Henry James and the Art of Impressions by John Scholar (review)

Reviewed by: Henry James and the Art of Impressions by John Scholar Mirosława Buchholtz John Scholar. Henry James and the Art of Impressions. Oxford UP, 2020, vii + 301 pp., £81 (e-Book). Henry James was a master of many arts. In his latest study, John Scholar addresses perhaps the most paradoxical of his artistic masteries. The novelist was admittedly critical of French Impressionism, while at the same time remaining faithful to and increasingly interested in the idea of impression per se and its implementation in his literary work. Scholar cuts the Gordian knot by disengaging James's idea of impression from the famous but time-bound artistic movement and relocating his literary project "to a wider contextual and intertextual history of impressions" (1). Charting "an intellectual history of the 'impression' from the seventeenth century to the turn of the twentieth" allows Scholar to point out connections far beyond a specific aesthetic program. "James's impression," Scholar argues, "looks forwards as well as backwards and sideways, anticipating the twentieth-century discourse of performativity in its power to do things with words and signs, upsetting the idea that its meanings might be wholly determined by pre-existing empiricist and aesthetic traditions" (2). In a nutshell, James is "not so much an impressionist as impression-driven" (4). Following Ford Madox Ford, who was among the earliest readers to call James an impressionist, other scholars have since interpreted James's literary impressionism as proto-modernist (7). In a succinct but highly informative manner, Scholar sketches the panorama of literary scholarship on James and Impressionism/literary impressionism/impression. The reader receives a complete overview, including classifications and comparisons (8–10). Against this background, Scholar emphasizes James's "pre-impressionist, but nevertheless painterly, notion of the impression" (10). His aim in this study "is to historicize James's use of the impression—by presenting a much more detailed intellectual context for literary and painterly impressions than currently exists" (19). The resistance to "the notion that James is a formalist who was not interested in ideas" is meant to buttress the argument that "James can be taken more seriously as an intellectual" (19). The monograph is divided into two parts in a simple and compelling way that hinges on the juxtaposition of theory—James's own as well as its many contexts and intertexts—and the literary practice in his three great novels of the major phase: The Ambassadors (1903), The Wings of the Dove (1902), and The Golden Bowl (1904). Part 1 consists of four chapters, of which the first focuses on James's early takes on theories of the impression from 1872 to 1888, and the last on his late theory of the impression in the New York Edition prefaces to The Portrait of a Lady, The Princess Casamassima, The Spoils of Poynton, and "The Altar of the Dead." The meticulous analyses of James's early essays and travel writing, as well as his famous prefaces, against the background of contemporaneous art (politics), leave no question unanswered. The two chapters in between form the theoretical backbone. Scholar aptly names them: "Contexts (I): Empiricism and Psychology" in chapter 2, and "Contexts (II): End Page E-4 Aestheticism and the Performative" in chapter 3. In these two chapters, Scholar pits a spectrum of empiricist attitudes against a no less impressive range of aesthetic ones. In chapter 1 Scholar introduces the distinction that is fundamental to his argument in later chapters between "performative" impressions and "cognitive" impressions (51). The sphere of impressions is, however, fraught with deception, as the division of James's major characters into "deceivers (usually the objects of perception …) and their dupes (the subjects of perception …)" (3) shows. This division is the thread running through chapters 2 and 3. The balancing of empiricism and aestheticism comes to the fore in chapter 4, in which Scholar also shows the possibility of coalescence of the cognitive and performative sides of the impression (136). In Part 2, Scholar studies James's practice of the impression in his late novels, one novel for each of the three chapters. The art of impression, seen in the light of the earlier theoretical discussion, allows Scholar to disentangle complex relationships between...