And as Isabel looks at him with his arm around Pansy’s waist, as she walks through his rooms and watches him take down a picture to bring it into the light, she begins to think that the man himself is far more interesting than his possessions. He resembles no one she knows—he has the air of being someone in particular. Most of her friends, she now realizes, belong “to types which were already present in her mind”; Ralph does, and Henrietta, and even Madame Merle. Osmond is different. She can think of no class or category to which he belongs, and he seems all the more original for not being in any way an eccentric. She finds herself attracted by his slender fingers and his overdrawn face; she admires his fastidiousness and even what she suspects will prove his irritability. He is shy and self-critical, and yet he treats her kindly, so kindly that Isabel wonders at his attention, and, as the afternoon proceeds, she becomes careful in her enthusiasms, lest she admire the wrong thing.
James’s heroine carries a story away from that hill, a story about a sensitive widower, who holds his daughter by the hand as they pace across his moss-covered terrace. She sees his “studious life in a lovely land” as one that involves a choice between the shallow and the serious; a choice she imagines he has not hesitated to make, even while knowing that the latter path must lead to loneliness and sorrow. She sees him, that is, as he would like to be seen. Her eyes give him back a version of his own best self, in which his love of beauty is inseparable from his “half-anxious, half-helpless fatherhood.” But James has already let his readers see enough to tell a different story. When the nuns deliver Pansy home to Bellosguardo, Osmond’s eyes drop with amusement at their claim to have made her a good Christian. Nevertheless, he uses their terms to cultivate Isabel’s favor, and when she praises the girl, he says, as though his father’s heart were full, that “she is a little saint of heaven!” Though he is not so bad as Madame Merle, who affects astonishment when Mrs. Touchett asks her if “that man is making love to my niece.”
This is the man Isabel will marry. She will make him wait, but a dozen chapters later she will marry him, and no one we like will be happy about it, not Ralph, or Henrietta, or even Mrs. Touchett, who thinks Osmond both a gentleman and a negative sum. James’s foreshadowing has been heavy enough to make us suspect that Isabel won’t be entirely happy in any marriage, but still everyone who reads this book thinks her acceptance of Osmond needs to be justified. With Warburton or Goodwood, in contrast, it was her refusal that required justification. But let us stop anticipating. James will offer an explanation in its place, and so let us, in Madame Merle’s words, distinguish instead.
In the New York Edition, James didn’t precisely soften his characterization of Osmond, but he did cut a long passage in which he tells us how to see him. It may, he had written, seem a “coarse imputation,” and yet still it must be said: Osmond is “not untainted by selfishness.” Even in the first edition, however, James backs away from that judgment as soon he makes it. For the word doesn’t cover Osmond in his entirety. Isabel has some cause for the picture she draws for herself, and we had better start by admitting it. Osmond’s literary tastes mix the expected—Machiavelli—with the recherché, and while few of us can share his enthusiasm for the rococo cream-puffs of the eighteenth-century librettist Metastasio, his interest in the sixteenth-century poet Vittoria Colonna is today worth taking seriously. His Tuscan primitives, bought cheap, are already worth something more, and though he speaks too much about his “willful renunciation” of chances he never had, even Ralph sometimes finds him good company. He may disapprove of Osmond’s courtship, but in these early days he recognizes that the man’s “good humour was imperturbable, his knowledge universal, his manners were the gentlest in the world.” Osmond’s pose works because it isn’t only a pose; Isabel’s view is partial, but not entirely misplaced.
Yet there’s another and more interesting reason for Isabel’s attraction, and one best approached by considering a few words of Madame Merle’s. Your rooms, she tells him, “are perfect. . . . You understand this sort of thing as no one else does.” Osmond would have liked to own the walls of the Uffizi itself, but even with modest means he has worked a great effect, and his apartment sounds attractive, mixing its modern furniture with elaborately carved wooden chests and pieces of antique pottery. “This sort of thing” is an art of its own, and we have to take it seriously before we can take it lightly. One of the Venetian essays in Italian Hours, James’s 1909 gathering of his travel pieces, is a graceful obituary for his friend Katharine De Kay Bronson, at whose small house on the Grand Canal the novelist often stayed. In it he recalls her love of the decorative arts, and suggests that she would have surrendered a Tintoretto “for a cabinet of tiny gilded glasses or a dinner-service of the right old silver.” Such pieces may be what Osmond has had to settle for, and yet a Tintoretto would overmaster almost any owner. You might envy the luck of the acquisition, but its possession points to little beyond a bank account. Yet to select just the right little goblets, to have no vulgar things—the ambition may be small but it isn’t in itself unworthy. One may not be a personage, but one can still belong to an aristocracy of taste.
Isabel will come to think that there was nothing terribly refined about inheriting such a fortune, and sees good taste as a note of distinction in a society that has no other way to mark it besides money. It’s not quite an alternative to money, but it does serve to justify her wealth—it will be what her money is for. James shared that prejudice, as his account of Mrs. Bronson suggests, and also saw through it. He enjoyed racketing around in curiosity shops, he delighted in things old and obscure, and in his fiction often allowed an appreciation of them to stand as a sign of intelligence. He bought little, however, and he never made the decoration of houses into an interest of his own. He knew how unsustaining good taste alone might prove, and had little sympathy with a younger generation’s belief in art for art’s sake, or indeed with Walter Pater’s idea that our finest moments come to us through the sensory pulses of aesthetic appreciation. Osmond of course shares that idea—or seems to.
Still, if he were indeed the man he wants Isabel to take him for, he might prove genuinely attractive: someone who has accepted his limits and decided to cultivate his own garden. That would make him rather like Frank Boott, the Bostonian in whose apartment James placed him. None of the records suggests that Boott had as keen an eye for a painting as Gilbert Osmond. Instead, he wrote music, and though his songs were best suited to the amateur tradition of Hausmusik, he did occasionally find a professional performance. He was more sociable than Osmond, a good host, and a more devoted father; his daughter Lizzie had tutors in Florence rather than being sent away to school. Nothing about the Bootts suggests the isolation that Osmond seems determined to cultivate; indeed the reverse, for Lizzie grew up in a lively set of expatriate children, a community split between Florence and Rome and that even included some cousins. Nor did their life abroad preclude an occasional stay in America, and after meeting them in Newport the young James quickly grew fond of the daughter. Her father, however, he thought childish and didn’t hesitate to describe him that way; even as he got to work on The Portrait of a Lady, James wrote to Quincy Street that the simplicity of Boott’s “mental constitution only increases with age.”
No one would use such terms for Osmond, and this brief sketch should be enough to caution anyone who might want to claim that the character was based upon Frank Boott. The difference between them is in fact so great that it could make one question the usefulness of tracing such “originals,” or indeed the literary tourism of my own walks up Bellosguardo. And yet the reason for doing so seems to me simple enough. Searching for some putative original allows us to see what was in fact created; the difference between the fictional page and the gravel of documentary truth can stand as a guide to artistic practice. Matching the description of the villa in The Portrait of a Lady up against the similar account in James’s “Italy Revisited,” and then comparing both of them to an act
ual walk up the hill suggests the degree to which his Italian settings are traceable to a particular place. The people he puts in those settings are a different matter.
Isabel herself is a special case, but few of James’s important characters have a source in a specific person. Or rather his characters’ characters—their moral being, their personalities—don’t usually have that source. What he does instead is to take not a person but a set of circumstances from the life around him. In the Villa Castellani he had an “Italianate bereft American,” a widower and an aesthete, who had devoted his life to the education of his daughter; who had raised an American girl on a European model, protected and cosseted and formidably polished. Their situation planted itself in his brain, and waited there until it proved exactly what his work required. “I had it there,” he wrote in his autobiography and had it all the more because Frank Boott “had no single note of character or temper . . . in common with my Gilbert Osmond.” What James got from his family friends—what they suggested, what he used—was the drama of their position, not that of their particular individual beings. Gilbert Osmond is an interesting creation precisely because he differs from the man in whose house James put him. If we’re looking for originals, we might do better to consider the twice-married collector James Jackson Jarves, who impoverished himself in buying the same kind of once-disregarded paintings that Osmond does; there’s a version of his story in Edith Wharton’s False Dawn, and most of the paintings are now at Yale. But Jarves was also less saturnine than Osmond, and perhaps the character owes his sense of unappreciated merit to James’s good friend Henry Adams, who never got over his discovery that there was more to politics than intelligence and a family name.
Osmond’s own paintings form a part of his “traditionary” pose: the work of a man who likes one to think that he could have been an artist if only he weren’t a gentleman. And his watercolors are not in themselves bad, even if to Madame Merle they seem inadequate “as the only thing you do.” One of the most puzzling things about this part of the novel is the tone that these two old friends take with one another. They speak bluntly, and yet their talk so brims with allusion that it amounts to innuendo, in a way that makes them seem creatures of another century—before, after, anything but Victorian. The more caustic they are, the more appears to go unsaid. Madame Merle tells Osmond that she wants to put Isabel in his way, and her phrasing is not disinterested. But we don’t yet see what she herself might get from it all, and therefore read with a sharp sense of the unspoken. Even Isabel herself will wonder at her friend’s eagerness, and at this point the novel’s plot starts to hang upon a plot in another sense of the word, to depend upon the hidden and unknown. The motivations and desires of the book’s other characters begin to exercise a shaping force upon both Isabel’s experience and our own; motivations unsuspected by her and unclear to us. One mark of that change is the growing freedom with which James starts to handle point of view. Up to this point he has stayed so close to his heroine as virtually to exclude his other characters’ sense of things, but now he begins to dip, however briefly, into their very different inner lives. So Isabel talks with Madame Merle about Osmond’s family history, and in the space of a single long paragraph James allows himself to slide from one mind to another, from Isabel’s perceptions of what the older woman has said to the latter’s impression of the girl’s response to Osmond’s sister. For Serena Merle worries about the Countess Gemini, worries about what that particular piece of flightiness might say.
When Madame Merle first comes to Osmond’s villa, her host tells her that she is “looking very well.” She has got an idea. On her that’s always becoming, and soon enough it begins to bear fruit. Osmond finds that “the girl is not disagreeable,” indeed that she’s charming. But she does have one fault. Isabel too has ideas, a lot of ideas—though fortunately, Osmond says, they are all very bad ones. Fortunately, for they must be “sacrificed.” Not because they are bad, but because they are hers.
12.
STRANIERI
IN 1786 A German poet traveling alone and under an assumed name boarded a coach in the spa town of Carlsbad and set off for the south on a holiday from the growing burden of his own fame. He ate his first figs in Munich, and once he had crossed the Brenner Pass and begun his descent into Italy, he exulted in a basket of peaches and pears. Venice seduced him but what he really wanted was Rome, and when he left the Adriatic behind, he pushed on so quickly for the papal city that he passed through Florence itself in a single night. Rome was the goal, for Goethe no less than for any other northerner on the Grand Tour, Rome and its remains, Rome and his hopes that the city might enlarge his very soul. So it will prove for Isabel Archer. She enjoys her weeks in Florence, but she too wants something more, and she will eventually make her home in the ancient capital.
Still, her first visit is a short one—just ten days at the end of May. She travels down from Florence with Ralph and Henrietta and they take rooms at the Hôtel de Paris. James himself usually stayed at the much larger Roma, in the Corso, which was especially recommended for “passing travellers or bachelors.” But he put his characters exactly where one would have found their real-life equivalents, just a few steps away from the Piazza di Spagna, in the center of what was called the city’s “strangers’ quarter.” The Baedeker for 1879 lists an Albergo di Parigi in the via San Sebastianello, a steep and narrow little street that runs parallel to the Spanish Steps, climbing up toward the Pincio, the hanging gardens where Daisy Miller had scandalized her world by strolling unchaperoned with an Italian. Keats had died just around the corner, in a house near the foot of the Steps, and Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch had spent her unhappy honeymoon close by in the via Sistina, which runs from their top down to Piazza Barberini. And today it remains a district of stranieri still, as anyone who has had to sidle around the crowds on those stairs will know.
In James’s day as in ours, the neighborhood was crowded with hotels, most of them with similarly generic names—the Russia, the Europa, the Inghilterra. Among them the only thing that distinguishes Isabel’s is the fact that it billed itself as suitable for families; an unostentatious choice for someone still getting used to her money. A few years later the Hôtel de Paris appears to have moved, while staying well within the quarter. My 1886 Baedeker gives an address on via San Nicola di Tolentino, a street in which many foreign artists kept their studios; advertisements note that it had one of the city’s first elevators. In that later spot it faced the Palazzo Barberini, where the sculptor William Wetmore Story rented an apartment of some fifty rooms, an apartment that functioned as the unofficial capital of the American colony in Rome and in which James himself spent many evenings.
In Florence, Osmond had told Isabel that he would like to see her in Rome, to watch her take it in, and soon enough he will follow her down. She will have another encounter before he does, however, and one that says more about the Anglo-American experience of the city. One afternoon she goes to the Forum, and when Ralph strolls off with a guide, she sits down on a fallen column. Scenery in this novel is never inert, never just a block of description. James always uses it to serve some dramatic purpose, to tell us something about his characters’ perceptions or desires. He has already suggested that though Isabel does feel the burden of Rome’s past, she also finds the city full of “the fresh, cool breath of the future.” Even the tumbled walls of the Forum make her think of nothing so much as her own prospects, and she’s so lost in her thoughts of the life to come that she doesn’t hear an approaching footstep, looking up only when a shadow falls across her line of vision.
The shadow belongs to Lord Warburton, and their meeting is accidental. He himself has been in Turkey and has stopped off in Rome on his way back home. In reading one certainly feels that the novelist is busily plotting; this way of bringing an old suitor onto the stage looks, at first, like coincidence on a Dickensian scale. Yet we shouldn’t allow it to strain our credulity. In an 1860 letter Henry Adams writ
es of going to the Vatican and running into “a young lady whom I used to know at Dresden,” while the letters his wife Clover sent from Italy are full of her chance encounters with other Bostonians. Warburton tells Isabel that he is merely passing through, but that doesn’t mean he’ll treat it “as if it were Clapham Junction. To pass through Rome is to stop for a week or two.” Clapham Junction was and is a South London railroad station, and even now remains the busiest commuter interchange in Britain. For people in Isabel’s world, however, Rome itself was a kind of Clapham Junction. It provided a major switching point on the routes of Victorian tourism, and in 1873 James wrote in a letter that “I have first or last seen in a cab in the Corso every one I ever saw anywhere before.”
Warburton’s entrance will have its effect on the plot, but it also has an effect on the reader today that’s summed up by a line in the journals of John Cheever. The Forum now looks, Cheever wrote, as if it were “a double ruin: a ruin of antiquity and a monument to the tender sentiments of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travelers, for we see not only the ghosts of the Romans here but the shades of ladies with parasols and . . . little children rolling hoops.” Any experience of Rome is a layered one, with cars honking outside a church built atop a temple, but such things now also lie under a topsoil of Anglo-American perception, and all of Italy comes to us as filtered through our awareness of earlier travelers. We remember what James said, or Twain; we register the difference between their version of the Caesars and ours, and pat ourselves on the back for knowing more than Hawthorne, who described the church of San Luigi dei Francesi without noticing the Caravaggios. Tastes shift, and desires as well, and the chronicle of touristic appreciation stands itself as a part of the city’s meaning and a measure too of America’s ever-changing relations with Europe. We join our own perceptions up with our predecessors’, and so place ourselves in history. We assert a sense of continuity; we give ourselves a past.
Portrait of A Novel Page 17
