Benvolio

Benvolio is an early short story by Henry James, first published in the Galaxy magazine in August 1875 and later collected in The Madonna of the Future and Other Tales. It is one of his more openly allegorical pieces from the 1870s and one of the strangest of his early works in tone.

The story follows a young man named Benvolio who lives in two distinct apartments connected by a hidden door. One apartment is austere, scholarly, and overlooks a quiet street. The other is luxurious, social, and looks onto a busy public square. Benvolio moves between the two as the mood takes him. In one he reads philosophy and writes serious verse. In the other he entertains visitors, courts a beautiful and worldly woman, and lives the life of a man about town. The story develops as Benvolio is courted on both sides, by an austere scholarly young woman who lives the life of the mind and by the brilliant Countess who represents everything social and worldly, and he cannot decide between them.

The whole structure is openly allegorical. James himself called the story a fable in a letter to a friend, and the two women clearly represent the two competing pulls in any artistic life, the pull toward solitude and serious work and the pull toward society and pleasure. The resolution James gives is not the easy one of a conventional moral tale. Benvolio’s eventual choice is partial and unsatisfying in a way that probably reflects the question James was actually living through in his own life at the same period.

The story is about thirty pages and works as a single sitting read. It is interesting now mostly as an example of James working in an explicitly allegorical mode he would later mostly abandon. It pairs naturally with The Madonna of the Future and with The Author of Beltraffio, two other short stories about the artistic life from his early and middle periods.