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Henry James considered writing and painting partner arts, for as he said in his famous treatise "The Art of Fiction," one type of artist "paints a pic ture" and the other "writes a novel."1 In fact, James spoke of them using similar language, often conflating the two arts through metaphor or anal ogy, and even used the same criteria to evaluate their merits. Indeed, the only artistic reference more frequent in James' fiction than writing is the trope of painting.2 His highest compliment to a writer came frequently in the way of such comparisons. In an early review, James describes Carlyle's "great merits" of expression as striking "tones in the picture,"3 and in his critical study of Hawthorne he claims that The Scarlet Letter has "hung an ineffaceable image in the portrait gallery, the reserved inner cabinet, of literature."4 In both cases, the central metaphor of painting is crucial for expressing excellence in writing. In an 1899 letter, James attempts to de scribe the elusive quality in common with the great writers, saying that they are "big painters."5 Continuing in the vein of painterly terms, James admires "the picture of American life on Mr. Howells's canvas" and claims that Howells' talent is based on the fact that his "work is so exclusively a matter of painting what he sees"6?yet again conflating the pen and the brush. About his own novel The Bostonians, he speaks of having "drawn" and "painted" a "portrait from life."7 He believed, in the final analysis, that the sister arts of writing and paint ing grew out of the same source and the same creative process. As he con tends in "The Art of Fiction," "the analogy between the art of the painter and the art of the novelist is, so far as I am able to see, complete. Their inspiration is the same, their process (allowing for the different quality of |
