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Introduction: the cultural varieties of
visual experience
A terrible danger is hanging over the Americans in London. Their
future and their reputation this season depend entirely on the success
of Buffalo Bill and Mrs. Brown-Potter. The former is certain to draw;
for English people are far more interested in American barbarism
than they are in American civilization.
Oscar Wilde, ‘‘The American Invasion,’’ Court and Society Review
(March 1887)1
As a boy, Henry James loved cartoons. In the essay ‘‘Du Maurier and
London Society’’ (1883), he recalls leafing through issues of Punch from the
1850s, when he ‘‘played in a Union Square, which was then enclosed by a
high railing and governed by a solitary policeman.’’ This young, ‘‘silent
devotee of Punch’’ felt ‘‘transported’’ by the famous cartoonists to the
‘‘London of the First Crystal Palace’’ of 1855 (DM 327). James then rejoins
the present, asking his reader to appreciate Du Maurier’s contemporaneous
‘‘skill in race-portraiture’’ (DM 365) and ‘‘peculiar perception of the look of
breeding, of face’’ (DM 350).
The term ‘‘race’’ here is not a static category of biological determinism.
Instead, it implies that social interactions have physical effects in which the
keen observer discerns a visual pattern. Yet the consistency of type, upon
which ‘‘race portraiture’’ might ostensibly depend, seems uninteresting to
James. Whereas Du Maurier may wish everyone ‘‘to be tall, straight and
fair,’’ he draws ‘‘the whole multitude of the vulgar who have not been
cultivated like orchids and race horses’’ (DM 350). James finds ‘‘real entertainment in the completeness, in the perfection of certain forms of facial
queerness.’’ He avers that ‘‘No one has rendered like Du Maurier the
ridiculous little people who crop up in the interstices of that huge and
complicated London world’’ (DM 348).
James directs our attention to ‘‘two brilliant, full page’’ cartoons from the
Punch Almanac in 1865 (DM 346). The first drawing, ‘‘Probable Results of
the Acclimatisation Society. – The Serpentine,’’ presents a remarkable
1
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Henry James and the Visual
Figure 1: George Du Maurier, ‘‘Probable Results of the Acclimatisation Society. – The
Serpentine,’’ Punch Almanack for 1865, no page number.
afternoon on the grounds between Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens
(Figure 1). Children lounge with a hodge-podge of potentially fierce
animals in a peaceable kingdom that seems precariously balanced. A
whale upends a young man’s boat, pitching him high into the air (upper
right of figure). The sign posted on the tree to the left reads ‘‘N O T I GE R S
A D M I T T E D U N L E S S LE D B Y A S T R I NG ,’’ but not one animal seems leashed,
although a boy is fish-hooked by the seat of his pants and dangles above a
crocodile. The snake and toucan enjoy each other’s company, while the
serene communion of the lion, tiger, and bear belies the return of their
appetites. Another boy (at the scene’s center) faces us with his hands in his
pockets and his eyes downcast in a precocious halcyon daze, unfazed by our
interest. The second Du Maurier drawing, ‘‘Probable Results of the
Acclimatisation Society. – The Streets,’’ transposes the Serpentine’s array
of wild life to picture the bustling traffic of London’s urban center
(Figure 2). The man being trotted about in his zebra-drawn rickshaw
returns our inquiring gaze with a flat stare of weary tolerance, as if we are
the curiosity or an unwarranted distraction. Perhaps our concern is for the
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Introduction
Figure 2: George Du Maurier, ‘‘Probable Results of the Acclimatisation Society. – The
Streets,’’ Punch Almanack for 1865, no page number.
bare-footed street sweeper who scurries at the cartoon’s center. His ragged
little broom seems no match for the elephant, whose hind quarters are
plastered with a bank advertisement. One hopes the boy will be paid by the
pound. In both cartoons, Du Maurier crowds the landscape with an
eclectic blend of potentially menacing animals, and yet the human inhabitants wear expressions of serenity, boredom, or tolerance.
As observers, we stand apart from the charivari, afforded a vantage from
which to enjoy the orchestrated calm of the relaxing beasts. However, our
Archimedean point is hardly secure. Not only are our eyes met directly by
the man’s flat stare in ‘‘The Streets’’ (or pointedly ignored by the
Serpentine’s boy with pocketed hands), but the wit of Du Maurier’s
assemblage depends on gauging the balance of these antagonistic parts.
As spectators, we sense both our distance from and witness to the scene’s
improbable configuration. Du Maurier’s sketches are more than a lampoon of Regent’s Park zoo (or Francis Buckland’s culinary quirks), but an
allegory of the United Kingdom’s struggle to subsume various climates,
geographies, and cultures in an imperial gestalt of civilization.2 His
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Henry James and the Visual
sketches manifest prescient analysis of what Martha Banta terms the
‘‘socially layered relationships’’ of the late nineteenth century’s international public sphere.3 James and Du Maurier find humor in England’s
pretense to compose the tempestuous forces of global traffic, and to
manage populations in an imperial frame that by 1883 included
Afghanistan, China, Egypt, India, Ireland, and South Africa (among
many others), each of which tolerated, endured, and broke the ‘‘strings’’
of British rule.
The following book considers the role of visual language in representing
types of national culture, and, more broadly, in conceptualizing ‘‘culture’’
as the kernel of national cohesiveness. Alexander Pope tied visual experience to literal cultivation when he famously observed that ‘‘all gardening is
landscape-painting.’’4 In Pope’s axiom, painting demonstrates the centrality of representation in conveying a genius loci, or ‘‘genius of place.’’ By
imagining global geography through metonymies of animal kind, Du
Maurier consolidates a social category of Englishness, which encompasses
glaring discrepancies in class standing, to capture (in James’s estimation)
London’s locative genius. In providing the site and soil for acclimatization,
Du Maurier’s Serpentine and Streets assume a distinct English culture that
supports what James calls the ‘‘multitude of the vulgar who have not been
cultivated like orchids and race horses.’’ In the midst of the franchise
debates roiling over the Second Reform Bill, ‘‘London’’ seems a particularly
volatile site on which to exhibit a cultural consistency. Without the cartoons’
beasts as a point of reference, the boy of the Serpentine, and the boy in ‘‘The
Streets’’ (one with his hands in pockets; the other with an overmatched
broom) might seem a world apart. What possible sense of community might
the man in the rickshaw share with the top-hatted men riding the bank’s
elephant, or with those strutting in the park? The whiteness of their cartoon
complexions is one unifying feature. Noticeably missing from these drawings
are any people whose phenotype, costume, or language signify the regions to
which the animals are indigenous. The peoples’ phenotypic whiteness registers labor as a dark smudge, while harnessing antagonisms that emanate from
the ‘‘interstices’’ of the vulgar ‘‘London world’’ in a portrait of a ‘‘facial
queerness’’ distinctively ‘‘Anglo-Saxon.’’
The subdued irony of James’s essay is representative of his style of
cultural commentary. He addresses his reader almost tongue in cheek,
pronouncing aesthetic judgment on cartoons of a popular monthly, and
blending in tone Hippolyte Taine’s confident incisiveness with the moral
equanimity of Mathew Arnold and John Ruskin. Yet, James’s nostalgic
anecdote is relaxed and playful as he takes Du Maurier’s images seriously as
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criticism, claiming that ‘‘Many people . . . have gathered their knowledge of
English life almost entirely from Punch, and it would be difficult to
imagine a more abundant, and on the whole a more accurate informant’’
(DM 333). James is poking gentle fun at someone, including those who
read Punch and Century Magazine to know ‘‘English life’’; cartoonists who
invest their drawings with the care of museum pieces; scientists and cultural
commentators who purport to observe and formulate ‘‘English life’’; and, at
himself, a forty-year-old author who envies the illustrator’s popularity. He
is also suggesting his own country’s deficiency of type. When James
declares that ‘‘We have no such finished types as these in America’’ (DM
348), it is difficult not to sense his determination to provide them.
Given his deep concern with the integrity of the written word, James’s
public appreciation of Du Maurier’s pictures might come as a surprise.
In the 1907 preface to The Golden Bowl, James famously bemoans the
‘‘ ‘picture-book’ quality that contemporary English and American prose
appears more and more destined, by conditions of publication, to consent,
however grudgingly, to see imputed to it’’ (GB 23). He reprimands publishers who cater to lazy audiences unwilling to invest time and energy in the
act of reading; his Arnoldian mission is to surmount the Philistine taste for
the short-cut of illustration, and to reinvigorate the printed word. James’s
ideal author is a ‘‘projector and creator of figures and scenes,’’ which pull
the reader into a ‘‘state of hallucination.’’ Thus, ‘‘The essence of any
representational work’’ should enable it to ‘‘bristle with immediate
images.’’ In considering the republication of his work for the New York
edition, James admits that he initially ‘‘looked much askance at the
proposal, on the part of my associates in the whole business, to graft or
‘grow’, at whatever point, a picture by another hand on my own picture –
this being always, to my sense, a lawless incident’’ (GB 23).
Alvin Langdon Coburn’s frontispiece photographs coordinate the pictures and text to avoid any unrestrained promiscuity. To acquire the
photographic specimens, James accompanied the photographer through
London’s streets, searching for the fitting scene. He later recalled the
‘‘pleasure of exploration’’ that transformed the city into ‘‘a field yielding a
ripe harvest of treasure’’ (GB 24). The resulting frontispieces manage a
compromise between the image and word in which James’s written language retains its primacy, as Coburn’s photos offer supplement in ‘‘as
different a ‘medium’ as possible,’’ succeeding ‘‘Even at the cost of inconsistency of attitude in the matter of the ‘grafted’ image’’ (GB 25). It is as if
James’s prose conjures the found scenes, thus maintaining the sacred aura
of literary enterprise.5 Coburn’s pictures acclimatize to the plot of James’s
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Henry James and the Visual
‘‘own garden,’’ upon which ‘‘the cultivation of [illustrators’] hands’’ risks
encroaching as the proper ‘‘frame of one’s work no more provides place for
[the illustrator’s] plot than we expect flesh and fish to be served on the same
platter’’ (GB 24).
James’s comparison of the word and image to ‘‘fish and flesh’’ is telling
for juxtaposing a language of manners (the presentation of a dinner platter)
and a scientific rubric of classification. Generally, the agitation of word and
image in James’s oeuvre triggers metaleptic effects, breaking not only the
diegetic and exegetic frames of narrative and narration, but also the
disciplinary frames of literary and scientific authority to put James in
dialogue with contemporaneous scientists, such as Louis Agassiz, Herbert
Spencer, Emile Durkheim, and Franz Boas, who were reinventing the rules
through which social existence was recognized, observed, represented, and
classified. In The Ethnography of Manners: Hawthorne, James, Wharton
(1995), Nancy Bentley draws compelling linkages between James and the
twentieth-century legacy of ethnographic authority. The literary author
and the ethnographer both stage the realization of critical limitations in
their accounts of social interaction. Cultural authority hereby derives from
the failure to be objective, as authors acknowledge truth’s relativity and
insist on the partiality of any particular vantage on society, including their
own.6 By linking James’s aesthetic to ethnography, Bentley explains the
eloquence of cultural relativity in its anxious regard for Otherness – an
eloquence that ‘‘provided a way for a literature of manners to capitalize on
its own predicament.’’7 The following chapters explore the extent to which
James’s visual metaphors cultivate ‘‘lawless incidents’’ to dramatize crises in
national manners, thereby challenging the categorical integrities of images
and words, and of romance and realism.
In the title of this book I use the adjectival noun ‘‘visual’’ instead of the
noun ‘‘vision.’’ By this I intend to emphasize sight as a process that is
allusive and elusive in establishing meaning within and between social
contexts. In The Expense of Vision: Essays on the Craft of Henry James
(1964), Lawrence Holland characterizes James’s fiction as a relationship
that not only shows readers something, but also acts upon them, enjoining
them to negotiate the intersecting imaginations and idealizations of a
shared world.8 My sense of the visual follows Holland’s lead by probing
how developing notions of cultural type structured the meaning of visual
experience in the nineteenth century. The word ‘‘vision’’ does work to
convey the sacred aura of James’s sense of cultural character; however, the
precise nature and meaning of culture always depend on the tensions
between those actors who communicate in the contested spaces that
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James conjures and represents. As an adjective, ‘‘visual’’ also suggests the
technological innovations that changed the mode of vision in the nineteenth century, introduced photography and cinematography, and established systems of knowledge that relegated the eye to an instrument of
inquiry when it had been a window to the soul.9 James’s sense of the visual
addresses these technological shifts and the market relations that stand
behind them, and does so by reworking a legacy of visual arts that Pope
summarizes so pithily: all gardening is landscape-painting.
The idea for this book sprang from the curious ubiquity of the ‘‘picturesque’’ as both a theme and style in James’s fiction and travel writing. On a
literal level, the picturesque derives from the French pittoresque and Italian
pittoresco, designating the suitability of the earth for painted representation.
It extends Horacian ruminations on ut pictura poesis, proposing that poetry’s
written word best motivates the imagination to realize impressions, thus
attaining an associative dynamism that exceeds literal pictures, a claim
Edmund Burke advocates in Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our
Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). Like the companion terms of the
sublime and beautiful, the picturesque frames one’s visual sensations of the
world in a landscape or scene; however, the picturesque effect is uniquely
combinative, teasing difference to contain it finally in a larger configuration.
In Biographia Literaria Coleridge famously defines the picturesque as
‘‘Where the parts by their harmony produce an effect of a whole, but
where there is no seen form of a whole producing or explaining the parts
of it, where the parts only are seen and distinguished, but the whole is felt.’’10
Unlike the beautiful, with its emphasis on symmetry, regularity, and
classical traditions of perfected form, the picturesque promoted innovations in style to foster more active roles of observation and artistic creation.
David Marshall discerns a seed of the picturesque in the ‘‘paradoxical
grounding of nature in the aesthetic experience,’’ emerging from the
‘‘renaissance art of gardening in which, theoreticians and practitioners
display a complex ambivalence about art and nature.’’11 Generally, those
who defined the term in the later half of the eighteenth century were either
practicing gardeners (or ‘‘improvers,’’ such as Lancelot ‘‘Capability’’ Brown
and Humphrey Repton), or gentlemen theorists, including William
Gilpin, Uvedale Price, and Richard Payne Knight, who reacted against
the monotony of the practitioners’ styles. Responding to the broader
philosophies of Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, the trio of Gilpin,
Price, and Knight differentiated the picturesque from the sublime, a term
signaling a philosophical crisis in the subject’s incapacity either to apprehend the extent of the world’s phenomena and implicit awesomeness of
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God (Burke), or to orient one’s ensuing critical inquiry in the metaphysical
quandary of knowledge that such perceptual limits implied (Kant).
Whereas the picturesque signaled a break from the regiment of beauty, it
also offered a foothold for recovering perspective on the vast whole, folding
consciousness back from sublimity’s aporia and into the delight of orchestrating a visual gestalt.
Uvedale Price’s Essays on the Picturesque (1794) affords a useful summary.
He characterizes landscape paintings ‘‘as a set of experiments of the different ways in which trees, buildings, water, &c. may be disposed, grouped
and accompanied, in the most beautiful and striking manner.’’12 The
‘‘roughness, irregularity and abrupt variation’’ of these scenes are predicated upon ‘‘the picturesque effect of the whole’’ in which intricacy stabilizes to produce a ‘‘delight’’ that is ‘‘immediate and universal.’’13 The
picturesque thus feeds the ‘‘active agency’’ of a ‘‘curiosity’’ that pursues
the landscape’s ‘‘wild’’ or the ‘‘most savage’’ elements. The excitement,
‘‘produced by the intricacies of wild romantic mountainous scenes,’’
‘‘prompts us to scale every rocky promontory, to explore every new
recess.’’14 The act of contemplation reins in all this energy to promote the
scene’s configured effect, and ‘‘Objects must have a mutual relation,’’
whereby ‘‘intricacy, variety, and connection’’ display the ‘‘character of the
ground.’’15 In Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty (1792), William Gilpin
goes so far as to gauge the geographical propriety of a picturesque balance
of variety.16 Anticipating the irony of Du Maurier’s cartoon, he advises that
to maximize picturesque effect, artists ought to select animals appropriate
to each geographical region, for the ‘‘speckled pard, / Or tawny lion, ill
would glare beneath / The British oak; and British flocks and herds /
Would graze as ill on Africa’s burning fields.’’17
My particular concern is the function of people in James’s narratives of
visual experience. Ann Bermingham argues in Landscape and Ideology
(1986) that the picturesque fostered sympathy for peasant farmers in
England who were unhomed as land became an increasingly marketable
commodity. As such, the picturesque drew more from the tone of Virgilian
removals in the Eclogues – where soldiers’ reward displaced citizens’ security –
than from the serene pastorals of the Georgics.18 People figure as malleable
elements in the larger composition, and Price proposes: ‘‘In our own
species, objects merely picturesque are to be found among the wandering
tribes of gypsies and beggars’’19 – accordingly, beggars’ poverty and the
gypsies’ ‘‘wandering’’ acknowledge and disavow the alienating effects of
consolidating land as property in the nation’s ‘‘fair regions.’’20 The picturesque thus aestheticized the material struggles of those in an imperial
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landscape whose national middle ground was being framed amidst the
violent contest of international traffic in goods and people.
By the time James engaged the picturesque, it had become somewhat
passé in England, a banal grammar of the sightseeing bourgeoisie; however,
in the United States it had a much more vigorous legacy, fueled in the first
half of the nineteenth century by Emerson and Hawthorne, and, other
popular figures, such as George Catlin, and, James’s friend, the famous
British actor Fanny Kemble. The ubiquity of the picturesque in the United
States during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries makes a comprehensive catalogue of its various revisions beyond the scope of this book.
John Conron’s American Picturesque (2000) provides a compendium of the
term, weaving a plethora of texts into a virtual sourcebook.21 In the national
legacy that James extends and reconfigures, the picturesque suggests an
underlying organization to variety, composing the ‘‘E Pluribus Unum’’ of
American civic identity by framing post-Revolutionary crises regarding
class hierarchy, slavery, and Indian removal in a republican process of
Constitutional amendment. In the American frame, England’s picturesque
‘‘peasants’’ and ‘‘tribes of gypsies’’ become America’s picturesque savages
and slaves, whom writers aestheticized in drawing forth expansive frontier
horizons and plantations. In the late nineteenth century, the picturesque
rebounded from the country to the city. As Nancy Armstrong, Amy
Kaplan, and Carrie Tirado Bramen have argued, the picturesque helped
writers frame urban space and made national sense of the class conflicts that
suffused an industrial capitalism sustained by waves of immigration, which
James, and his friends William Dean Howells and Paul Bourget, feared
were beyond any nation’s capacity of acclimatization.22
Some critics dismiss the picturesque as evidence of James’s overwrought
style and Eurocentric elitism.23 Nevertheless, it is a crucial means through
which he leverages credibility as an American author and cultural critic in
the intersecting public spheres of transatlantic publication. In a basic sense,
the term generates for James an often ironic sense of aesthetic integrity
through which his narrators cling to their established social codes while
facing the threatening consequences of modernity: the rapidly changing
modes of production and consumption, and new configurations of aesthetic value and cultural capital implied by the entrance of American
industrial muscle on the world stage. James does not cling to the past as
an Old World irredentist, but rather invokes the picturesque to signal
moments when the pride of his characters balances precariously on their
management of insecurities regarding how to recognize, classify, and,
ultimately, respect national identity in the international marketplace.
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To James, culture is intensely relational in its expression. In his literary
criticism – of Du Maurier, but also of Taine and Balzac – James evaluates
the authors’ representations of cultural manner as culturally expressive. For
example, he looks to Du Maurier’s cartoons as evidence of his mix of
French and British heritage, averring that his friend’s illustrative ‘‘gift’’
springs from a ‘‘combination of sources,’’ and reminds us that ‘‘[Du
Maurier] has French blood in his veins’’ and that his humor has a ‘‘very
Gallic element’’ (DM 341, 342). James’s appreciation of cultural mixture is
not a shell game of cross-cultural reference, but echoes the relational
condition of what becomes Du Maurier’s quintessential Englishness. In
an 1897 tribute to his recently departed friend, James differentiates Du
Maurier’s ‘‘international mixture’’ from a ‘‘cosmopolite’’ in whom ‘‘we find
Paris under London, and Florence under Paris, and Petersburg under
Florence, and very little . . . under anything’’ (DM2 881). Conversely, Du
Maurier’s brand of ‘‘international mixture’’ substantiates James’s sense of
British identity.
To convey the stakes of cultural respectability, James often juxtaposes
competing grammars of aesthetic apprehension in conversations that are
humorous, tense, or even deadly serious. Consider ‘‘An American View of
Swiss Scenery’’ from Punch of 15 June 1878 (Figure 3), another of Du
Maurier’s sketches, which James mentions. The ‘‘Fair American’’ exclaims
to the ‘‘Britisher’’: ‘‘O my! An’t it rustic.’’ If she were properly schooled to
meet a Continental standard, the Fair American would remark ‘‘How
beautiful!,’’ ‘‘How sublime!,’’ or even ‘‘How picturesque!’’ But, she has
not read John Ruskin, who regards rusticity as a counterfeit of ideal beauty,
enjoyed by small or untutored minds. The Fair American’s notion of ‘‘the
rustic’’ may reflect her national optimism about frontier development. Of
course, the joke depends on understanding that ‘‘Swiss scenery’’ is not the
American frontier. The Alps are supposed to elicit universal pronouncements, not to imply the potential for national expansion. Despite depicting
the young woman’s faux pas, the picture does not sacrifice her to the urbane
Britisher’s notice of her ignorance; after all, she holds his gaze and captures
his interest. In a novel by James, her comment would salve the Britisher’s
jaded sensibility. Depending on her yearly income, she would be an ideal
pupil for his aesthetic education, culminating in an Anglo-American
romance that tempers her New World energy with his Old World wisdom.
It is fitting that Du Maurier signs the picture on the fence (to the left of the
Britisher’s umbrella), owning in this gesture not the Swiss scene itself,
which looms indistinctly in the background, but instead the tension of
cultural exchange between the carefully sketched characters in the
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