Wm & H'ry: Literature, Love, and the Letters Between Wiliam and Henry James (6 page)

frequently fretted over the length of H’ry’s letters,

given his usual commission—and he worried that his

impressions could dry up if he didn’t use them quickly

enough. In 1, he complained to Wm that his impres-

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sion of Bar Harbour “has grown now too dim” for

use. At least in this context, impressions seemed best

suited for descriptive travel sketches that were easy

to write and paid well. But as early as 13, H’ry had

begun to doubt description (“I doubt whether a year

or two hence, I shall have it in me to describe houses

and mountains, or even cathedrals & pictures”), and by 15 he had tired of the process of gathering impressions (“I sometimes feel as if I had already got all the

impressions in life I can take in”). By 101, he seemed

disillusioned with description entirely—the problem

being, as he saw it, that there often wound up being a

huge gap between a given description and the thing it

described. A few years after moving to Rye, England,

H’ry pronounced last rites over description in noting

a discrepancy between Thackeray’s descriptions of

Rye and neighboring Winchelsea and the actual fact of

the places: “It is impossible to stand to-day in the high, loose, sunny, haunted square of Winchelsea without

wondering what [Thackeray] could have been thinking

of. . . . What
could
he—yes—have been thinking of ?”

An answer to the problem of description had begun

to manifest in H’ry’s fiction long before. In 12,
The
Lesson of the Master
(Wm: “Most
perfect
. . . the lesson 41

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of the master is a true one”) had used impressions

to home in on the whirling toil of interior life: “His

impression fairly shook him and he throbbed with

the excitement of such deep soundings.” Even ear-

lier,
The Tragic Muse
(Wm: “With . . . your tragic muse, and . . . my psychology . . . 10 will be known as the

great epocal year in American literature”) employed

impressions as the currency characters exchanged in

fruitless attempts at commerce of minds: “She only

watched, in Peter’s eyes, for this gentleman’s impres-

sion of it. That she easily caught, and he measured

her impression—her impression of
his
impression—

when he went after a few minutes to relieve her.” In

other words, impressions were no longer things, but

thoughts, and the dent of an impression was a better

measure of that which had been impressed—of what

one had been made to
think
—than it was of whatever hammer had inflicted the blow.

Without quite realizing it, H’ry had in this returned

to art. Of contemporary artists, Wm and H’ry knew

and discussed their portraitist and landscape artist

friends—Sargent, La Farge, etc.—but they seem to

have mostly ignored the avant garde, and the letters

never reference the painters Monet, Degas, or Pissarro,

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whom critic Edmond Duranty labeled “Impression-

ists” in 14. Nevertheless, the letters occasionally as-

pire to recognizably impressionistic atmospheres. Also

in 14, H’ry scribbled out a notably painterly view of

Florence:

To day is a raw, rainy Sunday of anything but

an exhilarating kind. The Piazza di Sta Maria

Novella, before my windows is a wide glittering

floor, with here and there two legs picking their

steps beneath an umbrella.

Wm and H’ry never truly left the womb of art, and

even the very last letter of the correspondence, from

August 110, details H’ry’s purchase of a landscape for

Wm’s home in Cambridge. Even more telling, H’ry

had just a year earlier giddily passed along a review of

the recently released New York edition of his collected

novels. It was rare for H’ry to agree with a critic.

“This strict fusion of material with form is Mr.

James’s point of departure,” the critic wrote. “He is in

the truest sense of the word an impressionist.”

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In February 14—just a few months before H’ry waxed

impressionistically from his Florentine window—Wm

and H’ry had traveled in Italy together. One day, Wm

visited Venice’s Galleria dell’Accademia and sat for

a long time before Titian’s
Presentation of the Virgin
in the Temple
. The museum was quite chilly, but Wm stayed long enough to share at least an hour’s study of

the work with an intently interested English couple.

He noted the pair as they drew near one another to

exchange impassioned impressions of the depicted

figures. When Wm was finally chased from the room

by the cold, he made a point of sneaking close to eaves-

drop for a moment. “What a
deprecatory
expression her face wears!” the woman murmured. “What self-abne
gation!
How
unworthy
she feels of the honour she is receiving!”

Hogwash! Wm thought. Old Titian would have been

made sick by such a reaction! For Wm, the English

couple feebly attempting to exert an aesthetic sense

was a clear demonstration of what could go wrong

when human emotions didn’t work quite correctly.

Nine years later, he sketched the scene in “What Is

an Emotion?,” an article published in
Mind
,
so as to 44

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contrast the couple with “experts and masters” whose

reaction to art, long before any emotion kicked in, was

determined by a more profound sense of
rightness
.

It was only “
Crétins
and Philistines,” Wm wrote, who erred by opting for mere “flush and thrill.”

H’ry’s reaction to Wm on this point is difficult to

gauge. He begged off reading “What Is an Emotion?”

when it appeared, claiming to have “attacked” the piece

only to be “defeated” by it. “I can’t give [it] just now

the
necessary
time,” he wrote. (Somewhat sneakily, he did call Wm’s attention to a critical notice of the article; the critic enjoyed Wm’s informal style, but warned that

unless Wm took care “his readers will begin to suspect

that the sober quest of truth is in his case apt to be dis-turbed by too keen an impulse towards literary effect.”)

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Perhaps H’ry didn’t have time for “What Is an Emo-

tion?” because he recalled that his
own
reactions to art had a few years back come to play a role in “Brute and

Human Intellect.” Here, Wm had taken note that in

ethical, psychological, and aesthetic matters, “to give

a clear reason for one’s judgment is a . . . mark of rare genius.” But what, he asked, of the preponderance of

moments in which clear reason eludes us? The most

obvious case of this was “uneducated people.” Stop

the “first Irish girl” you come across in the street in

America, he claimed, and you’ll find that she can’t even

tell you why she prefers this continent to her own. And

she was hardly alone. H’ry was there with her, in fact.

Wm called on H’ry’s letters from Italy, the same letters

in which H’ry attempted to articulate his impressions

of Tintoretto, Titian, Veronese, and others, to illus-

trate the breadth of the problem: “But if you ask your

most educated friend why he prefers Titian to Paul

Veronese, you will hardly get more of a reply.”

H’ry’s Italian letters came from the same trip dur-

ing which he suffered his “moving intestinal drama,”

though by the time he’d made it to Rome he had found

a pill that worked. (“I needn’t dilate upon it,” he wrote home, happy to move on to other subjects.) H’ry cer-46

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tainly recognized the difficulty of fully articulating

impressions. “Alack! ’tis poor work talking of them,” he

wrote of his reaction to a range of pieces by Michelan-

gelo. He seemed to think that whatever fleeting views

one had were best described with streams of conscious-

ness: “On the spot my intellect gushed forth a torrent

of wisdom & eloquence,” he wrote of his final visit to the
Moses
, “but where is that torrent now?”

At the time, Wm seemed to agree that a certain gush-

ing unruliness was perhaps the best we could hope for

in turning raw impressions into language:

I can well sympathize with what must be the

turmoil of your feeling before all this wealth—

that strange impulse to exorcise it by extracting

the soul of it and throwing it off
in words
—which translation is in the nature of things impossible.

For H’ry, this must have stung a little, at least in ret-

rospect, for it didn’t particularly jibe with having his

impressions likened, a few years later, to those of a

naive Irish lass. Something had changed. The broth-

ers’ aesthetics had begun to diverge. Wm had come

to conclude that the ability to state clear reasons for

one’s thinking was the mark of genius; H’ry had grown

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only firmer in his belief that we need never attempt

anything other than the slicing open of our veins to

let the impressions flow. It’s precisely because Wm and

H’ry gestated together in the womb of art that their

evolving theoretical differences first made themselves

apparent in opinions of art. The broader truth was

perhaps even painful. Wm had once had the hand of a

painter, but always lacked the soul of one; H’ry, pre-

cisely the opposite.

H’ry recognized this early, and he came to realize

that if he couldn’t be a painter himself then what he

would need to do was figure out how to
use
art. In 1, defending what appeared to his family as a wasteful

vacation in Europe, H’ry explained that his goal was to

“lay the basis of a serious interest in art . . . which may be of future use to me.” The following year, he identi-fied the art of Florence in particular as a “prompter

or inspirer of some sort,” leading him not toward an

assessment of its history, but to its employ as an “ir-

radiating focus of light on some other matter.” He

first linked painting with literature through Titian,

who reminded him of Shakespeare: “He belongs to

the same family and produces very much the same

effect.” Serially applying Wm’s argument on truth of

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detail, his view evolved as he shifted from artist to artist. Tintoretto was notable because he “strike[s] you as

the poorest & ends by impressing you as the greatest of colorists.” Michelangelo was “so far from perfection,

so finite, so full of errors,” yet the
Moses
produced “a great sensation—the greatest a work can give.” H’ry

was already headed for his better realism, but he could

as yet conceive of no explanation for it. Of Tintoretto,

he admitted to Wm, “I should be sadly at a loss to make

you understand in what his great power consists.” But

it hardly mattered that he might never find words for it.

“I’d give a great deal to be able to fling down a dozen of his pictures into prose of corresponding force & color.”

Art provided both process and plot points. In 15,

H’ry remarked on a James family scandal that erupted

over a likeness Wm once produced of a beloved cousin,

and H’ry’s stories often exploit similar tensions: fam-

ily dramas resulting from the painting of a portrait or

from the choice to dedicate one’s life to art rather than marriage. He was right that his idle journey through

Europe would equip him with a lifetime’s supply of

impressions. His Italy letters—once shared with Em-

erson, who was so keen on them he wanted to borrow

them for study; Henry Sr. refused—were a kind of

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mortar poured into the divots each artist left behind.

H’ry was left with a shelf of molds forever in easy