Henry James
Henry James
- Henry James had this
to say about the Impressionists after seeing their exhibition in 1876:
亨利•詹姆士在1876年參觀印象派畫家的展覽後，表達了他的看法：
- The young contributors to the exhibition
of which I speak are partisans of unadorned reality and absolute foes
to arrangement, embellishment, selection, to the artist's allowing himself,
as he has hitherto, since art began, found his best account in doing,
to be preoccupied with the idea of the beautiful. [. . .] [They] declare
that the subject which has been crudely chosen shall be loosely treated.
They send detail to the dogs and concentrate themselves on the general
expression. (The Painter's Eye 114-15)
-
Over the years,
James modified his initial criticism of Impressionism, especially after
his friend Sargent became associated with the movement. James wrote
the following in his 1893 essay on Sargent:
往後幾年，特別是在他的友人撒峻與這個運動有所關聯後，詹姆士修正他最初
對印象主義的批評。他在1893年的一篇文章中寫了有關撒峻的以下一段話：
- From the time of his first successes at
the Salon [Sargent] was hailed, I believe, as a recruit of high value
to the camp of the Impressionists, and to-day he is for many people
pigeon-holed under that head. It is not necessary to protest against
the classification if this addition always be made to it, that Mr. Sargent's
impressions happen to be worthy of record. This is by no means inveterately
the case with those of the ingenuous artists who most rejoice in the
title in question. To render the impression of an object may be a very
fruitful effort, but it is not necessarily so; that will depend upon
what, I won't say the object, but the impression, may have been. The
talents engaged in this school lie, not unjustly, as it seems to me,
under the suspicion of seeking the solution of their problem exclusively
in simplification. If a painter works for other eyes as well as his
own he courts a certain danger in this direction-that of being arrested
by the cry of the spectator: 'Ah! But excuse me; I myself take more
impressions than that!' We feel a synthesis not to be an injustice only
when it is rich. Mr. Sargent simplifies, I think, but he simplifies
with style, and his impression is the finest form of his energy. (The
Painter's Eye 217-18)
-
James himself has
been called a literary impressionist. In a famous passage in his essay
"The Art of Fiction" (1884, contemporaneous with Sargent's A Dinner
Table at Night) James characterizes experience as being made up of impressions.
For James, an impression is an expanding awareness of what the eye sees:
詹姆士一直被認為是文學界的印象派作家。在其散文〈寫作的藝術〉
〈1884年發表，與撒峻的畫作〈夜晚的餐桌〉同時期）著名的一個段落中，
他把經驗描述成印象的集結。對他來說，所謂印象，是肉眼所見之物的擴大認知：
- Experience is never limited, and it is
never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spiderweb
of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness,
and catching every airborne particle in its tissue. It is the very atmosphere
of the mind; and when the mind is imaginative-much more when it happens
to be that of a man of genius-it takes to itself the faintest hints
of life, it converts the very pulses of the air into revelations. [.
. .] The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications
of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of
feeling life in general so completely that you are well on your way
to knowing any particular corner of it-this cluster of gifts may almost
be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town,
and in the most differing stages of education. If experience consists
of impressions, it may be said that impressions are experience, just
as (have we not seen it?) they are the very air we breathe. Therefore,
if I should certainly say to a novice, "Write from experience and experience
only," I should feel that this was rather a tantalizing monition if
I were not careful immediately to add, "Try to be one of the people
on whom nothing is lost!" (Norton 2: 376)
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American Literature and Visual Art :
Joseph
C. Murphy
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