In Darkest James: Reviewing Impressionism, 1900-1905 (review)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge suggests that a book review answer three questions: What has the author attempted to do? Is it worth doing? Has the author done it well? Robin Hoople cites Coleridge's triple-pronged desideratum in this study of Henry James's late fiction, assembling reviews of six of James's books published between 1900 and 1905: The Soft Side, The Sacred Fount, The Wings of the Dove, The Better Sort, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl. Many of these reviews, duly quoted and annotated, are forgettable. They publicize James's books or provide rough outlines of what readers might find in them. They originally appeared in Pall Mall Gazette, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Catholic World, Springfield Republican, New York Tribune, Louisville Courier Journal, Churchman, San Francisco Chronicle, and numerous other magazines and newspapers. A useful, comprehensive list of materials appears in the list of works cited.

In effect, Hoople reviews reviewers, calling them to task for blind spots in their understanding and praising them for establishing a horizon of appreciation for James's late fiction. Concentrating on the ways in which reviewers dealt with James's evolving impressionist techniques of seeing, of rendering consciousness, of dealing with ambiguity, of suspending closure, Hoople writes with great insight and flair, especially when addressing James's fiction directly, but the position toward reviewers is often censorious. According to Hoople, James's reviewers did not grasp the significance of his evolving technique and content: "It is highly likely that the first readers recognize and fill fewer blanks [in a text] than later ones—that they miss, especially in works of great complexity, parts of the geography of the text." A reviewer of The Wings of the Dove, for instance, gets chastised for not understanding James's engagement with impressionism. The reviewer, "like most other reviewers, lacks the full equipment to put the epistemological considerations of James's impressionism into a usable perspective." Another reviewer is blamed for "seeing without quite registering exactly what James has done to make the stories [in The Better Sort]—to make his entire fictional development—a successful pass through an aesthetic of incorporative perception." Why should a review of one collection of short stories grapple with James's "entire fictional development"? That is not the mandate of a review. In the same vein, reviewers of The Ambassadors receive condemnation: "surely the reviewers could not muster a full sense of what James was doing with the novel."

Instead of passing categorical judgment on reviewers, it would be more useful to consider the ways that James smuggled impressionism, as a visual and narrative technique, into the hands of his readers. Americans at the turn of the century had even less exposure to new painting styles than did British or French art lovers. Louisine Havemeyer and Bertha Honoré Palmer had only just begun collecting impressionist and postimpressionist paintings for their private collections. Such works were not exhibited publicly. Most American reviewers, therefore, did not read James's late novels as analogues for impressionist paintings. Nor could readers be expected to contrast James's own changes in opinion on impressionist painting between his 1876 review of a show at the Durand-Ruel gallery in Paris and the 1903 publication of The Ambassadors. Not all readers are scholars. Not all reviewers care first and foremost about aesthetics.

Furthermore, Hoople's definition of impressionism is dated, failing to account for recent inquiries into the capitalistic or gender biases of paintings by Monet, Degas, or Cassatt. Hoople treats impressionism strictly as a modality of light and shadow. Yet impressionism also engages questions of poverty, industry, ownership, locomotion, agriculture, nostalgia, boredom, nationalism, and colonialism. Monet's 1872 painting Impression: soleil-levant blurs sky and water as an atmospheric effect, as Hoople mentions. Beyond that formal observation, the painting concerns the obfuscation of mercantilism that sustains artistic activity in the latter decades of the nineteenth century...