A Smashing of Idols
Henry James’s first novel explores the choices all artists must make, between the pursuit of truth and beauty and the surrender to self-idolization.
Review by Katy Carl
Artists—and humans—all eventually have to make this choice: Are we going to chase the things that matter, the things that last, where for artists the chase means the attempt to make things that bring others’ attention to what matters and lasts? Or are we going to chase something else—money, fun, infatuation, or that same attention of others which we once hoped to direct beyond ourselves?
As Henry James’s first full novel, Roderick Hudson, traces one artist’s answers, the resulting tragedy drives us as readers to marshal our own answers into line.
Hudson, though his name tops the billing and his choices dominate the novel’s action, is not the novel’s point-of-view character. That honor is reserved for the much more stable Rowland Mallet, who is one of James’s recording angels: characters who, without being main drivers of the action, are in some way entangled in it and positioned to further it. Mallet’s multifarious entanglement with Hudson is at once financial, aesthetic, and emotional. A wealthy native of a sleepy Massachusetts village, an appreciator of the arts recently returned home after a European tour, Mallet would like to do something beneficent to improve the taste and education of his home state. He thinks for example of donating money or artwork to a local museum (in Boston, it’s implied). But none of his ideas are appealing enough to give him the energy to act.
Then Mallet meets Roderick Hudson, a fantastically talented though mercurial young sculptor whose high-strung, puritanical mother is, from motives of practicality, forcing him to study law. On seeing the works Hudson has already made, Mallet is thunderstruck. They’re already as fine as anything Mallet saw in Italy—finer, maybe. What could Hudson do if he had more formation, more time, more resources? To let him become a country lawyer, to let him dwindle away in this cow town, would be an egregious waste of God-given gifts.
Without losing a moment, Mallet invites Hudson to return with him to Italy, to see and be formed by the fine art of the ages. More than that, Mallet orders “a dozen statues” from Hudson—and pays him in advance. Hudson riots with joy: He will not have to study law anymore. He offloads his books and, in a moment of rather overt symbolism, smashes the bust he has modeled of his law professor. Though Mallet hopes that what he is initiating will turn out to be a friendship of virtue, not one of utility, Hudson’s whirligig moods are already giving him pause.
Still, the next boat leaves for Italy with Mallet and Hudson on it—and on that boat, we find out that Hudson has gotten himself engaged to a hometown girl, Mary Garland, with whom Mallet is also secretly in love.
Like many an artist before and since, Hudson finds that he has a penchant for indolence, intoxicants, and the company of beautiful women.
Soon the two men settle down (in different apartments) in Rome, where Hudson swiftly makes inroads into the city’s artist community and dashes off more of his signature, extraordinary work, to loud acclaim. Yet in the narration, informed by Mallet’s sadder, later knowledge, James ominously lets us know that Hudson will never do anything finer than the work he does in this period.
We soon find out why: Like many an artist before and since, Hudson finds that he has a penchant for indolence, intoxicants, and the company of beautiful women. As soon as he has the resources to indulge that penchant, this is all he really feels motivated to do. Yes, the studio still appeals, when the mood strikes: but then, the studio is work. Ladies, in this time and place, mean leisure. And Hudson can even make the disingenuous argument that his chattering flirtations and inebriations ironically provide him with the only Puritan-approved stripe of leisure: the brief lapse that recharges and refills the hard worker to grind out still more hard work.
So Mallet indulges Hudson at first. He sends him off to Germany for what is supposed to be a walking holiday in the country and, when Hudson instead winds up acting the fool at Baden-Baden, Mallet pays his gambling debts. Hudson comes back to Rome and makes another brief effort, but soon he is in trouble again, playing the spoiled rockstar a hundred years ahead of his time: sulking instead of sculpting, quarrelling with clients, getting falling-down drunk, disappearing altogether.
It’s also at this stage that Hudson shakes off his bevy of beauties and falls desperately in love with the stunning Christina Light, a cold-hearted, keenly intelligent Machiavellian socialite engaged to a Neapolitan prince. To follow her wherever she wishes to go soon becomes the only freedom Hudson asks—of life, of Mallet, of anyone. He wants only Christina as a model; he turns down the dozen other society ladies who want to be “done in the same style, mutatis mutandis.” He offends existing clients and sinks into a state of apparently willful idle melancholy.
But when Mallet calls him (ever so gently) to account, Hudson protests:
I think that when you expect a man to produce beautiful and wonderful works of art you ought to allow him a certain freedom of action, you ought to give him a long rope, you ought to let him follow his fancy and look for his material wherever he thinks he may find it! … An artist can’t bring his visions to maturity unless he has a certain experience. You demand of us to be imaginative, and you deny us the things that feed the imagination. In labour we must be as passionate as the inspired sibyl; in life we must be mere machines. It won’t do! When you have got an artist to deal with, you must take him as he is, good and bad together… If you want a bird to sing, you must not cover up its cage. Shoot them, the poor devils, drown them, exterminate them, if you will, in the interest of public morality; it may be morality would gain—I dare say it would! But if you suffer them to live, let them live on their own terms and according to their own inexorable needs!
There were thousands of ways for Hudson to succeed, only a few for him to fail.
The art, rather than being the prime motive, has become the excuse for the behavior. And a thin excuse it is: Hudson, for all his initial success, has peaked. He has not by any means done all he was capable of, yet he has reached the highest point of his development. Meanwhile, he still has not established financial independence. Until he escapes that situation, he can only do, in life or in art, that which his patron will fund. And his patron has other ideas for his future—ones that Hudson does not find inspiring at all.
What becomes of Hudson from here I won’t fully detail but will simply describe as a fall from grace. Naturally that fall—this being a New England post-Puritan’s novel—carries a moral, but it isn’t the moral we might expect to find. There were thousands of ways for Hudson to succeed, only a few for him to fail. He finds one of those fateful paths and allows himself to be dragged backward down it, flailing all the way, by his well-meaning but ignorant friend; James makes us feel the sorrow and needlessness of this spectacle, even when Hudson is acting so absurdly that we might be tempted to laugh at him.
James also provides an alternative vision by way of the “light ficelle” or minor character: the artist Sam Singleton, whose last name suggests the nature of his aesthetic preoccupations (single-minded, focused). Every time Mallet happens across him, Singleton is either in a “devout” posture of attention or in the actual act of creation—sketching or painting. In their last encounter, Singleton, also a New England native, must return home to his family due to lack of finances for a second year abroad: but Singleton, in contrast to Hudson’s habitual state of dissatisfaction, returns filled with gratitude for the “treasure” of his experience, “which in Buffalo would seem infinite.”
True, Singleton does not see everything clearly—he idealizes and nearly idolizes Hudson to the end. And Mallet does not have the heart to fully disabuse Singleton of his flawed vision of the perfect artist, viewed “in radiant relief, as beautiful and as unspotted as one of his own statues.” Yet as the two men part for the last time, it is clear enough that for James it is Singleton who stands out in radiant relief, while Mallet and Hudson descend together deeper into the valley where Hudson’s gifts will be lost.
As Singleton sails away, the reader can hear the quiet echo of a seemingly casual line Mallet drops in a letter mid-novel: “I think it is established that in the long run egotism makes a failure in conduct; is it also true that it makes a failure in the arts?” Without leaning too hard on its end, James has found the fulcrum that will topple the idol of the art monster, which is the myth that artists must be ravenous for worldly pleasures and self-centered in order to succeed. As Singleton quietly points the possible alternative, James lets his own beautiful statue lose its center of gravity, tip from its pedestal, and smash.
Katy Carl is editor in chief of Dappled Things magazine and author of two books from Wiseblood Books, As Earth Without Water, a novel (2021), and Fragile Objects (2023). She is a senior affiliate fellow of the Program for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society through the University of Pennsylvania and is currently pursuing her MFA in fiction at the University of St. Thomas—Houston.
Roderick Hudson was originally published serially in the Atlantic Monthly and was released in full on November 20, 1876, by James R. Osgood and Company, Boston. It has been reprinted many times and is available from a wide variety of booksellers.
