Ghosts, Crowds, and Spectacles: Visions of Venetian Travel in Henry James's Italian Hours

Abstract

Reflecting upon a young American painter whom he sees at work copying the interior of St. Mark's Cathedral, Henry James writes, in a tone that seems both wistful and rhapsodic: "The mere use of one's eyes in Venice is happiness enough" (52). With these lines that begin the essay Venice: An Early Impression, James voices one of the more striking and curious phrases that appears in his travel writings.1 Moreover, despite its wide-eyed hyperbole, this phrase expresses what may be the controlling idea that extends throughout Italian Hours, the collection of James's essays devoted to travel in Italy.2 In these pieces, James continually reminds the reader that, more anything else, he goes to Italy to see, to become a sensitive witness to its intense visual splendor. These initial observations suggest, therefore, that the appeal to the primacy of the visual may be a point of departure for a reading of James's Italian travel texts and, especially as it is formulated here, as a point of instability. What does it mean to "see" in Italy? What does it mean to see through Italy, as if Italy acts as a lens that directs and focuses the energies of one's vision? The fact that the mere vision exercised in the act of painting is sufficient for happiness suggests, ironically, that vision cannot be so "mere." What makes this more than a simple cliché, however, is the subsequent qualification that it is a happiness "consistent with the preservation of reason," a controlled, measured, decorous happiness (52). "[U]nperplexed by [End Page 277] the mocking elusive soul of things and satisfied with their wholesome light-bathed surface and shape; keen of eye; fond of colour, of sea and sky and anything that may chance between them," this "young American painter" seems as much an archetype and a metaphor for the ideal of the Italian experience as an actual character (52). It is the ideal of one who takes pleasure in the "wholesome light bathed surfaces of things," who finds happiness in the illuminations of plastic form (52). "Strictly formal beauty," as James will say near the conclusion of the essay, "seems best to express our conception of spiritual beauty" (60). James equates vision, light, reason, and pleasure here; to see is to be happy, to have vision is to have reason, and all are unified within a field of "light" that is both metaphor and actual substance. Boundaries collapse; opposites blur together: "Sea and sky seem to meet halfway, to blend their tones into a soft iridescence, a lustrous compound of wave and cloud and a hundred nameless local reflections" (52–3). The everyday, concrete reality of Venice, the "slimy brick, marble battered and befouled," the "rags, dirt [and] decay," becomes visible and knowable through this "inscrutable flattery of the atmosphere," this "clear tissue" of light that is flung "against every object of vision" (52–3). Finally, there is "nothing but the light to see"; the city becomes a "longing for pure radiance" (53). At the same time, and perhaps as a result of the intense radiant energy of Venice, James confesses that he must "renounce all attempt to express" in words all that he sees (53). This is one of many aporetic gestures made throughout Italian Hours, and the admission of the inability to express a given visual impression in writing is, in fact, one of the signal traits of the rhetorical style in the texts. Why, however, does James make such a gesture here? How should one interpret this overflowing, this situating of consciousness in and of a light that yet seems somewhere and somehow beyond words? On one hand, this is the affectation of a travel writer reporting to a popular audience, one for whom the pleasure of Italy consists in good part in the sentimental luxury of visions too beautiful for words...