Henry James and the Picturesque Mode

Abstract

H E N R Y JA M E S AND THE PIC TU R ESQ U E MODE W IL L IA M F . H A L L University of British Columbia Useful as the terms “ romance" and "realism" may have been in nineteenthcentury discussions of the novel, their continued application to the fiction of that period, and particularly to Henry James's fiction, grows less and less so, grows in fact positively misleading. I wish to demonstrate in this essay - in examples from Hawthorne (The Blithedale Romance) and from Henry James (Roderick Hudson and The Portrait of a Lady) - the superior usefulness of another concept: that of the picturesque. One associates the picturesque vision and its techniques in fiction primarily with the first generation - Dickens in England, Hawthorne in America - of great nineteenth-century novelists. By the 1870s the term had become a common literary one1 and (as I shall demonstrate from the practice of Henry James) the vision and its controlling techniques were still positively at work in significant fiction at least through the early 1880s. Considered in the context of this single mode - the picturesque - three major techniques peculiar to it, caricature, melodrama, and mythic reference and allusion, may be correctly appreciated. In the contexts of "romance" and "realism" the first two are invariably considered to be crude, to be simplifications, the one of character, the other of action, instead of the subtle and complex techniques they may in fact be. Only occasionally, in these contexts, is the third understood as a structural patterning device that extends the fiction's total meaning and very rarely as the substitute for what, in the context of "realism," is designated as analysis and especially the analysis of character. The picturesque2 derived from the late eighteenth-century preoccupation with the sublime and like it, in both painting and literature, was marked by a mixture of beauty and ugliness, the symmetrical and the asymmetrical, by the delineation of a series of irregular surface facts rendered without analysis or direct comment. The important difference between the two lay in the reactions the two modes were expected to produce. Thus, common to both was an often repeated pictorial contrast between an ancient, often mythic, context (frequently characterized by the presence of works of sculpture) and modern human figures generally shown as dwarfed by the context. In the sublime mode the contrast was intended to contribute to English Studies in Can ad a, i , 3 (fall 19 75) 327 Henry James and the Picturesque M ode those reactions Burke noted as proper to it: awe and terror. In the picturesque mode the reactions were intended to be those more commonly associated with the grotesque: surprise, shock, even, in extreme cases, disgust. Dr Syntax expressed the essential difference succinctly enough in the fourteenth canto of his Tours: A carrion fowl tied to a stake Will a far better picture make Than a white swan in all its pride Sailing upon the crystal tide. Thomas Sargent Perry's comment on Turgenev's fictional method as "pic­ turesque not analytical ... we see the picturesque and analyse then ourselves" indicates a further distinguishing mark of the literary picturesque. His com­ ment describes what both James and Howells saw in Turgenev's novels - and imitated - as "the dramatic method"; what James was also to call "the architec­ tural method." This method included not merely the avoidance of comment or analysis but the conscious composition of a group of characters in a scene and the arrangement of a linked series of such "compositions" as the total structure of the novel; a method anticipated, one might note, in Mrs Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho. Just as Dickens, the most subtle of caricaturists, commonly used the term "caricature" loosely and pejoratively, so did James frequently use the term "picturesque." It is, however, possible to assemble from among James's non-fictional writing his serious and conscious understanding of the word as a literary concept. This amounts to - if one excludes the loose pejorative meaning - a cluster of three or four major related meanings: it may mean the grotesque; it may assume the form of a composed picture or scene associated with the...