BOOKS
519
sive with the world in which he lived, breathed, and had his be–
ing. He probably drew more
vital
sustenance from the written
word than any other modern master of comparable stature, Joyce
alone excepted.
Tintner did not begin "by looking for the literary models
lurking in James's fiction. They sprang out of [her] reading."
His appropriation, she believes, is a form of criticism. "The
reader cannot say where his fiction ends or his criticism be–
gins," but when James "redoes" another writer whose classic
"has been encoded in a James story, a process of extended rela–
tions begins that seems to be endless." The astonishing result of
Tintner's analyses shows a fantastically varied assortment of
models revamped for inclusion as analogies or metaphors within
a given tale.
Gulliver's Travels Part IV
is revealed to be the literary
analogue written into "Lady Barberina," a tale in which eques–
trian terms, culture, and names are the net in which James
catches with his "caustic wit" the heartless matrimonial market
ruthlessly engaged in by American millionaires and English
aristocrats. James shows how a "boy's book" by Robert Louis
Stevenson could be written into "The Pupil" simply by using the
vocabulary from
Treasure Island
as well as the relation between a
youth and an older mentor from
Kidnapped.
What happens, iron–
ically, is that James's most honored prototypes (for example, .
Shakespeare, Balzac, Meredith) are the ones most likely to un–
dergo drastic remodeling. A new and exhilarating freedom
emerges whenever such bold liberties are taken. At least some of
the premises on which the exemplars were grounded are set
aside and replaced with a set of assumptions sufficiently different
from-yet still sufficiently close to-those established by the
original artists: his true ancestors.
Adeline Tintner's fascinating study attests to James's
incredibly large intellectual appetite (matched only by that of
Goethe) for appropriating as much of the world's great literature
as it is possible for one single author to encompass. The impor–
tance of her studies lies in the detailed and heuristic analysis of
how this "appetite projects itself' on Milton for James's twin nov–
els,
The Wings of the Dove
and
The Golden Bowl,
on Novalis for ''The
Blue Flower" in
Roderick Hudson,
and on to Tolstoy and "Le
Roman Russe" for
The Awkward Age.
