Of Sacred Art and the Artist: Henry James's "The Altar of the Dead"

In "The Altar of the Dead" Henry James examines the nature of both sacred art and the artist who creates it. His aesthetic gentleman, George Stransom, visualizes internal images, imagines types and frames, arranges objects, expects interpretation of his work (a lighted altar), and yearns for immortality like any other maker. However, because generating sacred art requires beatitude in the creator, Stransom's intolerance, pride, and need to objectify people hinder its completion. Only the descent of charity and Stransom's forgiveness of his enemy, Acton Hague, allow for compositional harmony and the artwork's final execution. Set in a Catholic church, the altar even comes to embody the three Scholastic requirements for beauty: integrity, proportion, and radiance. Some critics have denied value to this tale, deploring what they believe to be its sentimentality and perverted vision of love. Others have been more positive but found in the story only psychological significance. In contrast, I believe that "The Altar of the Dead" depicts a true understanding of caritas, displays irony regarding its epiphanies, and reflects on theological as well as psychological truths. Redemption does not occur without cost: Stransom's charity could not have blossomed without the sometimes troubling influence of eros; Stransom and Hague could not have achieved their apotheoses without the aid (and suffering) of an unnamed woman. Grace may redeem individuals, but it does not obviate past selfishness. James always balances sublimity with a clear-headed awareness of the mixed motives and conflicted emotions with which it interweaves. George Stransom, an older man of affairs, habitually lights mental candles for his dead, a habit designed to respect their memories and maintain a tie with the living. Visiting a suburban London church, he conceives the idea of externalizing his vision in the form of a side altar. The table, soon ablaze with light, attracts the devotion of a middle-aged woman. Over time Stransom becomes intimate with this unnamed woman and discovers, to his shock, that she has been mourning her lover Acton Hague, a former best friend excluded from Stransom's dead because of an ancient betrayal. This revelation suspends intimacy between Stransom and the woman as the man, unforgiving, finds himself unable to light a candle for Hague. At length, haunted, sick, and dying, Stransom visits the church and beholds the face of his long-deceased fiancee, Mary Antrim, within its lights. Infused with her generous spirit, Stransom forgives Hague and finds that he can mentally insert the last candle his altar needs for symmetry. Desperate to pass on this revelation, Stransom turns and finds the woman, who, inexplicably, has discovered that she can forgive his cold-heartedness and return to honor his dead. Evidently thinking of Hague, Stransom exclaims that there is room for "just one more," but the shocked woman demurs because in her eyes the "one more" is Stransom himself, whose "face [now] had the whiteness of death." (1) Though not an artist by vocation, Stransom is what Krishna Baldev Vaid describes as a man of "vision" (218). At the tale's outset his life, which had been "fill[ed] to the brim" by the presence of Mary Antrim, has been emptied by her death (450). Turning away from the pain of the actual, Stransom, in the manner of an expressionist artist, fills his internal canvas with images. These images do not originate in the material world. At Mary's grave site, for example, he does not actually see the grave; rather, his eyes open "to another light," a realm where the deceased may be condensed to a "simplified[,] intensified essence" (451). Rearing an altar "in his spiritual spaces," Stransom creates a harbinger of the artwork, a conjuring that escapes mere subjective fancy through its unconscious connection to archetypes. Confronted with a lighted altar, Stransom perceives how, "if occasions like this had been more frequent in his life[,] he would have been more frequently conscious of the great original type, set up in a myriad temples, of the unapproachable shrine he had erected in his mind" (457). …