Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture (review)

Book Reviews 97 world ... and the second in the power of Creative Consciousness." Indeed, she believes that James himself estabUshed such a bridge, that at times the concrete perceptions of the early style appear in and fuse with the abstractions of the later style. Such appears to me to be the main thrust of MacDonald's critique. But there is other information and profitable reading in the volume, including a summary of the tradition of the grand tour, a discussion of Hawthorne's and Howells's writing of Italy and of James's animadversions upon their limitations, a detailed analysis of three of James's Italian tales, and, quite aside from the question of early versus late style, perceptive analyses of a number of the travel sketches in Italian Hours. Donald E. Stanford Louisiana State University Jonathan Freedman. Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture. Stanford: Stanford U P, 1990. xxx + 305 pp. $29.50. The main argument of this important and innovative book is that the very oppositions and assumptions that mark James's response to aestheticism helped him "transform the volatile and unstable example of aestheticism in England into that more austere form of aestheticism we call modernism" (xvii). Its further contention is that, though British aestheticism was not appreciated by modernism, its "full range, depth, and audaciousness comes into view" when it is approached "through the perspective we might broadly label 'postmodern'" (xviii). Both propositions are sound. The first was often suggested, if not fully explored, by former Jamesian critics. Freedman does a much more thorough and sophisticated job, bringing new literary theories to bear on his subject, rescuing British aestheticism from effacement, and placing its antinomies well at the center of the cultural movement that marked the transition to our century. His approach is, however, more belabored than his predecessors', and I wish to address myself to this question at once, to clear the way for better things. First, Freedman's thesis is too insistently reiterated, as if he had to convince himself of its soundness. Second, it is often couched in language that savors too much (to my taste, at least) of contemporary critical jargon. Third, the connection of aestheticism with literary professionalism and commodity culture, which is again much insisted upon, seems more symptomatic of a will to political correctness than an established fact. Freedman shows traces of a divided mind—always a good sign in a critic —though he seems needlessly apologetic about it "I have not fully made the turn toward a wholly historicized vision, preferring instead to let my no-doubt-retrograde nostalgia for the literary coexist, however tensely, with the very analysis that would undo it" (xxviii). I hope he is tongue-in-cheek; or is it the kind of lip service that is required by current trends in academia? A debasement of "the literary" goes totally against the skill, the sensitivity, and the expertise exhibited in this book. And can one really believe in "high-cultural art as a prime mechanism of social control" (xxix)? Prime mechanism? Surely politicians, statesmen, and even artists know better. As often in such cases, the theoretical preface is less valuable than the development and unfolding of the critical argument. Freedman is right in stressing the importance of British aestheticism and its contradictions—a balanced system of the organic and the artificial, emphasizing at once time as flux and the beauty of the captured moment, the solipsistic self and the union with the Other, purity of experience and high fashion—for American culture and for James 98 The Henry James Review himself. The distinction between the aestheticism of Ruskin and Morris, with its emphasis on social, moral, and transcendent values, on one side, and that of Pater and Wilde, with its immanent social critique, on the other, works cogently in that context. The line of Ruskin found its development in such American intellectuals as Charles Ehot Norton, V. W. Brooks, Lewis Mumford, Jane Adams, but generated more impatience than sympathy in James, who was cold to the Pre-Raphaeutes, the art-for-art school of fiction, and "decadents" such as Baudelaire and Swinburne. I am not totally convinced that the Venetian...