Portrait of a Lady (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

After having been serialized simultaneously in Macmillan’s Monthly in England and the Atlantic Magazine in the United States, The Portrait of a Lady was published in 1881, when Henry James was thirty-eight years old. The novel marks something of a midpoint in James’s career, coming close on the heels of his first great success, Daisy Miller, and well before the architecturally intricate novels of his later years, The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl. If Daisy Miller was James’s first popular work, establishing his reputation on both sides of the Atlantic, The Portrait of a Lady was, in the words of critic F. O. Matthiessen, “his first unquestioned masterpiece” (Henry James: The Major Phase, p. 153; see “For Further Reading”). The short, spare Daisy Miller introduced to a large audience James’s great theme, the conflict between American innocence and European sophistication, and also his great subject, the American girl abroad. “She’s an American girl,” sings out Daisy’s younger brother before Daisy makes her first appearance in a Swiss resort town. And Lydia Touchett, Isabel’s aunt, introduces Isabel to her Europeanized cousin Ralph as follows: “She thinks she knows a great deal of [the world]—like most American girls; but like most American girls she’s ridiculously mistaken” (p. 56). The Portrait of a Lady is an expansion and complication of the themes of the earlier book. If in Daisy Miller, James wrote, as Rebecca West famously put it, like a piper carefully playing out a tune, The Portrait of a Lady is a more orchestral piece. It’s nearly five times as long, with many more characters and scenes, and a plot of such complexity that it allows for many more dips and rises, harmonies, choruses, and movements. The book was revised by James for the 1906 New York edition of his complete works, and this is the version you hold in your hands.

The Portrait of a Lady is often discussed as a novel of manners, a sociological study of the contrasts in mores and styles of Americans and Europeans. It’s also described as a psychological novel, charting the complex interplay between the minds of its major characters and exploring relentlessly and finely the consciousness of its heroine, Isabel. But these characterizations, while not entirely mistaken, obscure a central characteristic of the novel: The Portrait of a Lady is a fairy tale, or as James put it in the 1906 preface, a “fable” (p. 13). With whatever authority he presents the psyches and social milieus of his Europeans and Americans and Europeanized Americans, and however carefully he observed the locales—and the authority and care are absolute—the project of The Portrait of a Lady is about as close to a work of social science as it is to a conventional potboiler. Americans and Europeans, in the novel, are types: As Leon Edel, James’s great biographer and critic, has it, “In James’ fiction, Americans are often presented as if they still possess the innocence of Eden;” and furthermore, “it is striking how often the adjective ‘corrupt’ precedes the word ’Europe’ ” (article in Scribner’s American Writers, Vol. 2, pp. 320-323). As they appear in The Portrait of a Lady, these representatives of the old and new worlds are rendered vividly, and they may feel to the reader momentarily real, but in the end they are figures in a novelist’s dreams and meditations; they are as conceptual as they are concrete. Similarly, “American girl” is not a category of mind or state of consciousness; it is a kind of representational ideal. In the author’s terms, the phrase “American girl” is almost redundant. Both the words conjure innocence and (in their way) beauty. Both words also augur doom. If, as Edel argues, America is an Eden, then a fall will come, as surely as a girl will become a woman or die. The phrase “American girl” also carries with it a hint of contradiction, a fight between the two words: While an American is liberated, a girl is subject to all kinds of boundaries and limits. “American girl,” then, is a phrase that conjures a story, a cheerful two words that together gather storm clouds. American girls are doubly doomed among the limits of European society; an American girl going to Europe is a pure white lamb bound to be ruined.

The Portrait of a Lady bears the details and precision of psychological and social realism, but the novel is structured like a kind of old-fashioned legend. We have an ordinary girl, Isabel, who on venturing into Europe becomes a sort of princess, an heiress related to her uncle, the banker Daniel Touchett, who in his kindness, power, and benevolence is as good as a king. Once in this strange land, Isabel is wooed by two Princes Charming, paragons of American and British manhood: Caspar Goodwood, the inventor-athlete businessman, and Lord Warburton, the nobleman-politician-reformer. But she marries neither and is instead entranced by Madame Merle, a kind of witch—an evil sorceress of society and good manners—who marries her off to the “sterile dilettante,” as Ralph Touchett puts it, Gilbert Osmond, an ogre of high aesthetics, who in the end does not find Isabel’s beauty up to the mark. This story is beauty and the beast in its most primitive form: the princess enslaved by a monster. But the monster in The Portrait of a Lady is a monster of aesthetics; Osmond is a painter, a collector of fine things, a disparager of vulgarity. And Isabel is no ordinary beauty: She has beauty based in character, in potentiality, in innocence, and in liberty of mind—in her being an American and a girl. This novel is not just a beautiful story; it is a story about beauty, a story in which the destruction of beauty is threatened by beauty’s great admirer.

The book opens with a meditation on a kind of perfect scene, Ralph and Daniel Touchett, along with Lord Warburton, taking tea on the lawn of Gardencourt. The time of day is aestheticized, “the perfect middle of a splendid summer afternoon,” which the narrator tells us “could be only an eternity of pleasure” (p. 19). The house is aestheticized, even its brick face, “with the complexion of which time and the weather had played all sorts of pictorial tricks, only, however, to improve and refine it” (p. 20). Daniel Touchett, for his part, has an “aesthetic passion” for Gardencourt (p. 20), and even Touchett’s “beautiful collie dog” gets into the rapture, “watching the master’s face almost as tenderly as the master took in the still more magisterial physiognomy of the house” (p. 21). This sort of highly aestheticized contemplation and pictorial scene-setting is replete throughout the novel, notably at the introduction to Osmond’s villa in Florence, where the narrator describes “a small group that might have been described by a painter as composing well” (p. 241). The windows of Osmond’s place, we are told, are “extremely architectural” (p. 241). Osmond’s beard is “cut in the manner of the portraits of the sixteenth century,” and he is described as a “gentleman who studied style” (p. 243). Not only are the settings beautiful, but these beauties are contemplated by a narrator whose precision and delicacy and aesthetic passions are rivaled only by his characters’.

The book is a tour of lovely places—Gardencourt, Osmond’s villa, the ruins of Rome, the Vatican—but the central questions in The Portrait of a Lady revolve not around the beauty of settings or houses or art, but around the beauty of the subject of the portrait—our heroine, Isabel. She is beautiful, this is clear. Ralph Touchett’s first observation upon seeing her is that Isabel is “unexpectedly pretty” (p. 30), and Mrs. Touchett, upon determining that Isabel is one of her three nieces, asks, “And are you the prettiest?” (p. 40). The narrator, comparing Isabel to her more conventionally attractive older sister, makes the following observation: “Nineteen persons out of twenty (including the younger sister herself) pronounced Edith infinitely the prettier of the two, but the twentieth, besides reversing this judgement, had the entertainment of thinking all the others aesthetic vulgarians” (p. 48). Isabel’s beauty extends beyond prettiness; it is not vulgar; it is a thing of high taste. Daisy Miller, the flirt of James’s earlier novella, is pretty, but Isabel’s attractiveness is of a higher order. Daisy is a daisy, a pretty little wild flower, but Isabel is a bell, pure and ringing, and a source of art. (She is perhaps a belle, opposed to a bête.) Daisy is a Miller, but Isabel is nothing so plebeian. She is an Archer, like Diana, the huntress, goddess of the moon, sculpted in gold-shining brass by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, raising her foot and bow with such purity of motion that it is certain that she is not hunting swine. The novel assembles around her a variety of aesthetic types, exemplars and worshipers of beauty. And the question they ask, the question at the heart of the book, is a double one: How will this beauty achieve fruition?—how will it be rendered? how will it find expression? Ralph asks his mother, when she brings Isabel to Europe, “What do you mean to do with her?” (p. 55). Mrs. Touchett replies: “Do with her? You talk as if she were a yard of calico. I shall do absolutely nothing with her, and she herself will do everything she chooses. She gave me notice of that” (p. 58).

Of course, the problem is that most everyone will see Isabel, in one way or other, as something to be collected or admired—more or less as a yard of calico, albeit an extraordinary one. Everyone in the novel is an aesthete, a collector or pursuer of beauty. Osmond and Madame Merle have beautiful collections of precious little objets d‘art; they are both curators of their own houses, though as artists they’re dilettantes, he a painter and she a pianist, neither of them terribly serious. (James, however, was very serious about his aesthetic choices; in the 1881 draft of the novel, he has Madame Merle playing Beethoven when Isabel first meets her; in the revision, it’s Chopin.) Daniel Touchett has Gardencourt, and Ralph and he have the paintings and rare books therein. Even Henrietta Stackpole, whom James in his 1906 preface deems perhaps a little too vulgar for the rest of the book, is a “literary lady,” a collector and renderer of scenes. Minor characters are abundantly aesthetic: The fey Edward Rosier is a great collector of bibelots, which he sells in order to get enough money to woo Pansy, Osmond’s daughter, a charmingly frightening little product of high aestheticism, devoted as she is to pleasing her father and perfecting the ceremony of tea. Even Warburton and Goodwood are pursuers of pulchritude and perfect order, but in their cases the beauty is Isabel, and unlike Rosier, they make no confusion between the pursuit of beautiful objects and of a beautiful girl. It is perhaps because they mean to “do” something with her—marry her—that Isabel rejects them. She must remain “independent”—that’s one of the great words to describe Isabel, and it is essential to Isabel’s beauty that she neither wants to be collected nor to collect. Her conception of beauty is ex periential, not material, as in her contemplation of Italy: “a land in which a love of the beautiful might be comforted by endless knowledge” (p. 238).

What will be done with Isabel? In this fable, the worst possible thing. She will fall prey to Osmond, the most horrible sort of collector and user of beautiful things—he marries her for her money and thinks she won’t clash too awfully with his decor. In her marriage to Osmond, the problem of beauty—what to do with it?—becomes urgent, or as the novelist, critic, and philosopher William Gass puts it, “the moral problem ... merges with the esthetic” (“The Brutality of Good Intentions,” p. 179). For Gass the answer to Ralph’s question—“What do you mean to do with her?”—is at the novel’s anti-utilitarian heart. In Gass’s eye, the book makes a moral point: We should not use people—beautiful or not—as if they were a yard of calico, and he quotes the second form of Kant’s moral imperative, which puts Mrs. Touchett’s words somewhat less euphoniously: “So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end withal, never as a means only” (quoted in Gass, p. 178). But for me, these words from Kant don’t square so easily with the book. Isabel stands for “humanity”—the mass of it—about as well as she does for “a yard of calico.” She is not ordinary; if she were even an ordinary beauty like her sister, she would not be the lady chosen to sit for this portrait.

The beauty of Isabel is not just her prettiness; it’s a beauty to be captured in prose: a beauty of life and mind, an interesting beauty—and this is the novel’s aesthetic ideal. Osmond likes pretty things, sure, but he does not understand the sort of beauty embodied in Isabel—a beauty whose source is its abundant liveliness of mind. “It may be that Isabel’s a genius,” says her aunt Lydia. And Ralph goes further: “‘A character like that,” he said to himself—“a real little passionate force to see at play is the finest thing in nature. It’s finer than the finest work of art—than a Greek bas-relief, than a great Titian, than a Gothic cathedral’” (p. 76). In its striving to capture Isabel’s wonder, her gorgeousness, the novel compares her to works of art of every kind. She hums “like a smitten harp” (p. 178); she talks, says Henrietta Stackpole, like “the heroine of an immoral novel” (p. 180). She is seemingly always placed among objects of beauty—the pictures at Gardencourt, the ruins of Rome —but the truth about Isabel’s beauty is that it is more human than artful; its throbbing humanity justifies its aesthetic wonder. As the narrator tells us, “She carried within herself a great fund of life, and her deepest enjoyment was to feel the continuity between the movements of her own soul and the agitations of the world” (p. 49). She is, as Daniel Touchett considers her, “young life;” she is “fresh and natural ... our rustling, quickly-moving, clear-voiced heroine” (pp. 68-69). Her beauty competes with the beauty of art, yet it is supremely artless. We’re told that her nature has, “in her conceit, a certain garden-like quality” (p. 67). It may be cultivated, but it springs up from the ground. A word James uses often in the beginning of the book is “fertilised.” Isabel is a natural. The first adjectives applied to her—they appear in the novel even before she does—are “independent” and “interesting,” and the two seem close to, if not exactly, interchangeable. In The Portrait of a Lady, that which is interesting is independent of social norms. This kind of beauty is, for James, essentially American. “I’m very fond of my liberty,” says Isabel when she shows up in England (p. 34). And later, the first time her Aunt Lydia rebukes her (though mildly) for her indiscretion, they have the following colloquy:

The marriage plot moves inexorably away from liberty. Marriage—any marriage—is a threat to liberty; it makes a girl into a lady. What makes Isabel’s marriage to Osmond so poignant is that it is a threat not only to her liberty, but also to her beauty—her marriage threatens to destroy the very attractiveness that marriage in a conventional novel confirms. Marriage to Osmond is a kind of anti-marriage; it shoves her value aside. He sees Isabel as “a young lady who had qualified herself to figure in his collection of choice objects” (p. 320); she figures for him as a stylish trinket, not as something alive. The horror becomes acute, as eventually she comes to regret her own liveliness. When she walks around Gardencourt in the book’s penultimate chapter the narrator tells us that “she envied the security of valuable ‘pieces’” (p. 590); and before the courtship even begins, Osmond worries that she’s not quite up to snuff. He thinks Isabel a little too ready to laugh or to applaud, and he says that she has too much conversation. For Osmond, Isabel’s beauty is marred by her vitality, the “young life,” in Daniel Touchett’s phrase, that is the source of Isabel’s liberty, her interest, and her independence. One gets the impression that like the aesthetic vulgarians referred to early in the novel, he might have preferred her older sister Edith—provided that Edith were loaded with enough dollars and that her manners were good. Ralph’s phrase “sterile dilettante” is apt. Osmond is overly precious, aghast at life itself, but—and this is crucial—he is not unattractive, nor are his values unrelated to those at the heart of the novel. In the fable of The Portrait of a Lady, evil is not good’s opposite but its caricature.

Osmond is beautiful, and in a novel devoted to high aesthetics, he is a devoted connoisseur, and though fundamentally so he is not entirely despicable in his connoisseurship. Osmond is described as a lovely object when we meet him—“he suggested, fine gold coin as he was, no stamp nor emblem of the common mintage that provides for general circulation; he was the elegant complicated medal struck off for a special occasion” (p. 243)—and he is last seen carefully rendering a pretty thing, also a coin: “A box of water-colours and fine brushes lay before him, and he had already transferred to a sheet of immaculate paper the delicate, finely-tinted disk” (pp. 554-555). The import of the coins is obvious, and not just because Osmond likes Isabel’s money. Beauty is Osmond’s currency. It is the source of his values. He is greedy and venal—he would not be interested in Isabel if she were poor—but more than that, his nature is such that, in violation of Kant and Lydia Touchett, he puts beauty to use. Beauty is the source of his own self-worth and, to him, the worth of others. He must place Isabel among his collections. She is valuable, and her value improves his.

In this way, the conflict between Osmond’s connoisseurship and Isabel’s beauty spins the book’s hub. W. H. Aden famously described Shakespeare’s Othello as a conflict between a work of art, Othello, and a critic, lago. The horror of Shakespeare’s play, Auden argued, came in part from the audience’s sympathy with the scientific scrutiny of the critical lago; according to Auden, theatergoers in some sense are set against the beautiful art object embodied in the Moor, and the play thus engages its admirers in a work of art’s destruction. The Portrait of a Lady similarly sets a paragon of beauty against its wicked hangers-on, but criticism isn’t the embodiment of evil in James’s book. According to the narrator, Ralph Touchett is “nothing if not critical” (p. 355)—James borrows the very words that Iago uses to describe his villainous self—but in Ralph “nothing if not critical” is not at all bad. Ralph is one of the book’s beautiful souls. If he is critical, he is passionately so; he lives to admire Isabel. Evil—and it’s not too strong a word to describe the soul-killing Osmond—lies not in criticism, but in a particular kind of over-refinement, of lifeless aestheticism. Not all aesthetes are evil, just the sterile ones. Ned Rosier might be foolish, but he’s not wrong. Like Osmond, he is a collector of beautiful trinkets; but he is passionate about his bibelots and his enamel; furthermore, he knows their relative worth and sells all his pretty things when he falls in love. Osmond, on the other hand, is somewhat sexless—it is, he says, his ambition to be pope. He sets himself apart from life, up in his villa with his pretty things. And he is, in his cultivated fineness, a hell of a lot closer in sensibility to the Jamesian narrator than he is to lively, naive Isabel. Osmond is superfine, exquisite and selective in his choices, but in him, aesthetic superfineness is taken to a deadly extreme:

In The Portrait of a Lady, beauty is a human quality, not an artistic one, and Isabel’s beauty lies in her consciousness—in her mentality—and not in her pictorial qualities. In his study of James’s 1906 revision of Portrait, F. O. Matthiessen notes that one of the words James characteristically knocked out was “picturesque” and one of the words he characteristically added was “consciousness.” The book is a struggle to capture Isabel’s beauty, and part of the novel’s genius is its portrayal of her attraction to Osmond. Her love of beauty draws her to him—also her innocence. She cannot conceive of the corruption of Madame Merle and Gilbert Osmond; she can never dream of the truth of their relationship; she can’t even allow herself to think that Osmond is interested in her money. Late in the novel, when Osmond’s corruption is revealed, his worldly, Europeanized sister, the Countess Gemini, is left fairly gape-mouthed by Isabel’s naivete. It’s also typical of Isabel’s unconventionality that she chooses Osmond, and not Goodwood or Lord Warbuton—it is an interesting, independent choice. But most of all, what Isabel sees in Osmond’s devotion to aesthetics is a way out of the conventions of life that will inevitably rob her of her independence and interest. If she marries and loves either Goodwood or Warburton, she will cease being an American girl and will become something more ordinary—the good wife of a good man. Life, her source of beauty, is also her enemy: Experience will rob her of her American innocence, and time will take her girlishness away. But in Osmond’s world of beauty, as Isabel initially conceives it, she hopes that she will transcend ordinariness and thereby preserve herself—or even improve herself, that her life will be enlarged by his appreciation of and devotion to beauty. Her image of the man, as she is falling for him, is described as follows:

The picture had no flourishes, but she liked its lowness of tone and the atmosphere of summer twilight that pervaded it. It spoke of the kind of personal issue that touched her most nearly; of the choice between objects, subjects, contacts—what might she call them?—of a thin and those of a rich association; of a lonely, studious life in a lovely land; of an old sorrow that sometimes ached today; of a feeling of pride that was perhaps exaggerated, but that had an element of nobleness; of a care for beauty and perfection so natural and so cultivated together that the career appeared to stretch beneath it in the disposed vistas and with the ranges of steps and terraces and fountains of a formal Italian garden (p. 294).

Her picture is mistaken. Osmond’s relation to “object, subjects, contacts” is not what Isabel supposes it to be; it is not Jamesian, it is something much worse. Osmond is, as Ralph says, “the incarnation of taste” (p. 362); he is, as he describes himself, “the most fastidious ... gentleman living” (p. 281). But fastidiousness and taste are not passion or joy, and, we are told, Osmond “would never, in the concert of pleasure, touch the big drum by so much as a knuckle: he had a mortal dislike to the high, ragged note, to what he called random ravings” (p. 321). This revulsion to the ragged note might be Jamesian, but Osmond’s fastidious palate rejects more than just strong flavors. His relation to fineness is negative, it is a revulsion to vulgarity, not an ecstasy in beauty. His aestheticism is anti-sensual and anti-romantic. He likes nice little things, but Osmond cannot stomach soul-moving art. His view of Saint Peter’s in Rome is telling: “For Osmond the place was ugly to distress; the false colours, the sham splendour were like vulgar, bragging, lying talk” (p. 323). He is almost allergic to liveliness, and what he sees as formal propriety is something akin to death—it is form without anything vital. The first judgment that he pronounces upon seeing Isabel is telling: “The girl’s not disagreeable.” And when Madame Merle asks if that’s all he can say about her, Osmond seems surprised: “All? Isn’t it enough? Of how many people have you heard me say more? (p. 302). “Not disagreeable” is for Osmond high praise—it is the nicest thing he says about anyone or anything in the novel. This is super-fastidiousness: He finds everything disagreeable, everything vulgar; if it’s alive it might make a mess. Pleasure and feeling upset him—he would prefer a yard of fine calico to a pretty girl’s talk. James as a stylist is sometimes mocked—the double or triple negatives, the sentences busy with commas like a piece of fish with too many bones—but consider the concise exactitude with which he describes Osmond’s pleasure—is it even the right word?—at the prospect of marriage: ”Contentment, on his part, took no vulgar form; excitement, in the most self-conscious of men, was a kind of ecstasy of self-control” (p. 367). Gilbert Osmond’s relation to experience and pleasure is the opposite of Isabel’s. If she wants to ”feel the continuity between the movements of her own soul and the agitations of the world,” he wants to be set apart from the world, in order that the world may better admire him for his own fineness. He is happy that Isabel consents to marry him, but that happiness is worldly and egomaniacal; it is, as the narrator describes it, ”the sense of success—the most agreeable emotion of the human heart;” and as this description of Osmond’s happiness continues, it appears that for him success is not human or active, not success in living or doing, but success as a thing would achieve it, as an object of art:

So he hopes that marriage to Isabel will confirm his greatness in the world’s eyes, and it is this part of his character—his desire for the admiration of the world’s eyes—that is finally most offensive to Isabel, and most disappointing. She has imagined him as apart from the world, as living unconventionally in a sphere of pure beauty, but in the end it is revealed that he sees his beautiful manners and his beautiful collections—and she as the centerpiece in those collections—only as a means of gaining the admiration of that world from which he has set himself apart. Ralph, in reflection, expresses this damningly: “[Osmond] always had an eye to effect, and his effects were deeply calculated. They were produced by no vulgar means, but the motive was as vulgar as the art was great.... Osmond lived exclusively for the world” (p. 412). And Isabel, when she has lived with him some time, begins to learn the awful lesson about her husband and his code of living:

It implied a sovereign contempt for every one but some three or four very exalted people whom he envied, and for everything in the world but half a dozen ideas of his own. That was very well; she would have gone with him even there a long distance; for he pointed out to her so much of the baseness and shabbiness of life, opened her eyes so wide to the stupidity, the depravity, the ignorance of mankind, that she had been properly impressed with the infinite vulgarity of things and of the virtue of keeping one’s self unspotted by it. But this base, ignoble world, it appeared, was after all what one was to live for; one was to keep it for ever in one’s eye ... to extract from it some recognition of one’s own superiority (p.449).

Osmond’s conventionality—his worship of the world’s view of value, of the eyes of the mass of humanity—stands against all the things that make Isabel valuable, her independence, her interest ingness, her liberty, her individuality; those things that set her apart from the common lot and compile her American aristocracy. In the end, Osmond’s living for the world is not so much misanthropic as inhumane and reductive. As Isabel discovers, “he would have liked her to have nothing of her own but her pretty appearance” (p. 447). For him, the only important things about a girl are her face and comportment. And maybe this is why Osmond is such an unsuccessful, sterile painter—he captures surfaces but not life.

Osmond represents, then, both the antithesis of the Jamesian sensibility and an extreme of its fineness. He is not so much driven to beauty as he is repulsed by the vulgar, and as Matthiessen has it, “One of James’s most limiting weaknesses ... was dread of vulgarity” (Henry James: The Major Phase, p. 175). The 1906 preface expresses this dread, and does so in a peculiar fashion, a dread of writing in a vulgar way, and a grief at having had to do so. In the preface, James describes the composition of The Portrait of a Lady as something of a losing struggle against the forces of ordinary storytelling. When he calls his plot a “fable,” that’s not something he’s happy about, and he works hard to distinguish himself from mere “fabulists” who begin the conception of their novels with a sequence of actions; for him the germ of a novel is a contemplative vision of character. James blames his plot’s development largely on “the anxiety of my provision for the reader’s amusement” (p. 13)—he seems to wish for something finer than a plot, to wish that he had not had to put Isabel into a book. He blames this anxiety for leading him to the creation of Henrietta Stackpole, whose appearance in the novel James regrets. (Interestingly, all the characters in the book but one come to like Henrietta; only Osmond remains appalled by her vulgarity, and James seems to echo Osmond’s squeamishness.) Of course, James’s distrust of plot is not uncommon among novelists—one could argue that it is predominant among contemporary writers; “All plots lead towards death” is the refrain of Don Delillo’s White Noise, and in Grace Paley’s story “A Conversation with My Father,” the narrator talks about “plot, the absolute line between two points which I’ve always despised”—but for James plot equals not death or limits, but vulgarity. His squeamishness about telling a story, about sullying his perfect fiction with the commonness of a Henrietta Stackpole, is positively reminiscent of Osmond’s unwillingness to dirty himself with the ordinary business of life. In the preface, James famously describes how the book came to him with “the conception of a certain young woman affronting her destiny” (p. 9), and “not at all in any conceit of a ‘plot,’ nefarious name” (p. 4). He writes, almost wistfully of:

So the novelist has a quick answer to Ralph Touchett’s question, “What do you mean to do with her?” And the answer is: Render her, create a portrait, write a book about her. In other words—in a faint contradiction of Kant—put the beautiful vision to use. But if a portrait of a beauty does put beauty to use, it does so only in the service of beauty and to create more beauty. For James, even that is done hesitantly and wistfully. The Refined Dealer in Forms and Figures must hand over his treasure to the vulgar hands of The Fabulist, but he does so reluctantly and with keen regret. According to Edel, The Portrait of a Lady was planned for almost a decade. And the book’s greatest achievement, both for James himself and for many of his many readers, is not any sequence of action or conversation, but Isabel’s “extraordinary meditative vigil” in the middle of the book, when she realizes Osmond’s relation with Madame Merle, and in a sense, when the story of her life is revealed to her. According to James: “It is a representation simply of her motionlessly seeing, and an attempt withal to make the mere still lucidity of her act as ‘interesting’ as the surprise of a caravan or the identification of a pirate” (p. 17). But these contrasts—between motion lessness and motion, between still lucidity and plot, between seeing and doing—are not absolute or mutually exclusive. Motionless seeing can be exciting, like the surprise of a caravan. The seeming opposites are complementary in the composition of a novel. What do you do with beauty? You render it, but you do so with care and contemplation—you let it express itself and in doing so engage and expand it.

Isabel’s beauty is captured magnificently, and it is inseparable from the beauty of the book. In an era when writerly style still seems to be synonymous with Hemingway—show don’t tell, short simple sentences, avoid adjectives; that’s the advice you get in writing class—James’s style goes in for a beating. It is never colloquial. Too many people “murmur vaguely,” and even James’s greatest admirers make fun of locutions like “hang fire.” The general view of James’s disparagers was summed up by H. L. Mencken: “Henry James would have been vastly improved as a novelist by a few whiffs of the Chicago stockyards” (A Mencken Chrestomathy, p. 500). But those words parody themselves; they don’t require response. James’s prose is not muscular; it is superfine. His words are chosen with mind-boggling precision. Rarely does James wax poetical—minimally or maximally; there’s nothing showy here. The narrative voice in The Portrait of a Lady is the voice of an artist, methodically and painstakingly composing the complexity of his portrait, each word a tiny careful brush stroke, and when as an observer you stand before the picture you are immediately taken under the sway of its subject. But bend forward, please, as you read, toward the canvas, and you will be dizzied by the perfect precision with which the sentences, the paragraphs, and the whole cohere in plot and contemplation to bring forth the liveliness and high aesthetics of Isabel and her portrait, this book. James may have felt uneasy about plot, but his devotion to the novel was absolute. And so this combination of committed storytelling and aestheticized meditation—James the Fabulist and James the Refined Dealer in Forms and Figures—combine to create a portrait that neither alone could achieve. As he remarks in the 1906 preface: