from Victorian Studies Volume 42, Number 4A Sense of Justice: Whistler, Ruskin, James, Impressionism
Adam Parkes
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On 2 July 1877, John Ruskin published his notorious attack on Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (c. 1874), by the expatriate American painter James McNeill Whistler, which was on display in the recently opened Grosvenor Gallery in London. The "eccentricities" of such art, Ruskin wrote in Fors Clavigera (1871-84), "are almost always in some degree forced; and their imperfections gratuitously, if not impertinently, indulged. For Mr. Whistler's own sake, no less than for the protection of the purchaser, Sir Coutts Lindsay [the owner of the Grosvenor] ought not to have admitted works into the gallery in which the ill-educated conceit of the artist so nearly approached the aspect of wilful imposture. I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face" (29: 160). Whistler sued Ruskin for £1,000 in damages for libel, thus provoking the celebrated trial of November 1878, which concluded with the jury finding Ruskin guilty but awarding Whistler contemptuous damages of one farthing without costs. Ruskin, who interpreted the libel action as an attempt to paralyze his hand, resigned from his position as Slade Professor of Fine Arts at Oxford; Whistler, wearing the farthing on his watch-chain, claimed a victory, but most observers agreed with the reviewer who wrote that this "victory" bore a "very striking resemblance to a defeat" ("Symphony" 1516)--as became clear soon afterward when Whistler went bankrupt. The verdict was, as The Times said, "a censure on both" ("[Whistler v. Ruskin]" 9).
In contrast to their treatment of other famous Victorian controversies, such as the Wilde trials, most recent critics have been reluctant to pay the Whistler-Ruskin affair the careful attention it received from commentators at the time. Ruskin's attack on Whistler is often dismissed as the aberration of a disturbed mind, and the same is true, by and large, of Whistler's vindictive counter-attacks.1 Even when the offending passage in Fors Clavigera is treated as a serious critical utterance, the public and legal controversy that followed is usually regarded as unilluminating for those interested in matters of genuine artistic or critical concern. A notable exception to this tendency is Linda Dowling, who describes the trial as a "symbolic episode" that illustrates the collapse of Ruskin's democratic impulses into a new authoritarianism of the self founded on "the idea of law"--an authoritarianism, moreover, that has much in common with Whistler's openly anti-democratic understanding of art as an arena of "specialist knowledge and professional expertise" (41-49). The prevailing critical attitude, however, is expressed by Linda Merrill, who argues (contrary to the evidence of her intriguing book) that "the popular press is as inappropriate a place for transmitting aesthetic theory as the courtroom is for expounding it" (2).2 To put it this way is to reduce the trial to a curious but merely entertaining narrative that lacks deeper aesthetic or intellectual significance. To be sure, Merrill is only recapitulating the view of one of the trial's most important Victorian commentators, another American working in London, Henry James. Describing the trial in the 19 December 1878 Nation as a "singular and most regrettable exhibition," James added that "the crudity and levity of the whole affair were decidedly painful, and few things, I think, have lately done more to vulgarize the public sense of the character of artistic production" (Painter's Eye 173). But James had more to say, and in saying it he often anticipates, sometimes refines, Dowling's revisionist account. As well as expressing the common feeling (echoed by Merrill) that the trial represented an affront to aesthetic sensibilities, James identified several issues about art and its relation to the viewer, and about artists and their relations with critics, that were crucial to a certain variety of impressionism that he was developing in his fictional and nonfictional writings of this time. As we shall see, such issues are essentially versions of James's well-known preoccupation with problems of freedom, knowledge, and perception. But revisiting these problems in the light of the Whistler trial allows us to see how they are informed by paradoxes of law and liberty that were dramatized in court--especially paradoxes that turn (like the trial) on the conflict between subjective perception, or the immediate sensory impressions of a singular perceiving consciousness, and collective judgment, or the cognitive and moral forms within which impressions are translated into knowledge. Broadly speaking, James linked Whistler's position with an impressionist emphasis on the subjective vision of the artist, and Ruskin's with an anti-impressionist demand for moral and social judgment. Yet James also discerned some arresting complexities in such identifications, which allow us to see how the apparently opposed aesthetics of artist and critic overlap in significant ways. As James implies, the Whistler-Ruskin scandal is more aptly described as a dramatization of certain tensions within impressionism rather than as a contest between impressionism and anti-impressionism. The complexities that James observed in the Whistler-Ruskin dispute are central to a larger argument about British literary impressionism that I wish to propose in this essay. For James, impressionism's internal conflicts, as displayed in the 1878 trial, generated a particularly vexatious question: How does one arrive at a "sense of justice"? As I suggest below, this issue has a special, though barely recognized, importance in the crowning achievement of James's early fiction, The Portrait of a Lady (1880-81), which was written in the wake of the Whistler trial, and in which the characters themselves speak explicitly about their desire for justice. "Justice is all I want," Madame Merle declares to James's heroine, Isabel Archer, in a telling phrase (173). As we shall see, James's use of the term "justice" in Portrait reactivates some of the key ambiguities in his response to the Whistler trial. In both contexts, Jamesian justice denotes both a personal sense of fidelity (as in "doing justice to" something) and the apparently more public, or social, idea of judgment, which depends on some norm or set of conventions (legal, moral, cognitive, or aesthetic). Superficially, the first of these meanings appears to support a Whistlerian version of impressionism, the demand for accurate representation of impressions that was also articulated by Walter Pater in The Renaissance (first published in 1873): "[T]he first step towards seeing one's object as it really is, is to know one's own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly" (xxix). Correspondingly, the second meaning of justice as judgment would seem more akin to Ruskin's condemnation of Whistler as a fraudulent egotist whose painting flies in the face of the aesthetic and moral expectations of the Victorian public. It is this second kind of justice that is refused by Pater's impressionism, as in his description of Botticelli's art as "undisturbed by any moral ambition": "His morality is all sympathy," Pater adds, "and it is this sympathy, conveying into his work somewhat more than is usual of the true complexion of humanity, which makes him, visionary as he is, so forcible a realist" (36). Yet, as Madame Merle's plea indicates, these different senses of justice may imply each other: just as the personal fidelity sought by Madame Merle presupposes the very moral codes that are brought to bear on her--by the narrator and by Isabel--in the name of normative judgment, so the force of that judgment depends in turn on the aesthetic adequacy, or authenticity, of the narrator's (and Isabel's) response. In drawing attention to these interrelated forms of moral and aesthetic justice, James tacitly directs us back to David Hume's argument in A Treatise of Human Nature (1740) that while our "sense of justice" is founded "on our impressions," those impressions in turn "arise from artifice and human conventions" (496). Somewhat like his precursor Hume, though unlike his contemporary Pater, James seems to want to reconcile a radical emphasis on the subjective impression with more traditional moral and social imperatives--to establish a form of moral justice that defines, but is also defined by, an aesthetic justice. This multifaceted sense of the "sense of justice," which is elided from our view of British impressionism if we take Pater as its sole critical representative, is disclosed by James's critical and fictional responses to the Whistler-Ruskin scandal.While generating considerable journalistic noise, the Whistler-Ruskin controversy gave public expression to an underlying debate about impressionist painting--a debate featuring artist and critic as spokesmen, in effect, for opposing sides. As in a previous attack on Whistler's paintings, which he had described as "absolute rubbish" (Val d'Arno 23: 49), Ruskin objected to Whistler's emphasis on "arrangement" and "harmony" at the expense of finish; in Ruskin's eyes, the result of this enterprise was mere eccentricity and sketchiness. Whistler was unapologetic, announcing in court and in print his desire to purge British painting of the observational naturalism and the narrative, or anecdotal, content that proved so popular in the Victorian era.3 Art, Whistler declared, "should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism, and the like" (Gentle Art 127-28). For similar reasons, Whistler wanted to rid the art world of critics like Ruskin, who were unable to practice, he argued, what they preached.4 According to Whistler, a painting communicates directly and privately with the spectator, who (like the artist) inhabits a realm of purely subjective perception, a realm of eye or ear. Evoking the philosophical impressionism of Hume and, more particularly, the critical impressionism of Pater (with whom he was linked by at least one reviewer), Whistler advocated a kind of aesthetic individualism, a virtual solipsism of the senses, undisturbed by abstract ideas, let alone by lofty moral ambition.5 Whistler told his legal counsel that he had painted Nocturne in Black and Gold not to "offer the portrait of a particular place but as an artistic impression that had been carried away" (qtd. in Merrill 154). His task as an artist was to recapture that impression in all its vivid sensory immediacy--to do justice to it, we might say, looking forward to James--regardless of its apparent departures from traditional moral frameworks. It was on these very grounds that Whistler was criticized by Ruskin. Too dispassionately concerned with life's visible surfaces and oblivious to its moral depths, Whistler's experiments (Ruskin claimed) amounted to no more than a self-regarding display of technical mastery that posited a fraudulent relationship with their spectators by asking them simply to admire and pay up. This relationship was emblematic, in other words, of the capitalist system of mutual exploitation that Ruskin abhorred; it was the by-product not of "art" but of commercial "manufacture."6 Thus Whistler's rejection of critics was an entirely self-serving, preemptive strike against those who might be inclined, as Ruskin was, to call the painter's bluff. But it had other, more pernicious effects as well. In Ruskin's view, critics performed a vital task, because in enabling spectators to appreciate art, they created the conditions for widespread involvement in a larger cultural conversation, which would form the basis of an authentic moral community even in the midst of nineteenth-century capitalism. Whistler's strident individualism threatened to undermine Ruskin's entire cultural endeavor. The Whistler trial coincided with the ongoing controversy aroused by the emergence of impressionist painting in France, and commentators, including James, were quick to draw comparisons. Although Whistler was not (and still is not) always regarded as an impressionist, many critics made the connection at the time of the trial and frequently employed the same language to criticize his work as they used to assail his French counterparts.7 Like the French painters (and, again, in the spirit of Pater), Whistler attempted to paint the striking immediate effect, or impression, that reality had made on his perceiving consciousness, to recapture the visceral sensation of the fleeting moment. Typical objections to this radical aesthetic of the senses, in its Whistlerian as in its French manifestations, attacked absence of finish (often confused with incompleteness), eccentricity, unintelligibility, flatness, and inwardness (or what Michael Fried has called absorption).8 Impressionism was also seen as drawing unwarranted attention to the relation between picture and frame, a practice that was taken to imply a lack of respect for conventional boundaries; Whistler seemed especially culpable on this score because, as Ruskin's attorney pointed out in court, he often painted on the frame itself. Whistler encouraged the use of this critical language, of course, by declaring narrative foreign to painting and by highlighting instead the private, sensory nature of its appeal to the spectator, an appeal that entails the same sort of "sympathy" that Botticelli elicited from Pater (36). Although Ruskin knew relatively little about the French impressionists of his time,9 his assault on Whistler clearly reiterated many of the complaints routinely made about Manet, Monet, and others. From a certain perspective, however, there is some irony in this correlation of Ruskin with anti-impressionism, because Ruskin himself might be (and sometimes has been) cited as one of impressionism's major precursors. Hailing Ruskin as "le prophête de l'Impressionnisme," turn-of-the-century critics such as Robert de la Sizeranne and Wynford Dewhurst drew particular attention to Ruskin's proto-impressionist emphasis on the use of pure, vibrant color to capture nature in its most animated state (Sizeranne 443-45; Dewhurst 295-301). More recently, Elizabeth K. Helsinger has noted that Ruskin consistently emphasized the importance in the artistic process of first impressions, that is, the "actual sensation" (23), or what Pater called the "primary data" of experience (xxix). The landscape painter, Ruskin wrote, "receives a true impression from the place itself, and takes care to keep hold of that as his chief good [. . .] then he sets himself as far as possible to reproduce that impression on the mind of the spectator of his picture" (Modern Painters 6: 33). Further, the attack on Whistler's allegedly slapdash workmanship was predicated on a distinction drawn by Ruskin, as by the French impressionists and Whistler himself, between finish, or "the mere neatness and completeness of the actual work [. . .] done for vanity's sake," and completeness, "the thing done to produce the effect of reality on the spectator," which was sought "for the impression's sake" (Modern Painters 5: 151, 164). But while Ruskin, arguing that "there is a moral as well as material truth,--a truth of impression as well as of form" (Modern Painters 3: 104), objected to slavish imitations of the visible external forms of reality, what finally counted in his view was nature, not the self. When Ruskin speaks of the truth of impression, he means the imprint made by nature, the palpable language of divinity, on the perceiving artist and, via the artist's pictorial translation, on the spectator of the artwork. Where Whistler, like Pater, observes a difference between impressions and external moral reference, Ruskin sees identity; for Ruskin, the impression is an inescapably moral category. It is this emphasis on the natural world, and, more specifically, on its status as the foundation of human morality, rather than on the perceiving subject, that distinguishes Ruskin's impressionism from that of Whistler, Pater, and the French painters of the 1870s. It is also the source of his animus toward Whistler, who seemed oblivious to the "sacredness of the truth of Impression" (Modern Painters 6: 36). Because this truth was sacred, exposing those who violated it was a moral imperative of general social concern. As a result of this emphasis on the sacredness of impressions, Ruskin's critical impressionism naturally took a rhetorical turn in the direction of cultural pedagogy, or public moral instruction.10 This development may seem surprising if one associates British literary impressionism with its most noted practitioner, Pater, whose famous "Conclusion" to The Renaissance dwells insistently on, and in, "the inward world of thought and feeling," where the "whirlpool" of moments is at its most "rapid," the flame of sensational experience at its most "eager and devouring"; a realm where the radically isolated self, "keeping as a prisoner its own dream of a world," experiences but a "continual vanishing away [. . .] [a] strange, perpetual, weaving and unweaving" (151-52). It is this Paterian sphere of immediate subjective perception and private psychological reflection--a sphere closely related, in its major effects and preoccupations, to the world of Whistler's nocturnes--with which British literary impressionism is usually identified. Yet, in turning toward the realm of culture, society, and morality, Ruskin was hardly turning away from impressionism, understood in its fullest, richest sense. On the contrary, Ruskin's gesture might be construed more accurately as a return to impressionism's etymological roots: according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the Latin word impressio means "irruption, onset, attack," connotations that resurface in Hume's definition of impressions (as distinct from "ideas") as "those perceptions, which enter [the mind] with most force and violence" (1). Understood in this light, the term "impression" evokes not the Paterian world of perpetual weaving and unweaving but one of decisive, penetrative action, in which boundaries between objects or subjects are not dissolved by a play of reflections but are simply crossed, or violated. The rhetorical violence, the transgression of accepted critical boundaries, that Ruskin displayed in his attack on Whistler may be intrinsic to the term "impression"; the scandal of 1877-78 suggests that it is an essential component, or implication, of impressionist aesthetics at large. That Whistler's courtroom and published defenses of his antinarrative, anti-realist procedures assumed forms as belligerent and polemical as Ruskin's reinforces the suspicion that a species of cultural pedagogy was the barely repressed double of impressionism's supposedly dominant tendencies toward the psychological and introspective. Like French critics of impressionist painting, British viewers often interpreted Whistler's penchant for the sketchy and unfinished as an assault on their aesthetic and moral expectations; he was seen as conducting, as William Michael Rossetti put it, a "rather strong experiment upon public submissiveness" (467). Anticipating James's account, we might say that, in their different ways, both Ruskin and Whistler point toward an impressionism defined in terms not solely of aesthetic but of moral and social justice--in terms of ethical judgment as well as sensitive appreciation. Indeed, it is when we examine James's peculiarly conflicted response to the Whistler trial that the full import of these complications in British impressionism begins to emerge.
I. Whistler, RuskinAfter expressing the painful sense of vulgarity that the Whistler trial had caused him, James offered this baffled confession to readers of the Nation:
II. James's Whistler, James's RuskinI confess to thinking it hard to decide what Mr. Whistler ought properly to have done, while--putting aside the degree of one's appreciation of his works--I quite understand his resentment. Mr. Ruskin's language quite transgresses the decencies of criticism, and he has been laying about him for some years past with such promiscuous violence that it gratifies one's sense of justice to see him brought up as a disorderly character. On the other hand, he is a chartered libertine--he has possessed himself by prescription of the function of a general scold. His literary bad manners are recognized, and many of his contemporaries have suffered from them without complaining. It would very possibly, therefore, have been much wiser on Mr. Whistler's part to feign indifference. Unfortunately, Mr. Whistler's productions are so very eccentric and imperfect [. . .] that his critic's denunciation could by no means fall to the ground of itself. (Painter's Eye 173-74)At work in this passage are various ideas of justice, which compete for James's attention as he attempts to arrive at a fair and accurate assessment of this embarrassing controversy. These are, as we shall see, forms of justice that give James's own impressionism its special shape. First, and most prominent, is the concept of justice as judgment, which is gratified by seeing Ruskin brought up as a disorderly character in a court of law. This type of justice is, in large measure, an aesthetic matter, in that the normative standards employed for making such a judgment are the decencies of criticism. Yet James's recourse to the language of decencies (as well as his use of such loaded terms as "promiscuous" and "disorderly") indicates that this aesthetic variety of judgment is undoubtedly moral as well; indeed, here the aesthetic and the moral seem inextricably connected. This kind of justice possesses the force of social or collective structures of feeling: in stating that Ruskin has transgressed critical decencies, James presumes to pass what is essentially a moral judgment (somewhat in the manner of Ruskin himself) on behalf of an entire civil community. But another kind of justice is operating here, too: justice as authentic personal response. This sort of justice keeps demands for moral judgment at bay in order to create sufficient space for proper "appreciation," as James puts it (using another term that Pater would make his own): a form of justice as fidelity to the objects under examination, and to one's personal impressions of them. As we shall see, though, these senses of justice do not simply compete with each other for rhetorical control over James's musings; it is difficult, at some point, to keep the different meanings of justice apart. James's comments on Whistler, in which appreciation yields a discomfiting awareness of the painter's imperfections, suggest that justice-as-judgment and justice-as-fidelity may be mutually implicating concepts. It is the collaborative relationship between these ideas of justice, as well as the conflict between them, that generates the uncertainties and tensions in James's attitude to both Whistler and Ruskin, and that defines his own version of impressionism. James's divided feelings about Whistler and Ruskin, and the intertwined senses of justice on which those feelings are predicated, may be traced to his pre-trial ambivalence about both parties. James later came to admire his fellow expatriate, and even used him as the model for the successful sculptor and aesthete, Gloriani, in The Ambassadors (1901), but his earlier writings present Whistler, and the French impressionists with whom he was associated, in a less favorable light. Writing to his father on 19 April 1878, James declared Whistler "a queer little Londonized Southerner," who "paints abominably" (Letters 2: 167). One month after Ruskin's attack on Whistler's Nocturne, James had printed his own review of the Grosvenor exhibition, in which he had pronounced himself unamused: "Mr. Whistler's experiments have no relation whatever to life; they have only a relation to painting" (Painter's Eye 143). As works of self-reflexive abstraction, Whistler's paintings seemed in danger of losing the contact with everyday reality that, in James's view, kept art alive. James's review of the second Grosvenor exhibition in 1878 faulted Whistler and the French impressionists on the same grounds: "[L]ike them, he suggests the rejoinder that a picture is not an impression but an expression--just as a poem or a piece of music is" (165). As he implied in his post-trial commentary, which echoes Ruskin's complaint about eccentricity, James found Whistler and his French counterparts guilty of exaggerated emphasis on subjective perception, which required a "plentiful absence of imagination" (115).11 Amplifying such objections in a later essay on another expatriate American impressionist, John Singer Sargent, James noted that artists who sought only to reproduce their personal impressions ran the risk of "simplification" and thus of failing to engage the interest and sympathy of the spectator: "We feel a synthesis not to be an injustice," James wrote, "only when it is rich" (Painter's Eye 218). James's reviews of Whistler and the French impressionists charge them with precisely this kind of injustice: an unfaithful representation of reality that is rendered inauthentic by subservience to the demands of an overbearing artistic ego. James's shifting attitude toward impressionism might be seen as the reverse of such iniquity: a willingness to open oneself up to others' impressions, as well as one's own, that allows criticism to function as an art of appreciation. James's attitude toward Ruskin is still more complicated. It is easy to hear in James's trial report the note of impatience with the excesses, the "promiscuous violence," of this "disorderly character" (Painter's Eye 173-74). Yet James's responses to Ruskin were never entirely negative; in fact, the two writers shared some important critical perspectives. It is quite clear, for instance, that James's critique of the injustices committed by Whistler and the French impressionists was underwritten by Ruskin's critical values. "To be interesting," James wrote, "a picture should have some relation to life as well as to painting" (Painter's Eye 143). While no more interested than Ruskin in imitating material reality for its own sake, James shared his British precursor's attachment to representation and the Romantic associationism that prevailed in late-nineteenth-century America. James was particularly impressed by Ruskin's emphasis on seeking the "truth of impression" (Modern Painters 3: 104), which encapsulates the beholder's immediate response to nature. Resisting what he considered to be the sterile abstraction and self-involvement of Whistlerian impressionism, James was often receptive to an alternative, Ruskinian aesthetic of the natural impression, an aesthetic in which "doing justice" means responding to a challenge of adequate representation. In James as in Ruskin, however, this kind of justice is inseparable from an implicit need for judgment--for the kind of justice that operates via reference to certain conventions. Doing justice to one's impression, according to this theory, means obedience to a jointly ethical and aesthetic imperative because it is defined by normative ideas about both experience and the representation of experience in art. This convergence of the twin spheres of justice is specified in one of James's early pieces on Venice, which betrays a strain of Ruskin-like moralism: Tintoretto, he claimed in audibly Ruskinian tones, "never drew a line that was not, as one may say, a moral line" (Italian Hours 55). Why, then, that note of impatience with Ruskin in James's account of the 1878 trial? An answer lies in this ambivalent assessment of Ruskin--published in the Nation on 18 April 1878: "a writer whose eccentricities of judgement have been numerous, but for whom, at least, it can be claimed that he is the author of some of the most splendid pages in our language, and that he has spent his life, his large capacity for emotion, and his fortune in a passionate--a too passionate--endeavour to avert, in many different lines, what he believed to be the wrong and to establish his rigid conception of the right" (Painter's Eye 160). In James's eyes, Ruskin's extraordinary aesthetic sensitivity is severely constrained by an intractable moralism, which diverts his generous emotional resources from their proper object. Where there should be a quickening, James finds inflexibility. Where doing justice should be treated as a matter of appreciation, Ruskin seems excessively devoted to passing judgment and (James implies) meting out what is often unfair punishment. James develops these objections in an 1878 essay on Florence, which at some level must be read, like all of James's writings on Italy, as an answer to Ruskin's Italian studies. Ruskin's characteristic posture, James contends, is that of both a comically overzealous schoolmaster and the less amusing figure of a "Draconic" legislator. Such comments imply that Ruskin's cultural pedagogy concerns itself too exclusively with lawmaking, and that he is therefore asking too high a price for his attempt to build a community of interpreters:Art is the one corner of human life in which we may take our ease. [. . .] One may read a great many pages of Mr. Ruskin without getting a hint of this delightful truth. [. . .] And as for Mr. Ruskin's world's being a place--his world of art--where we may take life easily, woe to the luckless mortal who enters it with any such disposition. Instead of a garden of delight, he finds a sort of assize court in perpetual session. Instead of a place in which human responsibilities are lightened and suspended, he finds a region governed by a kind of Draconic legislation. (Italian Hours 117)Resenting Ruskin's perpetual talk of "error," James insists that the world of art allows--paradoxically, prescribes--freedom from such narrow-mindedness: "A truce to all rigidities is the law of the place; the only thing absolute there is that some force and some charm have worked. The grim old bearer of the scales excuses herself; she feels this not to be her province" (117). If these observations remind us of Byron's portrait of Italy as "the garden of the world, the home / Of all Art yields, and Nature can decree" (4.26: 3-4), James also waxes Paterian (and Whistlerian) when objecting that differences in the world of art "are not iniquity and righteousness; they are simply variations of temperament, kinds of curiosity." James ends this section of the essay on an unusually emphatic note of protest: "We are not under theological government" (Italian Hours 117). While deprecating elsewhere what he saw as Whistler's extreme emphasis on the self, James redeploys the language of individual personality to check Ruskin's approach, in which a preoccupation with community-building seems in danger of turning into an even more problematic--that is, despotic--form of subjectivism.12 Ruskin himself, James implies, comes very close to committing the kind of injustice that he (and James) found in Whistler's impressionism. James's musings imply that although Whistler had taken the first step toward the courtroom by issuing a libel suit, it was the legislative (yet despotic) element of Ruskin's aesthetics that had forced this legal turn. James hints as much in his subsequent account of the trial, when he confesses "to thinking it hard to decide what Mr. Whistler ought properly to have done" in the face of Ruskin's verbal assault. By insisting that artists and critics alike abide by his own rules and regulations, Ruskin had ridden roughshod over the usual "decencies of criticism" in a manner seemingly calculated to incite any victim, let alone the litigious Whistler (Painter's Eye 173). In the essay on Florence, James elaborated a similar point by suggesting that Ruskin's "Draconic legislation" entailed an inherently self-defeating attempt to make the world of art conform to "rigidities," moral and temperamental, that it was bound to resist (Italian Hours 117). If the courtroom seemed an inappropriate place in which to carry on a dispute about art, James intimated that it was Ruskin's rhetorical failure to observe the boundary separating the aesthetic from the legal realm--his insistence, in fact, on crossing this boundary to make the case for a justice that satisfied the claims of both art and morality--that had brought them into collision. Consequently, the trial might be regarded (James suggests) as the upshot of Ruskin's peculiar, innately transgressive brand of impressionist rhetoric, which demanded a form of moral judgment permeated at every level by the critic's own sensibility. This tension between lawmaking and libertarian tendencies, which was illustrated by the 1878 trial, underlies in different ways the apparently opposed impressionisms of Whistler and Ruskin, especially their attempts to teach spectators how to see. Whistler's paintings constituted an attempt to compel viewers to engage actively with the art they encountered, as he made clear by eschewing the naturalistic and moralizing narrative elements found in the work of popular mid-nineteenth-century painters--such as William Powell Frith--in favor of an aesthetic of suggestiveness. Ruskin's writings sought to achieve a similar effect by providing rigorous, detailed guidelines to steer ordinary spectators through the process of testing and comparing their impressions; ultimately, in Ruskin's view, spectators should be able to judge and appreciate art by themselves. As we have seen, Ruskin and Whistler strongly disagreed about the larger aims of this process, as the critic pointed to moral and social concerns whose relevance was flatly denied by the painter. But there is another important difference. The kind of active viewing encouraged by Ruskin entailed the application of rules drawn (he claimed) from an objective study of nature, which had been undertaken in response to a deep moral imperative that might be traced to sources in his own personality. Whistler, on the other hand, virtually demanded that viewers take more liberties, and that they dispense with conventional frames of reference, even with the artist himself. Ironically, Whistler's offer of a large interpretative freedom (which Dowling misses in her account of the trial) was unwittingly echoed by James's criticism of Ruskin. And yet, in a further irony, James detected the potential for such freedom less in Whistler's paintings than in Ruskin's writings. As Tony Tanner remarks, "James maintains a continuous discrimination between Ruskin the matchless aesthetic appreciator and Ruskin the uncompromising ascetic judge" (Venice Desired 169). Despite his efforts to lay down the law, Ruskin could display the very spontaneity and "irresponsibility"--an irruption of the self's morally unconstrained energy--against which he was trying to legislate.13 Continuing his argument with Ruskin's response to Italy (in this case, to Venice), James writes:It is, however, all suggestive, and much of it is delightfully just. There is an inconceivable want of form in it, though the author has spent his life in laying down the principles of form and scolding people for departing from them; but it throbs and flashes with the love of his subject. [. . .] There is no better reading at Venice, therefore, I say, than Ruskin, for every true Venice-lover can separate the wheat from the chaff. The narrow theological spirit, the moralism à tout propos, the queer provincialities and pruderies, are mere wild weeds in a mountain of flowers. (Italian Hours 8)In this account, Ruskin's prose embodies a kind of lawlessness that breaches the contract he is ostensibly seeking to foist on his readers. This lawlessness, which is a function of Ruskin's temperamental impressionability, allows the critic to do justice both to his subject and to his own capacity for sensitive response, and effaces the judgmental aspect of justice that frequently marks his texts. In revising Ruskin, James is encouraging such lawlessness to free his precursor's best insights from the dogmatic framework that had been erected upon them. These paradoxes of freedom and legislation impressed themselves on James's critical and fictional writings of this period. In negotiating the various conflicts dramatized in the Whistler-Ruskin dispute, James forged a similarly complex and shifting rhetoric of literary freedom that served as the basis of his own impressionist practices. Such complexity manifests itself in James's repudiation of what he considered to be the "contagion" of Ruskin's excessively legislative tendencies (Italian Hours 8). James's observation that Ruskin had transgressed the "decencies of criticism" (Painter's Eye 173) clearly implied a respect for the rule of a certain kind of law in aesthetic discourse. Describing the world of art as "the one corner of human life in which we may take our ease," an "escape" from everyday "convictions and prejudices," James nonetheless found himself unable to avoid the language of "rules and regulations," of moral and aesthetic judgment. "A truce to all rigidities is the law of the place," James claimed (Italian Hours 117), thereby conceding that the liberties he sought had to be prescribed. Reviewed through the lens of his reading of Ruskin, James's recourse to such Paterian terms as "temperament" and "curiosity" might be regarded less as a declaration of aesthetic and moral independence than as the observance of a different, and perhaps even less forgiving, system of laws: the laws of individual personality. James's call for freedom, in other words, reactivates the conflict between Ruskin's aesthetic of the natural impression, which depends on reference to a moral framework external to the self, and an individualistic, subjective impressionism, or what Ruskin had condemned as Whistler's "wilful imposture" (Fors Clavigera 29: 160). A similar tension informs important aspects of a later work, The American Scene, which suggests how the issues raised by the Whistler trial engaged James to the end of his career. In The American Scene Whistler's name appears in a much-quoted (and tantalizingly ambiguous) catalogue of "wondrous" impressionist painters (37), but the implications of the dispute with Ruskin reverberate at a deeper level. In the Preface, for instance, James frequently resorts to metaphors of law and judgment, which register not simply a desire for freedom but also a sense of constraint and necessary limitation.14 Mingling "conviction" with "curiosity," James presents himself as reconciling, or compromising between, the poles of law and self-expression that he saw at play, in different ways, in Ruskin and Whistler. Subtly evoking the actual legal process in which these two figures had been entangled, James openly declares his commitment to an impressionist aesthetic:
I would take my stand on my gathered impressions [. . .] I would in fact go to the stake for them--which is a sign of the value that I both in particular and in general attach to them and that I have endeavoured to preserve for them in this transcription. My cultivated sense of aspects and prospects affected me absolutely as an enrichment of my subject, and I was prepared to abide by the law of that sense--the appearance that it would react promptly in some presences only to remain imperturbably inert in others. (American Scene 3-4)James presents his book as a transcription of the trials of perception and interpretation to which his impressions have given rise. This image takes much of its force from the allusion to Luther's famous declaration, "Here I stand," which allows James to adopt the language of religious martyrdom in order to stake a claim for the artist's private judgment, or inner light. Yet James's extension of this religious metaphor, which reminds us of the emphatically public scene in which martyrdom is secured ("I would in fact go to the stake"), signifies the inseparability of private judgment from the kinds of judgment that are passed in courts of law or published criticism. The very notion of private judgment is the dialectical twin, we might say, of the concept of public judgment, which casts a shadow over the light--or, in Pater's phrase, "hard, gem-like flame" (152)--of personal inspiration. Noting that the human scene represented "a greater array of items, a heavier expression of character, than [his] own pair of scales would ever weigh" (American Scene 4), James suggests accordingly that his personal judgments persist in making themselves available for further consideration and refinement. Implicitly, such revision is not undertaken by the author alone; in printing his impressions, James offers them up to the judgment of his readers, who must assess his credibility on grounds that are at once moral and aesthetic.15
There are indications, then, that James found ways to maintain Ruskinian and Whistlerian impressionisms in productive tension. While attending to one's impressions inevitably meant inhabiting the private sphere of subjectivity, or Whistlerian temperament, this condition did not necessarily override Ruskin's stated artistic principles. As James puts it later in The American Scene, an "impression fix[es] itself by a wild logic of its own," to produce not "a show of neat ciphering" but "a bold drawn image" (228). The impression constitutes a certain principle of lawlessness, which operates beyond the self's control. Ruskin captures this very logic in Modern Painters: if "the artist does not understand the sacredness of the truth of Impression, and supposes that, once quitting hold of his first thought, he may by Philosophy compose something prettier than he saw and mightier than he felt, it is all over with him." While emphasizing fidelity to "the far higher and deeper truth of mental vision, rather than that of the physical facts," Ruskin, like James (and Pater) after him, prized the immediate sensation of the first impression, which the "strange laws" of imagination transposed into artistic form (Modern Painters 6: 35-36). In proclaiming the wild logic of the impression, James was invoking what Ruskin called the "universal law of obscurity," which says that "nothing can be right, till it is unintelligible" (6: 81). In James as in Ruskin, moreover, the response of the audience constitutes the final test of an artist's adherence to this law. Just as James invited his readers to evaluate his transcription of reality, Ruskin held that the successful artist would reproduce "on the far-away beholder's mind precisely the impression which reality would have produced" (6: 36). For both writers, the true work of art reproduced in the spectator the artist's own original impression.
James's writings bespeak a deep commitment to perpetual self-scrutiny that reveals an awareness, even suspicion, of an impressionism that is merely of the self--whether it be the retreat into private abstractions, the declining to express, that he saw in Whistler's paintings and French impressionism, or the ultimately self-indulgent violence of Ruskin's law-ridden criticism. James recognizes the inevitability of rhetorical violence for a writer operating in an impressionist mode, which always entails a crossing (as in transgressing, but also intertwining) of different strands of thought and sensibility, and attempting to control, or frame, the results. But James felt it was imperative to resist total abandonment to such impulses. His sense of freedom is perpetually implicated in an awareness of the need for moral and aesthetic law, and of the way that freedom itself constitutes a certain kind of lawfulness, which counterpoints but also complements the need for discipline.
What James does affirm is the need for flexible, mobile literary forms for his impressions. In James's critical works and, as I shall suggest, in The Portrait of a Lady, such forms stimulate the growth of a new kind of impressionist vision. These forms create the aesthetic and moral conditions for a Jamesian sense of justice founded not on the laws that governed the dispute between Ruskin and Whistler but on those of a "cultivated sense of aspects and prospects" (American Scene 4). In James, this sense answers equally to the demands of personal temperament and desire, on one hand, and of moral and social laws, on the other; it meets the requirements of both private appreciation and public judgment. Thus James is not so distant from Hume, who argued that our "sense of justice" is founded "on our impressions" (496), which not only depend on human conventions but even require confirmation by others. James certainly stands closer to Hume on this matter than to Pater, who transforms the Humean impression into an "Epicurean passion" by stripping away "its customs and skeptical orientation" (Matz 439).16 James does not stretch the point so far as to claim that Humean consensus is finally possible, but he intimates that an impressionist sense of justice neither begins nor finds ultimate satisfaction in the self. James's sense of justice informs not only his own imaginative activity but also, as we shall see, the interpretative processes in which he invites readers of his Portrait to participate.
Published in 1880-81 after a long gestation that had begun in the year of the Whistler trial, The Portrait of a Lady enjoyed rather more success than James's previous novels, but several reviewers charged the novel with obscurity. These objections had much in common with contemporary complaints about the lack of finish, sketchiness, and confusion of picture with frame that were observed in impressionist painting. Some commentators alleged that James's novel, suffering from an excessively analytical or "scientific" method, lacked both action and fully realized characters, and so gave the effect of a "shadowy, unfinished picture" (Taylor 179). According to these critics, the absence of a coherent, unified plot revealed itself most glaringly in the inconclusive note on which Portrait ends. "It is a most equivocal and debasing conclusion," Margaret Oliphant wrote anonymously in Blackwood's Magazine, "and brings us up sharp with a discord instead of the symphony of harmonising chords with which it has been the habit of art to accompany the end of every story" (qtd. in Gard 103). The obscurity of James's characters seemed especially pronounced in the case of Isabel Archer. "The central figure," R. H. Hutton complained in the Spectator, "remains shrouded in mist. Where the strongest light and the most definite impression should be, there is nothing but haze, nothing but laborious riddle" (qtd. in Gard 94). Isabel, Hutton concluded, was "a great blot in the centre of a carefully-painted picture" (96). Thus, in the courtroom of contemporary critical opinion, Hutton and like-minded reviewers repeated Ruskin's attack on Whistler by accusing James, in effect, of flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.17 The parallels between contemporary responses to Portrait and attacks on Whistler and impressionist painting may not have been entirely accidental, and (more importantly) they certainly help us to see how James's novel restages some of the crucial issues raised by the Whistler-Ruskin controversy. The following brief reading of Portrait will suggest how James's concern with perception, knowledge, and freedom is inflected by the very issues of justice that had been raised by the Whistler trial, particularly the conflict between subjective perception and collective judgment. James's Portrait encourages us to dwell on the complex relations between the concept of justice as immediate sensory response, which is associated with a definition of impressionism as personal receptivity or private appreciation, and justice as knowledge and judgment, which shifts our understanding of impressionism onto more public, morally contested ground. Reactivating the questions that James posed in his criticism of Ruskin, Portrait forces us to ask: Is the world of art a "garden of delight," a space for the free play of the individual, or is it a "sort of assize court in perpetual session," where a purportedly collective but potentially oppressive kind of justice holds sway? Further, we are invited to consider whether those two seemingly divergent possibilities--which are figured in the compelling yet ambiguous images of the Touchett home (Gardencourt) and Gilbert Osmond's Roman mansion (the Palazzo Roccanera)--might be reconciled, or whether such an accommodation would lead only to another kind of "Draconic legislation." A pressing reason for trying to answer these questions, as I hinted earlier, is that James's characters frequently ask each other for justice--a major, though surprisingly neglected, theme in the book as a whole.18 Madame Merle's cry for justice is not the only declaration of its kind in this novel. It is echoed a few pages later by Isabel: "I want to be treated with justice; I want nothing but that" (191). Isabel has a "passion for justice," to which even Osmond, her demonic husband, is able to appeal; indeed she mistakes his dark designs for manifestations of a form of justice that is merely "different" from her own (361). At least one of James's modern readers has contended that Osmond's disappointment is grounded in real, if morally unjustified, grievances, which might be construed as the foundations of a distorted sense of justice (Krook 51-56). What James's characters have in common in such instances is an appeal to the various forms of justice at play in his own assessment of the Ruskin-Whistler dispute. When one character asks another to treat her with justice, she is requesting not only fair judgment but also (to recall Pater's term) sympathy; she is pleading not simply for evaluation according to certain extraneous rules of conduct but for an authentic emotional and imaginative response to her very being. Madame Merle, for example, wants to make a deep personal impression on Isabel, which should protect her if Isabel later turns against her by appealing to a more conventional form of social morality. Such a plea activates at one stroke the sense of justice as fidelity to one's own untutored impressions and justice as the impressions made on the subject by conventional judgments. As I have noted, these senses of justice sometimes cross paths: Madame Merle's plea implies a request for favorable moral judgment as well as sympathetic appreciation (an error that betrays her presumption in asking for better treatment than she deserves). The relations between these kinds of justice are even more complicated because they can also be read as pleas to the narrator, or author, for adequate representation (in the vein of what Pater called Botticelli's "forcible" realism [36]) as well as appropriate judgment--for adequate representation as the precondition of appropriate judgment. It is at this point that what might have been construed as private issues of aesthetics and individual morality assume a more public, legal guise, as they did in the Whistler trial of 1878: for James, fair representation is owed as much to characters in novels as to defendants in courts of law. It is here that the author's, and the reader's, burden is felt most acutely: author and reader must treat the characters with the same kind of justice they would wish for themselves. In offering us those ambivalently contrasting images of paradise (Gardencourt) and courtroom (the Palazzo), James not only heightens the sense that in this novel different kinds of justice converge to the point where they seem to occupy the same terrain; he also gives this terrain a specific shape that communicates the urgency with which he is asking us to grasp what his characters mean by justice, and to appreciate what this implies for the search for justice his readers must undertake.
III. James's PortraitSome of these problems have been described by other critics in both formal and moral terms, and sometimes--as in famous studies by Laurence B. Holland, Dorothea Krook, and Dorothy Van Ghent--in terms of the connections between the formal and the moral. In directing attention to James's use of legal language in Portrait, I do not mean merely to rephrase previous interpretations. Nor do I wish simply to rehearse the general comparisons between fictional and legal processes that have been drawn by Ian Watt and, more recently, Alexander Welsh (31; 225). What I am suggesting is that The Portrait of a Lady is shadowed by a particular legal scenario, the Whistler trial, whose unfolding James had recently witnessed in London, and whose spectral presence in James's text sheds light on hitherto unrecognized aspects of literary impressionism as well as on the novel's fabled inconclusiveness.
The character who engages us most fully in a quest for justice is, of course, the allegedly obscure heroine, Isabel Archer. This is not (as we shall see) because James asks us to identify her point of view absolutely with his, or with our own. But Isabel is the character with whom we become most intimate. In an effect analogous to that of an "unfinished" impressionist painting, and a source of special irritation for such critics as Hutton and Oliphant, her activities sometimes resemble the reader's to the point of mirroring them, so that her outlines, and the distinction between reader and character, blur. It is on Isabel, too, that the issues of justice and impressionism raised by the Ruskin-Whistler controversy are focused with greatest intensity.
Our first glimpse of Isabel, standing in the "ample doorway" at Gardencourt (25), indicates her status as the potential object of the reader's gaze, offered up for our delight--or is it for judgment? At this juncture Isabel is less of a blot on James's canvas than a spot--the doorway does not frame her, it dwarfs her--so that she can hardly be said to command attention. Ralph, the heroine's voyeuristic, incessantly aestheticizing cousin, is the unwitting object of her gaze before he ever sees her: for some unascertainable time, she has been looking on, rather like ourselves, at the tea-time scene unfolding on the lawn. Once Ralph's attention is drawn to Isabel by his dog's excitement, she comes into the reader's view, but she retains her status as observer. If Isabel's primary mode of visual experience is receptive, James expresses it in a language of freedom and activity: "[H]er flexible figure turned itself easily this way and that, in sympathy with the alertness with which she evidently caught impressions" (28). The world into which Isabel has stepped strikes her (and, no doubt, the reader) as a garden of delight, a place unburdened by weighty moral imperatives, those "great things," as Pater called them (36), from whose shadow we tend to shrink. At this stage of Isabel's development, success in life (or doing justice to herself) appears to depend on nothing more than openness to her impressions, a fidelity to immediate experience. Correspondingly, the author's (and the reader's) task seems to be to treat Isabel's impressions with a similar kind of justice--to adopt a Whistlerian, or Paterian, attitude of "irresponsible" appreciation that guarantees just representation of her character, while suspending the threat of public moral judgment that James identified with Ruskin's pose as Draconic lawmaker.
The last time we see Isabel, again at Gardencourt, the picture is very different. Her uncle and cousin are dead; having inherited the bulk of her uncle's wealth, she is trapped in a soul-destroying marriage to Osmond, an expatriate American who lives in Italy. Ralph's funeral is over; she has said a final farewell to one former suitor, Lord Warburton, and has just extricated herself from the embrace of another, the "perpendicular" Bostonian, Caspar Goodwood (412):
She never looked about her; she only darted from the spot. There were lights in the windows of the house; they shone far across the lawn. In an extraordinarily short time--for the distance was considerable--she had moved through the darkness (for she saw nothing) and reached the door. Here she only paused. She looked all about her; she listened a little; then she put her hand on the latch. She had not known where to turn; but she knew now. There was a very straight path. (489-90)This passage (and the description of the kiss that precedes it) has already received extensive critical scrutiny, but I want to draw attention to how it reverses certain elements of the opening scene, which occurs at the very same location.19 When the novel begins, Isabel is all eyes, extraordinarily alert to her surroundings. Retreating at the end to the doorway from which she had initially emerged, she seems to live merely in the darkness of inner turmoil, which is lightened, if at all, only in her mind's eye; instead of leisurely, luxuriant vision, we have only the nervous retinal movements of a woman in panic ("She never looked about her. [. . .] She looked all about her [. . .]"). What had once been a garden of delight seems to have become a sort of assize court, not entirely unlike Osmond's Palazzo, where the only kind of justice on offer is a grotesque imitation of the austere moral judgment from which Isabel used to be exempt.An explanation for this change emerges when we notice that the pressure exerted here by Goodwood exemplifies a process that has been at work from the outset: the framing of Isabel. By "framing" I mean, obviously, the idea of a picture frame, to which other critics have pointed, but I want also to evoke the legal notion of providing false or misleading evidence to make an innocent person look guilty. In James's Portrait these two senses of framing usually coincide. In light of questions provoked by the Ruskin-Whistler dispute, we can perceive in such framings the patterns of willful distortion, of misrepresentation and misjudgment, that impress the reader with a sense of injustice. In James's frame-world, the liberty to catch impressions that the young Isabel enjoys at Gardencourt is withheld, because she is now treated as a blank, wax-like surface on which others may stamp their own designs. When, for example, Goodwood recalls Milton's image of Adam and Eve leaving Eden as a context for his and Isabel's situation at the end of the novel--"The world's all before us," he says (Portrait 489)--he rearranges her portrait to include himself as her natural partner in fate.20 In the process, he attaches to Isabel (if also to himself) the stain of sin, and thus frames her for the crime that precipitated humanity's fall into history. Similarly, Ralph--who is not, in my view, the straightforwardly benevolent figure he is often thought to be--frames his cousin as the portrait of a lady who is given freedom of choice only to see it wither in her own hands. From the first, Ralph regards Isabel as a source of personal amusement, the central figure in the "reduced sketch" (46) that he has drawn up for the last years of his life. Only at the end of his life, when the consequences of his actions have sunk in, does Ralph realize how his conception of Isabel's freedom has turned her into an irresistible target for the conspiratorial genius of Madame Merle, who, with ex-lover Gilbert Osmond, frames her within a scheme for the social redemption of their illegitimate daughter, Pansy.
It is Osmond, of course, who is most deeply guilty of framing Isabel. Aided and abetted by Madame Merle, he comes desperately close to succeeding in his efforts to circumscribe Isabel's range of movement within the limits of his sterilizing, narrowly aesthetic vision and to frame her for the crime of marriage-breaking. Osmond's plot is dangerous, moreover, precisely because it concerns the status of his and Isabel's marriage--their place, that is, in an institution whose function is to transpose personal relations into public form.21 If successful, Osmond's treachery, which marks him as something of a "chartered libertine" (to recall a phrase James used to describe Ruskin [Painter's Eye 174]), would not only deny Isabel a private sense of justice; it would turn her into a potential object of public condemnation. James sets the stage for Osmond's fraudulent treatment of his wife by turning his pseudo-aristocratic Roman mansion, the Palazzo Roccanera, into a pastiche of Gardencourt. Deploying metaphors of prison and fortress that recall the image of the assize court associated elsewhere with Ruskin, James depicts the Palazzo, "which smelt of historic deeds, of crime and craft and violence" (307), as an embodiment of what struck him as oppressive and suffocating in Ruskin's version of Italy. It is in this forbiddingly "Ruskin-haunted" atmosphere (Italian Hours 255), where first impressions have lost their original freshness, that we meet Isabel, "framed in the gilded doorway [. . .] as the picture of a gracious lady," now dominating the canvas on which she appears, yet (in a poignant irony) trapped in the role of Osmond's most prized possession (310). Hence her loss of the "quick eagerness" that distinguishes the diminutive figure of the opening scene at Gardencourt. Compared with the intensity and obscurity of the "bold drawn image" produced by what James later called the "wild logic" of the first impression, Osmond's picture of a gracious lady looks like a piece of "neat ciphering" (American Scene 228), and neat in the same sense as his copies of coins: Osmond's world is one not of spontaneous but of "studied" impressions (Portrait 330). In reducing Isabel to these terms, Osmond has transformed her into a mere "representation," or even an "advertisement" (330), amounting to nothing but a public misrepresentation that denies her justice twice over: a travestied response to her situation that subverts in turn the very possibility of fair judgment. The effect of this travesty is itself doubled by the way Osmond feigns injury, as if he were the real victim of injustice. While Ruskin, in James's view, "possessed himself by prescription of the function of a general scold" (Painter's Eye 174), Osmond forges such a prescription, and then behaves as if it had been obtained by honest means. So Osmond feels free to pass judgment on Isabel--and, as Madame Merle informs her later in the novel, he "judges [her] severely" (Portrait 429).22
If the foregoing sketch indicates a certain compulsion to frame Isabel that unites an otherwise disparate group of (mostly male) characters, the same tendency is exhibited by the narrative as a whole. Further, the narrator's framing impulses appear to be mobilized in response to the flexibility and the "joy of irreflective action" (446) for which Isabel is so remarkable before her marriage--as if any sense of freedom must be checked, or complemented, by a desire for constraint (which is implicitly figured in the form of marriage). The young Isabel seems an integral part of the garden of delight at Gardencourt, distinctions between self and world giving way, bringing her relief from the pressure of awaiting Goodwood: we see her "seated [. . .] on a garden-bench [. . .] beneath a spreading beech, where, in a white dress ornamented with black ribbons, she formed among the flickering shadows a graceful and harmonious image" (92). Isabel's function here is analogous to that of figures in certain impressionist paintings, like Whistler's "harmonies," perhaps, or The White Girl (1861-62), for she gives us an impression, a perception of certain characteristics that she contains but that may be isolated from her (and that may be discovered, potentially, in some other form as well). The image--the product of the impression's wild logic--constitutes no more than a momentary arrest of the flux of time and space, which is represented here by the "flickering shadows" among which Isabel sits. These excited, agitated shadows also serve as a projection of Isabel's internal state, suggesting a bewildering restlessness that is hardly belied by her temporary stasis. It may have been the restlessness associated with such images that made Isabel seem obscure, or blot-like, to some of James's contemporaries. This "flickering" effect even compels the narrator himself to search for a frame within which to place her--for a system of conventions that will enable him, in the first place, to make sense of her, to give her adequate representation, but that is also a prerequisite for any attempt at rendering judgment.
This point reminds us that while the framing of Isabel is lamented in several ways, it is felt to be a necessity, and not simply an evil one. Readers may find individual plotters and counterplotters entirely objectionable, but the pleasures of Isabel's youthful romanticism can only acquire meaning when placed, if not within, then in relation to, some organizing frame.23 This relation (which is conceded even by Lee Clark Mitchell's illuminating study of how Isabel moves beyond the novel's frame) is productive and enabling as well as prohibitive. Just such a double-effect is evident in the consequences of Isabel's marriage to Osmond and in her attitude toward it. On one hand, their union rapidly comes to feel like an indefinite prison-sentence; on the other hand, Isabel, who is very close to James's own sympathies here, feels profound respect for the "magnificent form" of marriage (446). The alternative offered by Goodwood--adultery--is impossible for Isabel precisely because it is the too-easily-imagined alternative, the too-conventional reaction against convention: when Goodwood issues his Miltonic declaration of independence, she gives "a long murmur, like a creature in pain" (489). The rules of marriage maintain their hold on Isabel, even though it is transparently clear that, in identifying himself with "convention itself" (265) and with the marital institution ("we, we, Mrs. Osmond is all I know" [446]), her husband is cynically applying the letter of the law while killing the spirit in a style reminiscent of James's least sympathetic portrait of Ruskin. Osmond's "appeal," which is what Isabel recognizes in his "blasphemous sophistry," succeeds in arousing her "old passion for justice" (446), perhaps because she suspects that the spirit of the law without the letter is only marginally preferable to the letter without the spirit; after all, one thing that the passion for justice guarantees is respect for some sort of law. One consequence of this passion is that not only does Isabel remain committed to Osmond, but in doing so she seems to renounce life, even to commit a kind of suicide. In a sense, this is the very crime for which the narrator frames her; it is the offense against life of which Ralph tacitly accuses her when he exclaims that she was "meant for something better than to keep guard over the sensibilities of a sterile dilettante!" (292). But this is part of the price she must pay.24James elaborates this sense of compromised, compromising freedom early in the novel by sketching the drawbacks, as well as the advantages, of the irregular or "liberal" education bestowed on Isabel and her sisters by their recently deceased father. Their peripatetic education had led to several extended visits to the Archers' grandmother's home, in the "idleness" of which the "foundation of [Isabel's] knowledge was really laid" (33). The result of this benevolent regime is the "flexible figure" we see at Gardencourt (28). But James also indicates that Isabel's education has weakened her character by overstimulating her imagination (the seat of private aesthetic experience) at the expense of good judgment (which applies to this experience a normative frame that allows it to survive translation into the language of public morality): "Her imagination was ridiculously active [. . .] and at important moments, when she would have been thankful to make use of her judgement alone, she paid the penalty of having given undue encouragement to the faculty of seeing without judging" (39). It is only when Isabel's aunt, Mrs. Touchett, enters her life in Albany (an episode that in narrative time succeeds the opening scene at Gardencourt but chronologically precedes it) that the heroine senses that "the note of change had been struck" (39). James plays numerous variations on this note by exploring the shifting relation between the heroine's faculty of seeing and her increasing need to form sound judgments. In the process, James probes the complicated relationship between the reader's perceptions and the development of a refined sense of justice. But this exploration is always filtered through the (ostensibly) primary concern with the evolution in Isabel of a mode of vision that is wedded to sound judgment: one cannot live, James implies, by first impressions alone. And what this teaches her is that freedom means nothing, can be nothing, without a profound sense of constraint. In choosing Osmond, Isabel reveals that she has learned this lesson imperfectly, as her tragedy makes all too clear, but her error is quite understandable, as it represents a sincere response to a genuine problem--an overcompensation for the excessive irregularities of her upbringing.
Isabel, then, has been framed on several counts, some, perhaps all, represented as necessary for her development, but by the end of the novel her sensibility has undergone a crucial transformation, as we see in a late scene at the convent in which Pansy Osmond is incarcerated. As she confronts Madame Merle, whose presence has "the character of ugly evidence, of handwritings, of profaned relics, of grim things produced in court" (456), Isabel breaks out of the role of victim in which others have cast her. In possession at last of Madame Merle's secret, James's heroine exacts maximum psychological punishment by declining to accuse her of any specific crime, thus denying her "the opportunity to defend herself" (459). Isabel makes a victim of Madame Merle, and can do so because she has learned from her example, absorbed some of her characteristics, especially her selfishness and artistry. Having become the "picture of a gracious lady" (310), Isabel plays the increasingly effective role of counterplotter to the plots devised by the woman she mistook for a friend.
The alteration in Isabel's conduct signifies a deeper change in her character: her "faculty of seeing" (39) has been reinforced by a capacity for judging that does not demand perpetual self-sacrifice. Her reflectiveness has become a matter not simply of charming receptivity but of moral insight and action; she has learned to translate impressions into knowledge, which is the basis for such action. Isabel moves beyond the naive romanticism of the self, of which James suspected all parties involved in the legal controversy of 1877-78. At the same time, she edges toward a sense of justice that depends on acknowledging the need to search for a perspective that is, if not objective, then more comprehensive, less partial--a perspective closer to that promoted by the explicitly social and moral arguments of Ruskin's recent work. For much of the novel, Isabel, enjoying her generous capacity for "irreflective action" (446), recognizes only a subjective, or (in James's view) Whistlerian, notion of understanding founded on an unearned skepticism about the possibility of shared judgment. Hence Mrs. Touchett's insistence on adopting a personal point of view strikes an early chord: "[W]e have each to judge for ourselves," Isabel says (139); "I try to judge things for myself; to judge wrong, I think, is more honourable than not to judge at all" (143). Such emphatic subjectivism turns out to be a meager substitute for a truly "cultivated sense of aspects and prospects," its assumptions poor relations of the "law of that sense" (American Scene 4). This gradual transformation in Isabel's sensibility is dramatized most powerfully in her (and our) shifting, swelling response to the "strange impression" (355) she receives in one of the most famous scenes in the novel. Returning to the Palazzo Roccanera after a walk in the Campagna, Isabel comes upon her husband and Serena Merle in a "colloquy [that] had for the moment converted itself into a sort of familiar silence":What struck Isabel first was that he was sitting while Madame Merle stood; there was an anomaly in this that arrested her. Then she perceived that they had arrived at a desultory pause in their exchange of ideas and were musing, face to face, with the freedom of old friends who sometimes exchange ideas without uttering them. There was nothing to shock in this; they were old friends in fact. But the thing made an image, lasting only a moment, like a sudden flicker of light. Their relative positions, their absorbed mutual gaze, struck her as something detected. (342-43)In this scene, which suggests, as Marianna Torgovnick observes, an immediacy and lack of finish typical of impressionism (168), Isabel is unaware of the particular crime that has been committed. But from this point she begins to find evidence of morally criminal conduct; in this arresting mélange of mystery and suspense, Isabel, who doubles as detective and victim, knows who the criminals are, but has to discover from a journey into the past what their crime was. As every reader knows, James's masterly control of the way in which this pre-narrative past is revealed keeps the reader in the dark as long as Isabel, so that her process of discovery mirrors our own interpretative activities--a convergence that heightens both readerly sympathy with the heroine and the characteristic impressionist effect of a heightened readerly participation in the narrative drama. The way forward for Isabel, as for the reader, is to allow her impressions to coalesce into knowledge--that is, to obey the "law of obscurity," as Ruskin called it (Modern Painters 6: 81), and let her first impressions evolve into mature consciousness. At the end of a slow, painstaking process, Isabel realizes what the reader has probably guessed: as it develops into a picture with a frame, her strange impression yields the knowledge that Osmond is "in more direct communication with Madame Merle than she had suspected" (Portrait 355), and that she has been the victim of their conspiracy. Her supposed friend has been playing her false all along; what she had taken for Osmond's different sense of justice turns out to be nothing but anti-justice, a negation of the motives of both appreciation and judgment that evokes what James most deplored in Ruskin's Draconic mode and in the "promiscuous violence" of his response to Whistler.The reader's estimate of Osmond and Madame Merle probably remains quite close to Isabel's, but our view of the novel's events is never identical to hers; the experience of James's reader neither begins nor ends in the heroine's subjectivity. If we have learned anything from reading The Portrait of a Lady, we recognize that Isabel's interpretative activities comprise an important subject of our own contemplation, which is at once further removed from events and also more complicated, perhaps richer, for this very distance. The reader's aspects and prospects represent a higher degree of cultivation, in comparison with which even Isabel's seem relatively limited. The reader inhabits a sphere of broader scope that is governed by a more highly refined sense of law. This law guarantees a form of justice that is rich where Osmond's is impoverished. Such justice marries the apparently conflicting demands of subjective impressionism and public moral imperatives in the manner indicated by James's response to the Whistler-Ruskin controversy; it is a justice that concerns neither adequate representation nor fitting judgment alone, but the manifestation of both at the same time.
This point may be clarified by turning to the paragraphs that follow Isabel's final exit. James is describing Goodwood's last interview with Isabel's journalist friend, Henrietta Stackpole, who informs him that his quarry has started for Rome:
Henrietta had come out, closing the door behind her, and now she put out her hand and grasped his arm. "Look here, Mr. Goodwood," she said; "just you wait!"This passage has been a persistent source of critical disagreement, especially over the question of whether Isabel returns to Osmond for good, and if so whether she does this out of a sense of obligation to him or to Pansy (Holland 53). Some early readers, as Annette Ziemtzow reminds us, even saw this ending as leaving open the possibility of adultery between Isabel and Goodwood (393). But if such discord indicates moral, as well as aesthetic, ambiguity at the end of the 1908 New York edition, the original 1881 text (which concludes with the phrase, "On which he looked up at her") leaves the ending even more undecided. The earlier version terminates with the blank expressions on Goodwood's and Henrietta's faces--synecdoches for the lack of finish, the refusal to grant ultimate resolution, that connects James's novel to the impressionist paintings with which he enjoyed a longstanding, ambivalent kinship. James's readers end the novel without arriving at the sense of closure Isabel seems to attain in her investigation of Osmond's past. Our removal from events--our ability to see the frame within which Isabel, like the other characters, moves--does not give us anything that can be called, with confidence, superior knowledge. Instead, we experience a reimmersion in our impressions, which means a resumption of the arduous process of interpretation from which the ending grants Isabel a well-earned reprieve. Further, we might well feel uncertain about how the events described in this novel might be continued or resolved. Our "sense of justice" may be gratified, as James's was in the Ruskin case, by seeing Osmond effectively "brought up as a disorderly character" (Painter's Eye 173-74), but what would we have had Isabel do, apart from the now-too-obvious (not marry Osmond), and what would we have her do now? As Mitchell has noted, it is remarkable how frequently readers have been brought to this point, where, like the novel's characters and narrator, we attempt "to dress Isabel in a set of projected futures" that are always defined in terms of moral choice (104). And our judgments, as Mitchell emphasizes, may be no more secure, no less self-interested, than those of the characters. Having discovered a sense of justice that extends beyond the limits of Isabel's knowledge, we are bereft, nonetheless, of deeper insight. While feeling impelled toward a search for collective understanding, we are forced by the novel's ending to confront again the complexities and limitations of subjective perception. Thus James's readers face the very difficulties posed, in their different (yet not entirely different) ways, by Whistler's paintings and Ruskin's writings. As the history of this novel's many interpretations shows, it is possible to seek some assurance, some provisional certainty, in the community of readers, yet this text has proved peculiarly resistant to any such consensus. Continuing the search for justice, we may be on our own. Reviewing The Portrait of a Lady in light of the moral and aesthetic issues raised by the Whistler-Ruskin dispute reveals how deep and problematic are the implications of James's impressionism for the activity of reading itself. It is a critical truism that impressionist texts direct our attention to the interpretative process, even to the point where reading is seen as their major concern. But the impressionism of James's Portrait raises the stakes of these self-reflexive acts of interpretation. By making us negotiate and renegotiate the borders between self and other, text and reader, this work moves us continually to reconsider the fundamental nature of our impressions--to weigh the relative claims of individual sensory responses, on one hand, and, on the other, social and moral conventions. By its very inconclusiveness, the Portrait compels us to transport ourselves back inside its frame, even as it encourages us to construct yet another interpretative frame around it. Framing James's Portrait, we are framed in turn by the text, as we dramatize the central conflict in his impressionism between the demands of the one and those of the many, between its well-known tendencies toward a private realm of subjective reflection and its apparently contrary, but no less significant, impulses toward public rhetoric and discursiveness. Precisely because James cannot resolve the tension between Whistler's and Ruskin's varieties of impressionism, or even the tensions within each variety, his audience must restage his divided response to the 1878 trial--and, more specifically, the anxious quest for a sense of justice that it forced him to undertake--in its own acts of reading. These acts are brought into play by the drama of irruption, of violent transgression of once secure boundaries, that is the foundation of impressionist aesthetics. University of Georgia NOTES For their helpful readings of different versions of this essay, I would like to thank Douglas Anderson, Kristin Boudreau, Simon Gatrell, James Longenbach, Hubert McAlexander, Carl Rapp, and the readers and editors of Victorian Studies, especially James Eli Adams and Jonathan Freedman.On which he looked up at her--but only to guess, from her face, with a revulsion, that she simply meant he was young. She stood shining at him with that cheap comfort, and it added, on the spot, thirty years to his life. She walked him away with her, however, as if she had given him now the key to patience. (490)
1 Some critics, such as Joseph and Elizabeth Pennell, simply dismiss Ruskin as mad (1: 323). R. H. Wilenski speculates that Ruskin was troubled by Nocturne in Black and Gold because it played on his fear of light spots against a dark background (138-39). Echoing Wilenski, John D. Rosenberg argues that the trial "proved nothing, except that Whistler deserved his reputation as a wit and that Ruskin, who had defended the avant-garde in the '40s and '50s, was now its enemy." Indeed, for Rosenberg, the trial was a blessing in disguise because it "gave Ruskin an opportunity to resign with dignity from a position [the Slade Professorship] which he could no longer hold with competence" (207-08). Roger B. Stein, in a seminal study of Ruskin's influence on American culture, contends that Ruskin's invective "was as much a pathetic expression of the man's fears and obsessions as it was the rational critic's attack on one who consciously violated the ideal of truth to nature" (197). For exceptions to this approach, see Beatty 27-41 and Craven 139-43, who argue that Ruskin's observations in Fors Clavigera were consistent not only with his other comments about Whistler but also with the larger assumptions of his work. See also Hewison, who rejects Wilenski's reductive psychological approach and points out that even when Ruskin was mad, "he was able to recognize the horrors of [his] attacks as fantasies, and clearly distinguished between them and normal life" (192-96).
2 Despite her strange disclaimer, Merrill provides the fullest and most illuminating account of the trial that is available. Compare this with Whistler's self-serving version of events in Gentle Art (1-19).
3 As Shearer West has shown, influential English critics such as Tom Taylor and William Powell Frith regarded Whistler's anti-naturalism and anti-moralism as a threat to British art, which led them to support Ruskin in court (see especially 320).
4 During the trial, Whistler, holding that "none but an artist can be a competent critic," rejected all criticism except "technical criticism by a man whose whole life is passed in the practice of the science which he criticises" (Gentle Art 5-6). Ruskin was accordingly dismissed in a vitriolic post-trial pamphlet, "Whistler v. Ruskin: Art and Art Critics": "What greater sarcasm can Mr. Ruskin pass upon himself than that he preaches to young men what he cannot perform! Why, unsatisfied with his own conscious power, should he choose to become the type of incompetence by talking for forty years of what he has never done!" (34).
5 Estimating a farthing in damages as "somewhere about the artistic value of those remarkable splashings from a paint pot which he chooses to regard as pictures," the reviewer for the Examiner described Whistler as the preeminent painter, Wagner as the most extreme composer, and Pater as the exemplary writer, of the "extravagant," or "grotesque," school in modern art: "Anyone who wishes to see sheer unadulterated nonsense in the garb of profundity in its richest and fullest development cannot do better than read some of Mr. Pater's criticisms" ("Symphony" 1516).
6 In Modern Painters Ruskin wrote: "[L]et it be clearly understood that an 'impression on the mind' does not mean a piece of manufacture" (6: 32). Ruskin wanted to purge the word "impression" of the commercial and industrial connotations it had accumulated in a modern age governed by laws of supply and demand. Prominent among these instances of lexical corruption, in Ruskin's mind, was the use of "impression" as a technical term for printing (as in "printing a second impression"), which he linked with certain forms of cultural degeneracy. "The discovery of printing," Ruskin claimed, "confused literature into vociferation," and inaugurated a "universal gabble of fools" (St. Mark's Rest 24: 257-62).
7 Whistler was linked with French impressionism in trial reports in The Times and the Illustrated London News. See also "Celebrities at Home"; Tondo.
8 For Fried's discussion of absorption (and its opposite, "theatricality," or "facing") in Whistler, see his commentary on Whistler's 1861-62 work, The White Girl (222-32).
9 As both Quentin Bell and George P. Landow have observed, Ruskin's ignorance of the French impressionists was neither surprising nor blameworthy, because they were not easy to find. The preeminent French painters of the time were Meissonier, Bonvin, Besnard, Cormon, and Bonnat. In any case, Ruskin had published the last volume of Modern Painters in 1860, several years before impressionism flowered.
10 It is a critical commonplace that the aesthetic concerns of Ruskin's early work later gave way to an emphasis on social issues, a shift that is usually seen as occurring in 1860. See Helsinger 58-62; Hewison 119-47; Landow 35-36; Richard L. Stein 32-33. See also Paul Sawyer's interesting variation on this theme (14). What I am suggesting, however, is that by considering Ruskin's impressionism, it is possible to see how even his early attempts to explicate the laws of perception and interpretation illustrate the legislative tendencies that would become more overt in the later social criticism.
11 My aim here is to describe the general change of direction in James's thoughts on Whistler, rather than each local vacillation. To be sure, James did not simply convert from merciless critic to unequivocal admirer. The early James, for example, managed some words of praise for the portraits of Whistler's mother and of Lady Archibald Campbell (Letters 3: 43). Conversely, James's later works, such as The American Scene (1907), occasionally reveal a lingering ambivalence.
12 With this suggestion, James anticipates an important point made by Dowling: "[O]perating at a distance from any of the specific disputes about defamation or damages is the implicit ontological conflict between the traditional belief in the external order of reality entailed by the ontic logos and a newer belief in an inner order or energy of nature within each individual subject" (47).
13 James consistently upheld the value of irresponsibility in his critical writings. In 1864, for example, he praised Scott's Waverley (1814) as "the novel irresponsible," which "proposed simply to amuse the reader" and "undertook to prove nothing but facts" (Critical Muse 21), and he used the same criteria in 1885 to criticize Eliot: "We feel in her, always, that she proceeds from the abstract to the concrete; that her figures and situations are evolved, as the phrase is, from her moral consciousness, and are only indirectly the products of observation. They are deeply studied and supported, but they are not seen, in the irresponsible plastic way" (208).
14 In pointing to the sense of inevitable limitation that James communicates in The American Scene, I am seeking to correct a recent tendency--visible in, for example, Ross Posnock's influential account--to oversimplify the nature of James's openness. Commenting on James's "critique of the ideology of information," Posnock writes: "In rejecting conclusions he rejects all they imply--definitive, categorical judgment--the synthetic act of authoritative knowledge. In place of conclusions [. . .] he devises 'chains of relations'" (153). In the passage from which Posnock is quoting, James's language conveys an unmistakable feeling of involuntary constraint: "[T]here is no such thing [. . .] as a break in the chain of relations" (American Scene 231). Posnock's own language gives the lie to the claim he seeks to establish, since a rejection of conclusions and "all they imply" would constitute a "definitive, categorical judgment." This confusion probably stems from an attempt to overcompensate for Mark Seltzer's Foucauldian reading of James's narratives as participating in "social policies of control" (18-19).
15 Paul B. Armstrong makes a similar, though more general, point about James's understanding of the "impression" when noting James's wariness of solipsism and his doubt about "the wisdom of trusting uncritically in the powers of consciousness." In James, Armstrong writes, the impression "mediates subject and object," and is itself subjected to the test of "intersubjective validation" (52-53). Armstrong does not comment, however, on the sources of such thinking in Ruskin.
16 Arguing that Pater's passion "is also a homoerotic one," Matz finds tensions in Paterian impressionism that resemble (at least structurally) those found in James: "[H]aving dismissed even the limited grounding of Hume's antirationalism, Pater develops a particular ambivalence about the means by which the receptive temperament exists. [. . .] In the tension between the ideal of unreflective receptivity and the narrative voice of aesthetic education, the erotic dynamic in Pater's impressionism begins to appear" (440).
17 For additional variations on these themes, see Gard 98-119; Taylor 173-78. James, of course, was prepared in advance for these criticisms (Notebooks 15-18).
18 As far as I am aware, the issue of justice has been treated by only one other reader of this novel (see Wiesenfarth). The scope of Wiesenfarth's inquiry is limited, however, to Isabel--in particular, to the conflict between her ethical need to do justice to herself and her desire to avoid doing injustices to others, or between her individual freedom and her marriage. My aim is to extend and complicate this concern with an ethical understanding of the term "justice" by resituating it in the context of impressionism.
19 Anthony J. Mazzella contends that whereas the 1881 text renders the kiss as a "sudden explosion" that registers Isabel's fear of sexual possession, the 1908 version indicates that she "is not afraid merely of the erotic experience itself but rather its tendency to diminish the life of the mind" (611). H. Peter Stowell sees this finale as a clear indication that Isabel has progressed from limited initial perception to an ultimately complete vision, a reading that anticipates, in a crude fashion, some features of my own (186). Holland gets closer to the mark when stating that Portrait "conceives [the] future as an urgent and unresolved crisis rather than as the hoped-for resolution of one" (25). For two illuminating recent readings that follow Holland's lead on this point, see Freedman 166; Horne 220.
20 As numerous critics have pointed out, James is alluding to the last lines of Paradise Lost (1667): "The World was all before them, where to choose / Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide: / They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow, / Through Eden took thir solitarie way" (12: 646-49). But James is also asking us to hear an ironic echo of the narrator's earlier statement (which implicitly announces Isabel's own thoughts), "The world lay before her--she could do whatever she chose" (Portrait 273), which evokes Wordsworth's revision of Milton. At the beginning of The Prelude (1850), Wordsworth rewrites Milton's closing lines to make the poet himself the representative figure who chooses his new life: "The earth is all before me. With a heart / Joyous, nor scared at its own liberty, / I look about; and should the chosen guide / Be nothing better than a wandering cloud, / I cannot miss my way" (1: 14-18). James is implying that when the young Isabel inherits the Touchett fortune, she subscribes to an extreme form of Romantic individualism, but that the more experienced Isabel sees this attitude as misguided and self-deluded, as I contend below, and as Wordsworth indicates of himself later in Book I of The Prelude.
21 As Tanner has argued with reference to the nineteenth-century novel in general (Adultery 18, 99), and as Holland has suggested in his reading of James's Portrait in particular (28-42, 51-54), the social institution of marriage is wedded to a certain literary form: the bourgeois novel itself. Examined in this light, Osmond's plot against Isabel threatens to render her an outcast not only in terms of the social codes by which she lives her fictional life, but even in terms of the aesthetic conventions--the laws of representation--which make that life intelligible. I use the term "marriage-breaking," rather than Tanner's "adultery," because Osmond suspects Isabel of undermining their own marriage by frustrating his desire to marry off Pansy to Lord Warburton. In this suspicion there is also some residual resentment of Warburton's previous (or perhaps continuing) designs on Isabel herself, which suggests that the specter of adultery indeed shadows all of these dealings. But it is Goodwood who embodies most fully the possibility of future adultery.
22 While suggesting that it makes sense to interpret some of Osmond's basic characteristics and actions as informed by James's responses to Ruskin, I do not mean to imply that Osmond should be regarded as a fictional equivalent of Ruskin; surely there are stronger Paterian connections, as noted by Freedman (146-66) and Tintner (87-89). The link with Pater also reminds us that for James the term "portrait"--like "temperament," "curiosity," and "appreciation"--has Paterian roots.
23 Objections to Osmond have run so deep that many readers, in the nineteenth as in the twentieth century, have been unable to accept that Isabel could fall for him. The flaw in such readings is their unquestioning acceptance of Ralph Touchett's hardly disinterested view of Osmond as a "sterile dilettante" (Portrait 292), a view that we should to some extent distrust, as William Gass has noted (69). As Krook and Tanner point out, James gives us ample evidence to explain Isabel's attraction to Osmond (41-45, 51-56; "Fearful Self" 208-12). Holland observes that while "Isabel's determination to 'choose,' and Osmond's to construct or 'make,' are sharply delineated by the mutual antagonism of the two characters," James brings them into "perilous proximity" not only by marrying them but by relating them to American attitudes to money (38-39). Further, as Mitchell argues, "any strict moral condemnation" of Osmond and Madame Merle "begins to strain under the weight of our narrative perspective," because the novel persistently "unsettles the impulse toward neat discriminations" (105).
24 This commentary may seem to run counter to James's own call in "The Art of Fiction" (1884) for the "freedom to feel and say" (Art of Criticism 170). Moreover, some of James's most perceptive readers have observed that he wants this freedom for fictional characters as well as for their creators. Richard Poirier, for one, emphasizes the pains James took to liberate his characters from systems of meaning that might curb their dramatic vitality (9-10). As Leo Bersani argues, however, to say that James's great subject is freedom is not to settle the issue but to bring deeper problems to light, as the "novels dramatize the difficulties of living by improvisation," including the "nostalgia for an enslaving truth which would rescue us from the strenuous responsibilities of inventive freedom" (58). Millicent Bell rightly observes that James "makes the very contest between interpretive limitation and freedom the essence of his most moving stories" (44).
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