Jochen, 112 Sargent, John Singer: in Broadway, 144, 145; cartoon on, 120, 121; “The Death of the Lion” (James), illustration for, 149; James’s essay on, 99, 100, 123, 125–26, 129, 131, 145, 221n1; James’s relationship with, 125; “London” illustrations and, 171, 177; London studio of, 142 Sarony, Napoleon, 136 Scanlon, Jennifer, 44 Schneirov, Matthew, 41 Schongauer, Martin, 98 Scribner, Charles, 14, 167 Scribner’s (firm), 10, 14, 45, 193, 220n5, 225n19 Scribner’s Magazine, 4, 5, 10, 12, 20, 23, 39, 45, 54, 82, 94, 160, 193–94, 199, 209 Scudder, Horace, 16, 32, 41 Sedgwick, Ellery, 7 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, on the “periperformative,” 151–52, 223n17

250

Index

Seltzer, Mark, 55, 56, 83 Shorter, Clement, 16, 18 Simpson, Marc Alfred, 126, 142, 144 “Sir Dominick Ferrand” (originally “Jersey Villas,” James), 21, 55, 71 “Sir Edmund Orme” (James), 33 Sir William Butts (Holbein portrait), 112 Small Boy and Others, A (James), 2, 116 Smedley, W. T., illustrations for “Julia Bride” (James), 127, 208, 209, 209, 210, 211 Soft Side, The (James), 20 Sonstegard, Adam, 123 “Special Type, The” (James), 20 Spielmann, M. H., 82 St. John, John, 186 St. Mark’s, Venice: illustration by Pennell for Italian Hours (James), 206, 207; photo for “Venice” (James), 198, 199 St. Paul’s, from Ludgate Hill (Pennell illustration for English Hours, James), 195, 196 Stendhal, James on, 189 Sterner, Albert, 10, 118, 119, 120 Stone, Donald D., 157 “Stops of Various Quills” (Howells), Pyle’s illustration for, 59 “Story of a Masterpiece, The” (James), Fay frontispiece for, 27, 28 Story, William Wetmore, 54, 223n1 Stowe, William W., 169 Studio Magazine, 82 Sun (New York), 107 Sunset in Oxford Street (Pennell illustration for “London,” James), 174, 175 Sutherland, John, 12 Sweeney, John L., 123 Talmeyer, Maurice, 82 “Tess of the D’Urbervilles” (Hardy), illustration of, 11 Thaxter, Celia, 8 “Third Person, The” (James), 19 Tintner, Adeline, 88, 111, 216n8, 218n24, 219n30

Tragic Muse, The (James), 32, 127, 144 Trollope, Anthony, 25 Truth (magazine, N.Y.), 19, 21 “Turn of the Screw, The” (James): La Farge’s headpiece for, 54; Pape, Eric, illustration of, 30; publication and illustration of, 52–53, 55; as serial publication, 9 “Two Countries” (retitled “The Modern Warning,” James), 23, 155, 156, 158 “Two Faces, The.” See “Faces, The” Typhoon (Conrad), 11, 75 Van Rensselaer, Mariana, English Cathedrals, Pennell’s illustration of, 180 Venetian Life (Howells), Pennell’s illustration of, 183 “Venice” (James), 198, 199, 199–200, 202 Village Green, Broadway, The (illustration by Alfred Parsons in Picture and Text, James), 122 Ward, Mary, 126 Warner, Charles Dudley, 11, 13, 157, 161 Washington Square (James), 11, 81, 107, 127, 153, 155, 207 Watt, Alexander, 32, 33 Wells, H. G, on J. Pennell’s lithographs, 197 Wenzell, A. B., 33 West, L. W., 7, 32 Wet Evening, Parliament Square—House Sitting (Pennell illustration for “London,” James), 175 Wharton, Edith, 8, 10, 45, 115, 121, 193, 203, 212 Whistler, James Abbott Mc Neill, 137, 140, 178 Whyte, Frederic, 187 Wilson, Christopher P., 40, 53 “Winchelsea, Rye, and Denis Duval” (James), 185, 192, 193–94, 195 Wings of the Dove, The (James), 14, 115

Winner, Viola, 100 “Winter Exhibitions in London, The” (James), 101 “Women Are Made Like That” (Hoyt), Sterner’s illustration of, 119, 120 Women’s magazines, 44–45 Woolson, Constance Fenimore, 10, 17, 165

Index

251

Wornum, Ralph, 94 Yellow Book, The (James), 19, 39, 45, 71, 83, 149, 219n32 Zabel, Morton Dauwen, 170 Zezzos, Alexander, illustrations of, 199, 200, 200, 225n191

The Illustration of the Master: Henry James and the Magazine Revolution

Henry James and the Supernatural

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Henry James and the Language of Experience

Henry James and the Art of Dress

The Master And The Dean: The Literary Criticism Of Henry James And William Dean Howells

The language of a master: theories of style and the late writing of Henry James

The Fundamentals of Illustration

Henry James: The Writer and His Work

Henry James and the Father Question

Henry James and the Philosophical Novel

The Rhetorical Logic of Henry James

The Martian Invasion Journals of Henry James

Henry James and the Abuse of the Past

Henry James

Inside the business of illustration

The Visual Dictionary of Illustration

Henry James and his Prose

Henry James and Queer Modernity

Henry James, Women and Realism

The Henry and the Martha

Death in Henry James

Henry and the Clubhouse

Henry and the Clubhouse

The Observations Of Henry

Decadence in the Late Novels of Henry James

the Master and the Muses

Henry and the Paper Route (Henry Huggins)

Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and the Biographical Act

The Master of the Revels

the Master and the Muses

The Illustration of the Master: Henry James and the Magazine Revolution

Henry James and the Supernatural

Henry James and the Imagination of Pleasure

Henry James and the Language of Experience

Henry James and the Art of Dress

The Master And The Dean: The Literary Criticism Of Henry James And William Dean Howells

The language of a master: theories of style and the late writing of Henry James

The Fundamentals of Illustration

Henry James: The Writer and His Work

Henry James and the Father Question

Henry James and the Philosophical Novel

The Rhetorical Logic of Henry James

The Martian Invasion Journals of Henry James

Henry James and the Abuse of the Past

Henry James

Inside the business of illustration

The Visual Dictionary of Illustration

Henry James and his Prose

Henry James and Queer Modernity

Henry James, Women and Realism

The Henry and the Martha

Death in Henry James

Henry and the Clubhouse

Henry and the Clubhouse

The Observations Of Henry

Decadence in the Late Novels of Henry James

the Master and the Muses

Henry and the Paper Route (Henry Huggins)

Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and the Biographical Act

The Master of the Revels

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