Even though coded, the connections James makes in expressing his passion permeates the consciousness of his readers. On the first page of Erwin Panofsky's Problems in Titian, the following sentence is found: "This discussion must start, however, with a few introductory remarks enabling us to 'place,' as Henry James would say, the works to be considered later" (Panofsky 1). James is being used referentially but without any context--as if the connection is implicit. Certainly James's enthusiasm in regard to Titian's work is well documented. His thorough study of Titian was not limited only to the painter's works; James was also familiar with the artisans with whom the Venetian master surrounded himself. James wrote passionately about Tintoretto, who claimed to be Titian's student. To help improve his Italian, James recited the poetic works of Titian's close friend, Ariosto. Obviously James had an intimate investment in several aspects of Titian's life, but how can a reader not take notice of the non-contextual referencing used by Panofsky? Similarly, in the latest James biography, Novick asserts that James "would in some degree model his work upon the painter's [Titian]" (Novick 198). How this modeling after Titian would be approached and executed are left to the reader's imagination. Panofsky and Novick both seem to be hedging around a Jamesian/Titian, and more broadly a Jamesian/visual art, construction, which they both acknowledge but keep silent about. As I have shown, the homoerotic subtext found in James's fiction is borne out of his remapping homoeroticism onto art. The Ambassadors, written in 1903, illustrates how fine art represents James's expression of homoerotic/romantic expression. Unlike in James's literary detection stories, the negotiation of desire in The Ambassadors is metaphoric. While, as I have shown, the literary portrays James's struggle with same-sex desire, fine art (and artists) portray James's celebration of that desire.

By looking at certain passages from The Ambassadors apart from the novel as a whole, trying not to reconcile a character's established sexual orientation with the homoerotic subtext, a reader can begin to detect James's remapping strategy. For example, the reader is obviously intended to view the novel's protagonist, Lambert Strether, as a heterosexual character. He begins the novel with aspirations of marrying a wealthy widow and is also given a would-be love interest in the character of Maria Gostrey. Yet when Strether meets the great artist Gloriani, a palpable attraction is ignited inside Strether. Because he is intended to be viewed as a heterosexual character, the reader is left to wonder to whom do these homoerotic feelings belong. I suggest they belong to James himself.

To say that the character of Gloriani is meant to represent a Titian-like character would perhaps suggest more of a direct connection than the text of the novel will support. Even so, Gloriani is certainly infused with the same passion and excitement with which James wrote about the painter. Further separating Gloriani from Titian is the medium used by James's fictional artist. Unlike Titian, Gloriani is a great sculptor. Just as James's personal interest in Titian must have inspired the character of Gloriani, James's personal interest in a young sculptor named Hendrik Andersen must have influenced the choice of the medium of James's fictional artist.

By the time The Ambassadors was published James had become infatuated with Andersen. In reference to the correspondence between James and the ambitious Andersen, Edel states that:

"there is a quality of passion and possession in [James's] . . . reiterated 'I hold you close,' 'I feel, my dear boy, my arms around you,' or 'I meanwhile pat you affectionately on the back, across the Alps and Apennines, I draw you close, I hold you long.' In letters written to Andersen in 1902 on the death of the sculptor's elder brother, James enjoins him, as from Olympus, to 'lean on me as on a brother and a lover.' " Edel, Life 497

The echoes of both Andersen and Titian are present in Gloriani. James melds the two artists, using what most excites him about each: the homoerotic tie he feels for Anderson (who was not too successful an artist); and Titian's wild artistic success (although he was heterosexual).

James uses his Titian/Andersen-inspired character as a conduit for homoeroticism by using a ploy from his earlier writing. He refers to the great artist Gloriani as having a face "like an open letter in a foreign tongue" (James, Ambassadors 199). To the casual reader such a statement may sound poetic and imaginatively pleasing. For a reader who is looking at James through a queer lens, a familiar Jamesian tactic can be detected: the use of foreign languages as a code for homosexual expression. For example, as mentioned earlier in "The Pupil," Pemberton refers to Morgan as "puzzling as a page in an unknown language . . . . Indeed the whole mystic volume in which the boy had been bound demanded some practice in translation" (James, Pupil 414). A foreign tongue as a metaphor for homoeroticism accurately characterizes James's own struggle to understand his sexuality.

The queer desire in the novel is oddly disembodied, dispersed between characters who, outside of the passages I will discuss, seem to be strictly heterosexual. In particular, Strether is such a character. James is slowly, almost shyly, starting to reveal the homoeroticism Strether feels towards Gloriani in the passage where the American meets the artist. The striking difference between the homoerotics in The Ambassadors and all of the short stories I have discussed is the absence of a homosexual locus. While all of the narrators I have discussed can be interpreted as locations of homosexual desire, The Ambassador's narrator is almost non-existent. The occasional "our friend" reminds the reader of the narrator's presence. Yet when the narrator does emerge from the text, so, too, does the homoerotics.

The physical parts of Gloriani which the narrator describes and the way the narrator describes them is sensual: "tongue," "eyes," "lips," "handsome face," "delight," "dazzling." The narrator tells how Gloriani "shone in a constellation" (James, Ambassadors 199). Just as the ancient Greeks placed their heroes and lovers among the stars, so too does the narrator. Putting Gloriani among the stars is only the first Hellenic reference. References to ancient Greece having long been used (especially in James's time) to intimate homosexuality by many artists, James is surely aware of the homosexual implications he is making.

Perhaps part of James's attraction to Titian's work was because the painter could as easily paint a bacchanal as he could a Christian myth. Not surprisingly, James's interest was focused more strongly on Titian's Pagan-inspired work. James was unmoved by The Assumption; "it seemed to him only a great work of the second class, a masterpiece of technique" (Novick 198). In a letter to his intimate friend John La Forge, himself a painter, dated June 20th, 1869, James spoke of the "great Titan--the Bacchus and Ariadne--a thing to go barefoot to see; as likewise his portrait of Ariosto. Ah, John! What a painter! For him, me thinks, I'd give you all the rest" (Edel, Letters 39). James uses the same excited tone in Strether's encounter with Gloriani. The narrator tells how Gloriani's accomplishments "crown him, for his guest [Strether], with the light, with the romance, of glory" (James, Ambassadors 199). The use of the word "romance" is significant. Due to the protagonist's attraction to the sculptor, "the romance of Gloriani" would seem to make more sense or, perhaps, the "glory of romance." The homoromantics of these lines are magnified by the sexual awakening of the next sentence: "Strether, in contact with that element as he had never yet so intimately been, had the consciousness of opening to it, for the happy instant, all the windows of his mind, of letting this rather grey interior drink in for once the sun of a clime not marked in his old geography" (James, Ambassadors 199). The gray interior of his mind drinks in "that element" with which Strether is in intimate contact. At first glance it appears that James is being lazy when he uses such an imprecise phrase like "that element," but this is not the case. The "element" which James cannot bring himself to write about is homosexuality.

James's use of "clime" rather than "climate" is also significant, a choice that seems to suggest the Greek root "klima." By using "clime" in conjunction with associating the sculptor with light by using words such as "dazzling," "lustre," "shone," and the sun, James draws upon the image of Apollo--a potent homoerotic image. James flips the myth of Apollo and Hyacinth². Instead of having the god raise the mortal into the night sky, Strether raises Gloriani to celestial heights, "he shone in a constellation." Such homoeroticism is what Strether finds "not marked in his old geography." In a rather simple phrase, James accurately and poetically captures the feeling of being homosexual in a pre-Stonewall age of ignorance and anxiety.

Once James constructs the sexually charged image of Gloriani, steeped in a homosexual subtext, he inserts a rather obvious double entendre.

He was to remember again repeatedly the medal-like Italian face, in which every line was an artist's own . . . held by the sculptor's eyes. He was n't soon to forget them, was to think of them, all unconscious . . . as the source of the deepest . . . sounding to which he had ever been exposed. He was in fact quite to cherish his vision of it, to play with it in idle hours [my italics]; only speaking of it to no one and quite aware he could n't have spoken without appearing to talk nonsense. James, Ambassadors 200

James has Strether fantasizing about the sculptor which is then followed by "to play with it in idle hours." Grammatically the "it" refers to the protagonist's vision of the sculptor yet there is also a masturbatory intimation. This kind of overt sexual reference is not anomalous in James's writing.

Strether feeling he can speak "of it to no one and quite aware he couldn't have spoken without appearing to talk nonsense," explains how James himself must have felt about his passions for Andersen. Unable to openly voice homoerotic desires, how could he express himself in the heterocentric society? To voice such affections would have seemed to be, as James puts it, "nonsense." Unlike Strether, James has an alternative; in what are the most often quoted lines from The Ambassadors, James passionately advocates against a closeted lifestyle. "Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It does n't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you have n't had that what have you had?" (James, Ambassadors 215). Strether speaks these impassioned words to his young friend, Little Bilham. The boy's approach, just after Strether meets Gloriani, triggers a sense of regret--Strether has waited too long and now in his advanced years his chance for love has passed. Little Bilham becomes representative of the next generations of gay men whom James wants to reach with his message of life.

Strether's giving this advice to Little Bilham is not surprising. Throughout the novel he is referred to as "submissive" and "responsive" to Strether. Both of these characteristics as well as the age difference echoes the relationship between Morgan and Pemberton in "The Pupil." Little Bilham is also part of James's remapping of desire. In Chapter II of Book Third, Strether meets the boy at the Louvre. Given James's remapping, the Parisian epicenter of artistic viewing is a potent symbol for him. He specifies exactly where Strether meets Little Bilham--"before one of the splendid Titians--the overwhelming portrait of the young man with the strangely-shaped glove and the blue-grey eyes" (James, Ambassadors 145). While the mentioning of Titian may be foreshadowing the later appearance of Gloriani in the novel, the choice of which of Titian's works Strether meets Little Bilham under (symbolic of the next generation of homosexual men) is certainly strategic.

Titian's Man with a Glove (see appendix I) is a potent image for James. As an early Titian (painted in the 1520s), the figure in the portrait is not traditionally separated from the viewer by a parapet. Titian, attempting to distance himself from his mentor, Giorgione, by removing the interposing structure of a parapet, offers the viewer a more accessible image. Nothing stands between viewer and subject. In Titian: Prince of Painters, Man with a Glove is described as a "skillful contrast between the dynamic right hand with the extended finger holding the clothes, and the abandon of the left hand covered by the glove that holds the other glove" (Tiziano 192) as underlining "the energetic and sweet nature of the model, implied by the features of his face" (Tiziano 192). Also pointed out in Titian is the popularity of the portrait in the 1860s (when James viewed it) due to the nostalgic and romantic beauty of the model.

Not all of Titian's portraits were as romanticized as Man with a Glove. Many of his works were seen as unabashedly erotic, "so overtly erotic . . . that they disturbed nineteenth-century critics" (Piper 145). Titian's The Venus of Urbino is an example of the painter's unabashed erotic imagery. David Piper, in The Illustrated History of Art, asserts that "Titian's nude is aware of her own beauty and invites appraisal from admiring eyes" (Piper 145). Such invitation to appraisal is not restricted only to Titian's nudes. Man with a Glove has the same invitational quality which must have been apparent to James. The head of the young man in the portrait is turned slightly away from the viewer with a non-threatening expression of casual unawareness. While he looks away, his right hand gathers the drapery of his mantle, lifting the heavy clothing out of the way as if to expose himself. The gloved left hand, in conjunction with the direction of the young man's wrist, points to the area below the figure's waistline which is being exposed by the lifting of his clothing. A "dexterous compositional arrangements, create a kind of 'three-spot' relationship" (de la Croix 649) which direct the viewer's attention below the picture's frame and below the figure's belt.

To reduce Titian's Man with a Glove to a simple homoerotic "pin-up" would be unfair to the depth of feeling the painting inspires as well as unfair to the complexity James assigns to the image. Hourticq is cited as describing the figure as being "animated by an 'ardent melancholy' " (Tiziano 192). This sense of despondency must have also attracted James to the portrait. It may have come to symbolize the unattainable physical relationship he sought from his older brother, William James. In his introduction to "A Light Man," Edel explains the "homoerotic feelings that Henry must have had for his brother William and which William sensed and feared" (Edel, Life 82). Certainly Titian's painting was significant to the brothers. Edel's biography offers a pair of photos taken of the brothers in 1860 when Henry was only 17 (see appendix II). They are "apparently posing in imitation of Titian's Man with Glove in the Louvre" (Edel, Life 180). Titian's evocative portrait symbolizes the complicated feelings of desire and anxiety as well as excitement and fear which wore on James's consciousness his entire life.

Because James felt that he could not directly voice his homoerotic passion (for his brother or anyone else) in his writing, he needed a substitute which held meaning for him and which could be decoded by other homosexual readers. James discusses same-sex passion and warns against waiting until all the chances for love are gone. Once a reader discovers James's subtext, he or she can appreciate an entirely new level of meaning and depth. James's acceptance of his sexuality late in life and regret for time lost and opportunities missed were not in vain. Through the use of the art world, and Titian in particular, James sends a message of carpe diem to future generations of queer readers.

James's poignancy in regard to the sexuality he discovered late in life compels a reader to engage in a self-reflective reading of his work. By examining the intricacies of sexuality in James's texts, we gain a better understanding of both James's world and our own. There are still those who confuse sexuality in James with sex, chasing after proof of James's hetero- or homosexuality based solely upon sex he may or may not have engaged in. What these readers (e.g., Edel, Novick, and Seymour) fail to understand is that "sexuality is not reducible to what you do in bed; unlike sex, which is a biological category, sexuality is a cultural, a discursive, category--perhaps the category whereby we learn, in this culture, to make sense of the world" (Litvak 20). James understood the link between sexuality and culture. Through his use of sexuality in characters ranging from Max and Pemberton to the (at times) unabashedly homoromantic narrator of The Ambassadors, James interprets the world around him.

The gulf of experience and expression between the early short stories on the one hand and "The Author of Beltraffio" and The Ambassadors on the other represents an incredible maturation of self-knowledge. James's writing offers a unique evolution of sexual consciousness at the very point when homosexuality as an identity enters the cultural consciousness. While James felt the necessity to code the (dis)course of his sexuality, he offers a negotiable route which still engages readers with its bare honesty and humbling surrender to living life at all costs: "It's a mistake not to."