Henry James, The Scapegoat, and the William Holman Hunts

Although evoked by the image of a caravan in the (1827-1910) did not have the close personal desert. But it is the scapegoat as Homan Hunt relationship with Henry James that Edward had portrayed it which continues to operate Burne-Jones had,l Hunt's effect on James's on Maggie's imagination as the potent and sensibility had begun very early when travel­ most extensive figure in the second half of ing with his family in England as a thirteen the novel. It is the only by a contem­ year old boy. In the summer of 1856 James porary English painter (Hunt was alive until experienced "the first fresh fruits of the Pre­ 1910 and The Golden Bowl appeared in Raphaelite effiorescence ... , The very word 1905, the year Hunt's history of Pre­ Pre-Raphaelite wore for us that intensity of Raphaelitism was published) that we find in meaning ... that thrills us in its perfection James's fiction. It is important in the novel but for one season, the prime hour of first in­ because it controls the metaphoric itiations. "2 Two years later: "Momentous to machinery. us again was to be the Academy show of The first focus is the scapegoat's con­ 1858 where there were, from the same wide gruence with Maggie. As she watches the source, still other challenges to wonder." One members of her family play bridge, they of them was Holman Hunt's The Scapegoat seemed to "put it upon her to be disposed Here James's memory plays him false be­ of. . . and she promptly saw why: because cause from all accounts it was in 1856 that she was there, and ... to charge herself with Hunt's picture was shown and that would it as the scapegoat of old, of whom she had mean that James was even younger than he once seen a terrible picture, had been charg­ records having been when he saw it. At the ed with the sins of the people and had gone show were five paintings by MUlais, Wallis's forth in the desert to sink under his burden Chatterton and Arthur Hughes's ,3 and die" (G 457). yet the picture that impressed James most The "terrible picture" can only be The was Holman's Hunt's Scapegoat "which I Scapegoat by Holman Hunt and it remember most of all finding so charged with establishes the desert and its doomed victim the awful that I was glad I saw it in as the dominant Oriental icons of the last part company-it in company and I the same: I of the novel. The weary and dirty goat stands believed or tried to believe, I should have in the desert by the Dead Sea surrounded by feared to face it all alone in a room. "4 animal skeletons, one of which he soon will That early impression became the emo­ become. The scapegoat is next transferred tional center of volume two of The Golden from Maggie to Adam who becomes Maggie's BowL the masterpiece of his late phase. It is "victim": "I sacrifice you ... to everything the climactic image taken from the East, for and to everyone" (G 480). The thirst that the coinciding with Maggie's confrontation with scapegoat has experienced in the desert is her husband's mistress and her father's wife, then shifted to Prince Amerigo, Maggie's hus­ Charlotte, and the prodUction of the final lie band, as well as to Maggie, for they both feel that saves her marriage, she sees herself in "the torment of the lost pilgrim who listens her predicament as "the scapegoa~ of old of in desert sands for the possible, the impossi­ whom she had once seen a terrible picture. "5 ble, splash of water" (G 489). It finally settles The novel is loaded with Oriental icons, from permanently on Charlotte's shoulders, for it the Oriental tiles Adam Verver, Maggie's is she who is the victim of Adam's decision father, purchases in Brighton, to a pagoda to transfer to America and Amerigo's deci­ and Mohammedan mosque and, finally, sion to abandon her for his wife. When Fan­ through the prophesies of Mrs. Assingham, ny Assingham says that Charlotte, after the sibyl of the book, to the mystery that is Adam has decided to move to America,

34 THE JOURNAL OF PRE-RAPHAELITE STUDIES