“The pious secret of how to wait for us”: The Adaptation of the Ruskinian Picturesque in Henry James’s Venetian Essays

The essay examines the Venetian essays included in Henry James’s Italian Hours (1909) in relation to the aesthetic category of the picturesque, discussing textual revision and the ways in which the writer progressively returned to the concept, transformed it, and blatantly deployed it in a fashion that was consistent with John Ruskin’s own ultimate understanding of it in the last volumes of Modern Painters. The essay contends that it is indeed in the Venetian essays that one can find significant evidence of James’s enduring dialogue with Ruskin and his aesthetic theories. Far from emerging as a trite convention, the revived picturesque in James’s essays proves to be a valid means to understand the effects of modernization in Venice and to remind the reader of its eternal, but fragile, beauty.