Henry James, Impressionism, and the Public

Daniel Hannah

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317122555
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire pour la littérature comparée

Proposing a new approach to Jamesian aesthetics, Daniel Hannah examines the complicated relationship between Henry James's impressionism and his handling of 'the public.' Hannah challenges solely phenomenological or pictorial accounts of literary impressionism, instead foregrounding James's treatment of the word 'impression' as a mediatory unit that both resists and accommodates invasive publicity. Thus even as he envisages a breakdown between public and private at the end of the nineteenth century, James registers that breakdown not only as a threat but also as an opportunity for aesthetic gain. Beginning with a reading of 'The Art of Fiction' as both a public-forming essay and an aesthetic manifesto, Hannah's study examines James's responses to painterly impressionism and to aestheticism, and offers original readings of What Maisie Knew, The Wings of the Dove, and The American Scene that treat James's articulation of impressionism in relation to the child, the future of the novel, and shifts in the American national imaginary. Hannah's study persuasively argues that throughout his career James returns to impressionability not only as a site of immense vulnerability in an age of rapid change but also as a crucible for reshaping, challenging, and adapting to the public sphere's shifting forms.

Chapter 1
Henry James, Painterly Impressionism, Publicity, and Spectacle

In two essays that frame his career as a novelist, Henry James moved from sardonic derision to cautious celebration of French impressionist painting. In August 1876, James slated Georges Durand-Ruel’s second official impressionist exhibition in the Salon des Refusés for “abjur[ing] virtue altogether, and declar[ing] that a subject which has been crudely chosen shall be loosely treated” (PE 115). Twenty-nine years later, in the essay, “New England: An Autumn Impression,” he offered a quite different appraisal, celebrating “wondrous examples of Manet, of Degas, of Claude Monet, of Whistler” (AS 45–6) for offering the erotically charged “momentary effect of a large slippery sweet inserted, without a warning, between the compressed lips of half-conscious inanition” (AS 46). James’s complicated shift in appreciation—the paintings are now “wondrous” but their force is “momentary” and comes in a “half-conscious” state—suggests his growing sense of a joint critical investment in the “impression.” Read in the context of their publication history, these essays also reveal his sense of how pictorial and novelistic experiments shared a critical engagement with the perils and promises of a publicity-conscious marketplace.

James’s brief unsuccessful stint as a foreign correspondent in Paris for the New-York Tribune in August 1876 no doubt informed his initial disapproval of the Durand-Ruel exhibition. As he broke from the Tribune, decrying its demands for a more “‘newsy’ and ‘gossipy’” style (HJL II.64), James also shrank from, what he described in The Galaxy as, Paris’s “tolerably unprofitable spectacle” of artists and critics embroiled in “mutual feuds and imprecations and heart-burnings” (PE 90–91). Indeed, the impressionists’ rise capitalized on opportunities for promotion presented by the French press’s expansion, in small reviews and journals, after increased financial investment and a brief respite on censorship under the Third Republic (White 121–2). If the impressionism of the 1876 exhibition represented, for James, an unhealthy product of such “unprofitable spectacle,” his belated discovery of “wondrous examples” (AS 45) in a private collection in Farmington offered, in contrast, a sheltered refuge from the cultural monotony he attributed to American publicity.1 The “consummate” preparation (AS 46) of the paintings contrasts favorably, for James, with his localized “impression of a kind of monotony of acquiescence” to the traditions of the “common man” (AS 44). But this realignment of impressionism with resistance to publicity takes place in an essay James contributed to the North American Review, a publication he had previously critiqued for its scant appreciation of literature and its tendency to deal “wholly with subjects political, commercial, economical, scientific” (LC I.684). While the essays that became The American Scene bespeak James’s desire, as the “impressible story-seeker” (AS 57), to resist solely accounting for the “mere monstrosities” of “organisation, political, educational, economic” (AS 297), they are written with a sense of their dependency on journals attuned to such “monstro[us]” subjects.

Falling between these documented encounters with impressionist paintings, James’s own publicizing of a fellow expatriate artist, in his 1887 article on John Singer Sargent in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, probably informed his developing identification with visual impressionists. Here, he lauds efforts “[t]o render an impression of an object” but claims success depends on what “the impression, may have been.” Suspecting impressionists of “seeking” a “solution” through “simplification,” James identifies this practice as courting the danger of “being arrested by the cry of the spectator: ‘Ah! but excuse me; I myself take more impressions than that.’” Fortunately, James finds Sargent’s simplification to be carried out with “style,” making “his impression in most cases … magnificent” (JSS 684). James sets his personal appreciation against the general public’s resistance, seeking to popularize those erudite paintings as entrances into high culture. Sargent’s “language of painting” is a medium “into which a considerable part of the public, for the simple and excellent reason that they don’t understand it, will doubtless always be reluctant and unable to follow him” (JSS 686). In the face of such “prodigies of purblind criticism,” James suggests Sargent’s paintings perform a “genuine service,” reminding “people that the faculty of taking a fresh, direct, independent, unborrowed impression is not lost” (JSS 691). In James’s opinion, Sargent, at his best, engages a diverse viewing audience, “arous[ing] in even the most profane spectator something of the painter’s sense, the joy of engaging also, by sympathy, in the solution of the artistic problem” (JSS 685). James’s account of the educative value of Sargent’s impressions presents the painter’s oeuvre as a model for the kind of public-forming work he advocates in “The Art of Fiction.”

James’s three recorded responses to painterly impressionism, in 1876, 1888, and 1905, document, then, his incrementally more complex, contingent appreciations and refusals of the medium and practice of this contemporary moment in visual art. This chapter offers readings of three sets of fictional texts in which James grapples with the specter of painterly impressionism as a double for his own literary enterprise, arguing that reading and partaking in the reception and circulation of experiments in visual art proved a productive force in James’s gradual theorization of his own aesthetic and its place in the public sphere. Firstly, I read a series of fictions in which James treats the impressionist painter as a character, a series that traces James’s shift from disparagement of impressionist art to guarded identification with its practitioners. Against the background of this shift, my second section considers a set of texts self-consciously labeled “impressionistic” by James himself, demonstrating the ways in which James’s work came to ambivalently draw on the language of visual impressionism to elucidate its own narrative ventures. Finally, I read The Ambassadors, a text imbued with recognitions of the imaginative and cultural territories shared by impressionist art and the novel as explorations of vision in an age of spectacle.

In his analysis of literary impressionism, John G. Peters warns against drawing “too close a tie between the techniques of the visual and literary arts” (14) and suggests that literary impressionists sought not to “simply represent visual perception” but rather render “a much broader epistemological experience” (15). But while Peters’s work offers an important shift away from pictorial readings of impressionist writing, it also downplays painterly impressionism’s basis in and negotiation of its social environment. In 1960, E.H. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion linked the psychological objectives of impressionist art—“teas[ing] us with incomplete forms” in order to lay bare “the transitory and elusive features of visual reality” (179)—to their grounding in the social milieu of their day: impressionist painters “limited themselves to the motifs and scenes of la vie contemporaire” because “they could … rely on the beholder’s knowledge” (181). Gombrich later conceptualized the painting as a scene of dialogue, an interspace moving from private visual experience, the “map” of a “visual field,” to the public inscription of shared codes of visual understanding, to a “mirror” of the artist’s initial impressions (Image 181). But Gombrich’s arguments oversimplify the relationship between art-object and the culture that “behold[s]” it. Rather than merely appealing to unifying public understandings of the visual, impressionist art’s interrogation of the “visual field” frequently involved a vexed response to the makeup of a shifting public sphere and to the decorum that policed its representation.

John House describes how the “characteristic viewpoint” of “the Impressionists’ modern life scenes … involved, and implicated, the viewer in unfamiliar ways, by collapsing the barrier between the viewers’ space and the action within the picture,” a defamiliarizing process that “implicated” nineteenth-century viewers “as historical subjects,” as “social, political and moral” agents. Through unsettling strategies (by use of frontal-facing figures, indeterminate spatial mapping of the observer’s presence, or by focus “on the play of visual sensations” [House 103]), impressionist paintings install a sense of both optic and political uncertainty. In his formative work, T.J. Clark examined how artists of the period, such as Édouard Manet and Camille Pissaro, grappled with the new publicity granted to such class-defying figures as the prostitute and the petite bourgeoisie in the modern public spaces of Haussman’s Paris (such as the park and the café). Impressionism, as Clark’s reading suggests, emerges at the moment of a shift into a “spectacular society,” a “new phase of commodity production—the marketing, the making-into-commodities, of whole areas of social practice which had once been referred to casually as everyday life” (9). Through their protomodernist attention to flattened perspectives and blurred borders, these artists sought to both accommodate and resist the spectacular demands of the city’s shifting demographic, of a public sphere in which conventional understandings of class and gender appear to collapse. At the same time, as Griselda Pollock has argued, the predominantly male impressionist artist’s ability to traverse established class borders by bringing such marginalized figures as the prostitute into the public viewing space of the gallery also served to reinscribe and extend the already gendered demarcation of private-public space that repeatedly made women the objects rather than subjects of art from this period.

Impressionism, as this brief critical survey suggests, occupied uneasy territory, both resistant to, and complicit with, the spectacular and regulatory forms of Paris’s public sphere in the late nineteenth century. This chapter seeks to account for James’s shifting attitudes toward impressionist aesthetics as symptomatic of his developing awareness of how his own literary art shared with such paintings a perceptual vocabulary, suspicious of, yet fascinated with, the imaginary structures of spectacle.

James’s Impressionist Painters and Publicity

In “The Art of Fiction,” James announces that “the analogy between the art of the painter and the art of the novelist” is “complete” and claims these figures “may learn from each other, they may explain and sustain each other” (AF 504). At various stages in James’s career, the impressionist artist, as a character in his fiction, appears to offer an “analogy” that might “explain and sustain” his literary project. Three texts are pivotal to this argument: the two tales, “A New England Winter” (1884) and “Flickerbridge” (1902), and, between these, the much-neglected novel, The Reverberator (1888). These three texts trace James’s initial distrust of visual impressionism as an aesthetic pose, his eventual attraction to the figurative potential of the American expatriate impressionist as an interstitial private-public figure, and his complicated alignment with the impressionist artist as a bastion of privacy, a professed enemy of publicity.

In “A New England Winter,” first published in Century Magazine in 1884, Florimond Daintry returns from a circle of artists in Paris to his childhood home in Boston where his mother plots to retain his company by introducing him to an intriguing young woman, Rachel Torrance. James’s tone is satirical and dismissive as Florimond Daintry’s “impressionist” persuasion gives itself away by his reputation in Paris for seeking out, however sketchily, “the visual impression”: “His power of rendering was questioned, his execution had been called pretentious and feeble; but a conviction had somehow been diffused that he saw things with extraordinary intensity. No one could tell better than he what to paint, and what not to paint, even though his interpretation were sometimes rather too sketchy” (CS III.88–9). As in James’s early review of the Durand-Ruel exhibition, impressionism is here marked out by an obscure attention to “what to paint” (the subject “crudely chosen”) and a “sketchy” interpretation (the painting “loosely treated”). Through the ironic observations of Florimond’s aunt, Miss Daintry, James’s tale offers a cutting account of the artist and his “unlimited interest in his own sensations”: “In pursuance of his character as an impressionist, he gave her a great many impressions; but it seemed to her that as he talked, he simply exposed himself—exposed his egotism, his little pretensions” (CS III.93). James turns Florimond’s claims to sensitivity on their head: Miss Daintry ponders setting him up with the attractively mysterious Rachel Torrance in the hope that she will bring him down as “a presumptuous little boy,” thinking to herself that “since it was his business to render ‘impressions,’ he might see what he could do with that of having been jilted” (CS III.97). To be an impressionist, in “A New England Winter,” is to be a pretender, an actor doing impressions of taste. It is also to be “exposed” by this very act of self-promotion.

The sending up of Florimond’s and, by extension, impressionist art’s pretensions works hand in hand in this tale with accounts of the artist’s attraction to American publicity. On his strolls down Beacon Street, Florimond is drawn to the “cheerful and commodious” intimacy suggested by the houses’ “large clear windows,” which give “the street the appearance of an enormous corridor, in which the public and the private were familiar and intermingled” (CS III.90). On Washington Street, he finds “material for the naturalist” (CS III.111) in “the details of American publicity,” the “expressively commercial” housefronts, their “staring signs, with labels and pictures, with advertisements familiar, colloquial, vulgar,” the “stamp of the latest modern ugliness” (CS III.112). James’s instinctive distaste for the subjects of Florimond’s “optical impressions” is mockingly present when he describes the painter as comforting himself in the Boston winter with the thought that “it was a fortunate thing the impressionist was not exclusively preoccupied with the beautiful” (CS III.111).2

Published four years after “A New England Winter,” The Reverberator revolves around a conflict between European (or Europeanized) prizing of privacy and American indifference to exposure. In The Reverberator, James reworks an anecdote he first made note of in 1887 about May Marcy McClellan, an American woman, who at the end of a summer spent in an exclusive Venetian salon went on to expose its clique in an American paper. The anecdote demonstrates, James claims in his notebooks, “the extinction of all sense between public and private” (CN 40). But the “couple of columns in the vulgar newspaper” also, as James recounts in his 1908 preface to the New York Edition of the novel, came to offer “the very largest fund of impressions” (LC II.1197). The parallel, established in the preface, between the work of the “graceful amateur journalist,” gathering her “treasure of impressions; her harvest” (LC II.1196) in Venetian society, and that of James, “the weird harvester” (LC II.1202), reaping a “fund of impressions” of McClellan and her Americanness, expands on the novel’s ambivalent recognition of ground shared by the journalist and the artist.

Set in Paris, The Reverberator centers around the complicated engagement of Francie Dosson, an American girl reminiscent of Daisy Miller, to Gaston Probert, a devoted seeker of “impressions of the eye” (R 49) and the sole remaining French-born son of an aristocratically gallicized, expatriate American family. Gaston’s “Parisian education” “open[s] him much—render[s] him perhaps even morbidly sensitive—to impressions of” the visual “order” (R 48–9). Francie travels to Europe with her domineering sister, Delia, and her passive father, Whitney. At the novel’s outset, she is the subject of a fellow American journalist’s attentions—George Flack, a correspondent for the burgeoning newspaper, The Reverberator. Flack inadvertently introduces Francie to Gaston when he encourages her to sit for a portrait by the American expatriate impressionist, Charles Waterlow (referred to in the text as a former student of Carolus Duran, Waterlow’s character is, at least in part, modeled on John Singer Sargent). The crisis of the novel comes when Flack encourages her to reveal potentially scandalous familial details about the Proberts. His subsequent publication of these details, for which Francie is castigated by the Proberts, documents New Journalism’s advent in the late nineteenth century, with its increasing use of the interview as a means of exposure. The crisis is resolved when Gaston, acting on advice from Waterlow, breaks free from his family’s scandalized outrage and rejoins the Dossons as they leave Paris in search of somewhere beyond publicity’s reach.

Charles Waterlow, the impressionist painter, and Gaston Probert, the impressionist beholder, share a distaste for the “newspaperism” (CN 86) of George Flack that would appear to identify them with James’s sense of an “invasion” (CN 19). In the description of Francie’s first appearance in his studio and of the “impression” she makes as an “adorable model” for both Waterlow and Gaston, the narrator, in a subordinate clause, refers to her escort, the reporter “whom [Waterlow] didn’t like and who had already come too often to his studio to pick up ‘glimpses’ (the painter wondered how in the world he had picked her up)” (R 38). Gaston is similarly unimpressed when he joins Flack and the Dossons for dinner: he finds that he hates Flack’s “accent, he hate[s] his laugh, and he hate[s] above all the lamblike way their companions accepted him” (R 53). Ironically, Waterlow’s antipathy sets the scene for Francie’s exposure of Gaston’s family. Flack, seeking a firsthand view of the Proberts and their society, proclaims his “sensitive” awareness of the artist’s dislike of “newspaper-men” (R 137) as a reason for Francie escorting him to his studio, the fateful visit after which Francie informally reveals the Proberts’ intimate details. And further to this, George Flack’s appeal to Francie for “genuine first-hand information, straight from the tap” (R 134) concerning the Proberts parodies James’s vision, in the revised 1888 version of “The Art of Fiction,” of the novelist “receiving straight impressions” (PP 399): “ain’t we interested in the development of our friends—in their impressions, their transformations, their adventures? Especially a person like me, who has got to know life—who has got to know the world” (R 133). While James’s narrative establishes a “sensitive” openness to impressions as a state antithetical to the presence of journalism, it also exposes impressionism’s contributions to scenes of exposure, its enmeshment in Flack’s publicity.

Flack’s promotional apparatuses, in fact, frame the first mention of Waterlow’s art, his introduction of Francie and Delia to the commercial viability of his pictures:

Mr. Flack explained to them that it would be idiotic to miss such an opportunity to get something at once precious and cheap; for it was well known that Impressionism was going to be the art of the future, and Charles Waterlow was a rising Impressionist. It was a new system altogether and the latest improvement in art. They didn’t want to go back, they wanted to go forward, and he would give them an article that would fetch five times the money in a couple of years. (R 37)

The prior inscription of Waterlow’s art in a teleological narrative of journalistic discovery and progress speaks to James’s sceptical awareness of the contingent status of art in a burgeoning marketplace. But where The Reverberator raises more pressing concerns for James, less containable through parody, is in its attention to parallels between Flack’s promotional co-opting of Waterlow’s art and Gaston’s manipulative deployment of Waterlow’s portrait of Francie as a sanitized introduction of the potentially offensive, American girl to his family. Having fallen ...