72
PARTISAN REVIEW
(1888) and
The Author of Beltraffio
(1884), deal, in different ways,
with the split between life and art. The one "lesson" which Henry
St. George drills into young Paul Overt is not to be like him. The
Master has reaped all the material rewards of a successful writer, but
he has ceased to write. important books and has come to look like
"a lucky stockbroker." The choice that he insists upon between the
world and the supremely exacting mistre..."-S of art may sound curiously
dated to a generation whose most effective symbol of the artist has
been a figure like Malraux, gathering the knowledge for his writing
as he served in the air force for Loyalist Spain. But the half century
since Henry ·St. George has known far more stream-lined ways of
selling out than that smooth English gentleman ever dreamed of, and
the choice still remains, even
if
not cast in James' monastic terms.
Equally dated
is
"the gospel of art" enunciated by Mark Ambient
in the pages of his masterpiece
Beltraffio.
The
donnee
here, as James
indicated in a still unpublished notebook, came to him from an
anecdote he had ,heard about John Addington Symonds (not about
Stevenson, as has long been 'the gossip). A situation was suggested
by the reported cleavage between Symonds and his wife, who, in no
sort of sympathy with his books, disapproved of their tone as "im–
moral, pagan, hyperaesthetic." The story which James invented to
dramatize such a situation concentrated on the battle between Mark
Ambient and his conventionally Chric;tian wife over the control of
their child, and reached its lurid climax in her deliberately letting
the boy die from an attack of diphtheria rather than expose him to
what she conceived to be the corruption of his pagan father.
J
arne.<;
worked under two handicaps here. He made Mark Am–
bient so completely the correct English gentleman that he hardly
succeeds in persuading us that he had really imagined him as a pagan
sensualist. And increasing
this
unreality is the fact that he set himself
to dramatize the aesthetic gospel of the eighties .without quite indi–
cating, perhaps without being quite sure at this stage of his develop–
ment, exactly how much of it he accepted for himself. He was later
to portray in
The Tragic Muse
(
1890), the brilliant futility of the
aesthetic in the eerie figure of Gabriel Nash. In
The Author of Bel–
traflio
he made some fine humorous thrusts at the excesses of the
movement. Nature faithfully copied art in Ambient's surroundings;
even the creepers on the brown old walls appeared to have been
borrowed from a pre-Raphaelite masterpiece. And as though in revenge
