84
PARTISAN REVIEW
Thing
"should be a little gem of bright quick vivid form." The fable
~ji...
1here is so resiliently designed and brings ou0 his ideas about
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thr~ugh
so many deft symbols that nothing short of the whole can
_..,;;;,_,#-
properly convey its effect. But James' main convictions may be sug–
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gested by recalling the situation. Major Monarch and his wife, the
real social thing, are desperately out of funds and want to sit for
illustrations for a modern society novel. The painter-narrator is
touched by their plight and reluctantly takes them on, but is imme-
diately faced with a whole series of problems. He has a detestation of
the amateur in art, and an awareness of the stultification involved in
type-casting-indeed, he is very like James in his deep-rooted desire
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for character instead of types. Moreover, he confesses to an innate
l
preference for appearance over reality, for "the represented subject
over the real one."
~
Does
this
mean that his art is an escape, a hollow evasion of ex-
perience as. Wells found James? The answer involves James' whole–
hearted repudiation of realistn as mere literal reporting. The painter's
regular model, Miss Churm, is anything but the real thing. She is a
freckled cockney, but a clever actress and so a constantly ·shifting
challenge to fresh embodiment; whereas the Major's wife, a lady cer–
tainly, "is always the same lady" and soon comes to look "singularly
like a bad illustration." The show-down occurs when a little Italian
model turns up with the confident belief that he can pose for an
English gentleman far better than the massive Major. He soon proves
that he is as good as Miss Churm, "who could look, when requested,.
like an Italian." His brilliant mimetic gift illustrates the necessary
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doctrine of imitation for any branch of art. It tells the painter again
\
what he already knew, that action must be heightened by
s~lization,
if
art is to convey the
~e
and not the accidents of life. And so he
is forced to turn away the Monarchs, with James' experienced and
now thoroughly anti-transcendental "lesson": "that in the deceptive
atmosphere of art even the highest respectability may fail of being
plastic."
A kind of grace note to this discussion, concentrating directly on
the
art
of fiction, is sounded by
The Story In It.
One of the shortest
of James' compositions, it amounts to another condensed parable of
his material and method. Maud Blessingbourne's fondness for French
novels and D'Annunzio is in contrast with the simple absorption in
life of her hostess, Mrs. Dyott. An afternoon visit is paid by Colonel
