82
PARTISAN REVIEW
To that Wells could only reply: "I don't clearly understand you
concluding phrases- which shows no doubt how completely they
7
define our difference. When you say 'it is art that
makes
life, mak
interest, makes importance,' I can only read sense into it by assumin
>
that you are using 'art' for every conscious human activity. I use the
word for a research and attainment that is technical and special.'
That draws the central issue between them as sharply as possible
l
since the emptiness or living intricacy of the figure in James' carpe
depends on whether he was using "art" as a mystical abracadabra or
with verifiable comprehension of the enormous value he imputes to it.
3
Three other stories, written at widely spaced intervals, may be
added to the group with which we started to give us James' answer
most compactly.
The Madonna of the Future
(1873) can tell
us
}
why he saw so much value in art.
The Real Thing
(
1893) is
his
most
intimate fable of what that value consists in.
The Story In It
(1903)
can demonstrate that art "makes life" only to the degree that it rises
from, and, in turn, serve.s to heighten felt experience.
The Madonna of the Future
is one of James' earliest real ac–
complishments, though it may seem still very "literary," with the
detail of its unachieved canvas taken over. from Balzac's
L (JI Chef·
d'oeuvre inconnu,
and the speech of a Florentine painter quoted frorn
Musset. But it puts very affectingly many of the problems of the
7
beginning artist, and it vibrates with James' peculiarly high spiritual
notes. It sprang from his own first immersion in Italian art, which had
been followed by a reluctant return home. In part, therefore, the
story dramatizes the special case of the American, as .James had be·
gun to feel the burden of it. The old Yankee painter, who has lived
out his life in Florence, confesses sadly, and James' own anxiety is in
his voice: "We're the disinherited of Art! We're condemned to
be
superficial! We're excluded from the magic circle! The soil of Amer·
ican perception is a poor little barren artificial deposit! Yes, we're
wedded to imperfection! An American, to excel, has just .ten times
as much to learn as a Europe'an! We lack the deeper sense! We have
neither tact nor force! How
should
we have them? Our crude and
garish climate, our silent past, our deafening present. . . . We poor
aspirants must live in perpetual exile." To which the young narrator
rejoins, speaking for James' hopes: "Nothing is so idle as to talk about
