Henry James, _The Outcry_

 YOU DON'T HEAR about this one much—it’s the last novel James completed, published in 1911. Don’t go in hoping for anything like The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl, or The Ambassadors, though, for you will be (as I was) disappointed.

For one thing, it comes from an idea James had for a play. As such, the novel is mainly scenes of dialogue, and particularly ponderous dialogue at that, as it carries much of the novel’s exposition and tends toward people staking out debate positions rather than having conversations. The sympathetic characters line up tidily opposite the not-so-sympathetic, and there is a not-very-interesting romance that tips towards matrimony by the novel’s end. The Outcry seems more the work of James the would-be playwright than James the novelist…and that’s not good.

For another, the novel is (by James’s standards) topical, and the topic is probably of slender interest for a contemporary reader. James was inspired by a 1909 newspaper-led campaign to dissuade the Duke of Norfolk from selling an Old Master painting his family owned (Holbein’s The Duchess of Milan) to the American millionaire Henry Frick. (The campaign succeeded, and the portrait is now in the National Gallery in London, not in the Frick Collection in New York City.)

In The Outcry, Lord Theign is in embarrassed enough circumstances (thanks to daughter Kitty’s gambling debts) that he is tempted by American millionaire Breckinridge Bender’s interest in a Joshua Reynolds portrait of one of Theign’s ancestors. Stakes are raised when a bright young English connoisseur, Hugh Crimble, spots another of Theign’s families Old Master paintings as the work of an Old Master other than the one to whom it has been long attributed, making it much rarer and more valuable.

Theign is meanwhile hoping that his younger daughter, Grace, will agree to marry Lord John. Lord John is serving as middleman for Bender, probably in hopes that the painting’s sale will pump up Grace's marriage settlement. But Grace has eyes for…Hugh Crimble.

It all seems a bit on the rattletrap side, doesn’t it?  I have read about two dozen novels or short novels by James, and The Outcry, I’m sorry to say, is the first one that seemed to me not really worth the reading.