The ironically named Monarchs go on to prove inadequate models, and serve momentarily as servants before being finally bought off and dismissed from the narrator’s sight. The social instability of which they are a symptom compounds the challenge of representation which the artist faces, and the story delights in the paradoxes and contradictions which such a challenge throws up. So the distinguished appearance of Major Monarch ‘would have struck me as a celebrity if celebrities often were striking’. The narrator learns that ‘a figure with a good deal of frontage was, as one might say, almost never a public institution’. The tale begins in a comic confusion over who – artist or models – is going to pay whom. The narrator declares a Wildean ‘preference for the represented subject over the real one: the defect of the real one was so apt to be a lack of representation’. Artistic drawings of Mrs Monarch turn out, topsy turvy, to look like nothing more than ‘a copy of a photograph’. And the narrative puns zanily on figures physical, artistic and financial, on what fits and is fitting, on copies and copiousness. In the course of the tale, the ‘real thing’ proves itself to be ‘the wrong thing’: reality and aesthetic rightness are no longer in any easy relation.

If life and art are in difficulties, then what of life and the artist? At the close of ‘The Middle Years’ the dying novelist Dencombe announces oddly but movingly: ‘We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.’ Few of James’s artists have an easy time of it. It is remarkable how many tales here involve the death of the artist: ‘Greville Fane’, ‘The Middle Years’, ‘The Death of the Lion’, ‘The Figure in the Carpet’, ‘The Real Right Thing’ and – stretching the term ‘artist’ to include men of letters – ‘The Abasement of the Northmores’. While death comes all too often and all too soon, life, in the form of reciprocated and realized love, seems to elude the artist. Or perhaps the artist deliberately evades love, or he is tricked by others into such evasion – as might be the case in ‘The Lesson of the Master’. Is such evasion motivated by a concern to preserve the fineness of high art? Is it perhaps a reflection of a fear of life, and a fear of sexuality in particular? The artist tales here are a set of variations on such questions, James repeatedly configuring and reconfiguring the problems, the pressures and the pleasures of the artistic life.

ON NOT BEING THE NOVEL

One way of thinking of these tales is as jokes at the novel’s expense, the tales enjoying a freedom and a fleetingness which the nineteenth-century novel in its vast interrelatedness is always denied. That joke is there in the very title of ‘Fordham Castle’: the narrative promises us a place and then never gets there. As a novelist James often enmeshed his writing in the vast complicating history which the great family house carries – one thinks pre-eminently of Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady, but also of The Spoils of Poynton and The Golden Bowl. He thus enmeshed himself in a novelistic tradition which goes back through George Eliot, the Brontës, Austen (as, for example, the very title Mansfield Park declares) to Henry Fielding and the eighteenth century and which goes forward to D. H. Lawrence and E. M. Forster. But the tale ‘Fordham Castle’ is a comic misnomer, avoiding the English castle and instead putting itself out ‘at board’ in an anonymous Swiss pension. The tale ends with one of its protagonists finally setting off for a minor part in the novelistic Fordham Castle; the other promises to follow – but only ‘as the ghost’. The encumbrances of marriage and paternity (or, more accurately, maternity) – the very stuff of the novel – are in this tale radically and abruptly dissolved. For example, Abel Taker’s identity flickers in the dark in the ‘little momentary flame’ of a struck match. Identities in such tales have a freedom and an elusiveness more modern, more frightening and more free than the novel traditionally can accommodate: names quickly change and multiply; gender seems fluid; even the distinction between being alive or dead is put in question; and pages crowd with alter egos, alibis, doubles and ghosts.

‘Broken Wings’ too is a joke at the novel’s expense: it is the story, not of a failed relationship, but of something which fails to be a relationship – and the curious final reparation in the coming together of Stuart Straith and Mrs Harvey in a mutuality of failure at the tale’s close. In the wonderfully elaborated joke of the tale’s opening, the protagonists hover uncertainly at the periphery of the novelistic events of a country-house weekend, but the meetings characteristic of novels do not get underway, since throughout luncheon and dinner ‘no sound and no sign from the other had been picked up by either’. Indeed Straith is left wondering at ‘the special oddity – for it was nothing else – of his being there at all’. ‘Broken Wings’ is, moreover, a vengeful snub to another great art form: our two characters go to the theatre, attending the opening night of a play set to run for three years and more, and manage to take in precisely nothing of the drama playing before them.