Novelist and Art Critic
HENRY JAMES'S taste in the visual arts was natural and well educated; it was also wholly conventional, being no more adventurous than Stendhal's and certainly less so than Baudelaire's or George Moore's or Huys- mans's. We cannot find in a pleasant selection of reviews and essays recently collected* any sustained passage of penetrating criticism nor any special and personal response, though it is fair to say that all these pieces were written before 1900 and most of them before 1880. His favourite nineteenth-century artist was Delacroix and his favourite contemporary, Sargent. There is evidence here that he did change his opinion of Whistler, but there is no direct proof that 'he ever thought better of the Impressionists (in this matter Mr. Propert of The Rererberator would seem to have been his mouthpiece) although Mr. John L. Sweeney, who has edited this volume, does suggest that later novels indicate a change of heart. The frontispiece shows James in immaculate top hat and frock coat coolly con- ferring his attention on a little picture; he did not engage in esthetic dispute and he was impatient of artistic impropriety. His social conventions and prejudices prevented him from doing justice to Daumier whom he respected and, like all of us, he gave undue attention to much that was soon to wither.
But one reads with pleasure even an extended account of some trivial thing because of his wit, his sense of the human creature and the dexterity of his prose; we should not so read a common art critic with James's taste. In the end one feels he is never wholly deceived, even by Sargent, who makes him unusually excited and, sure enough, in an essay on an expensive Meissonier, he comes, after paragraphs of friendliness, circuitously to an ironic and devastating verdict, the kind of verdict which elsewhere lies beneath the surface of his genuine urbanity. He can sum- marise an artist's personality with excellent directness and economy—on Murillo: 'an almost excessive want of tension—an undue humbleness of inspiration.' Could there be a better image of American art collecting than is found in the phrase 'stretched out her long arm and raked across the green cloth of the wide Atlantic the highest prizes of the game of civilisation'? And his observations on the Englishness of English Art, though occasionally borrowed from Taine, will appeal to some of us. 'If they had a painter's disposition, they could not stand that amount of amateurish- ness.'
James's most solid ,contribution is his view eof art criticism, contained in reviews of books "'THE PAINTER'S EYE. By Henry James. (Hart-Davis, 20s.)
by P. G. Hamerton and Fromentin, and, quite apart from agreeing With all his arguments, I find them still relevant. Art criticism is not a very elevated literary practice, he believed; it is a useful one, though not to the painter. That is an evaluation to remember in an age of criticism. The quality he enjoys in the best French writers on the visual arts—'theY examine pictures with an equal regard to the standpoint of the painter and that of the spectator'—puts the matter in the proper focus.
BASIL TAYLOR
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