Henry James’s 1884 essay “The Art of Fiction” attributes much to atmosphere. James was an atmospheric writer — his fiction renders the subtle mood, the sense of things, the warm or chilling ambience — but in “The Art of Fiction,” air itself is at issue. Air is where writers get their inspiration.

James says that the true-genius writer conjures the greatest insights out of the slightest impressions. This is his impressionist theory of aesthetic perception, his version of the idea that keenest sensitivity to mere impressions feeds the strongest imagination.¹ But James offers a unique metaphor for this reversal when he writes that true genius makes art out of the very nothingness of air itself: genius “converts the very pulses of the air into revelations.”² The larger idea here is that the minimal input provokes maximal ingenuity; less is more for the imagination inspired by the power of mere suggestion. But the specific, oddly mixed metaphor of air to revelations involves other ideas too. Compounded by the claim (made in the same sentence) that “experience . . . is the very atmosphere of the mind,” James’s airborne impressionism becomes a function of the environment.

“The Art of Fiction” was a response to a similar but different view of what truly makes fiction an art. Walter Besant had written (in his own The Art of Fiction earlier that year) that the best writers work from experience. They write what they know. James agreed, but he redefined “experience”: not just a matter of full and direct immersion, experience could be sidelong, partial, and fleeting, and speculative, and as much a matter of invention as actuality.³ It was, in other words, a matter of impressions. Impressions were neither objective facts nor subjective suppositions, neither observations nor intuitions, but both. As such, they gave the writer of genius much more to go on, since experience-as-impressions could be everything from sensory input to wild theories, gaining it far greater range. This expansion made a massive difference to literary aesthetics. This was how realist writing expanded its nineteenth-century creativity, bridging Romanticism to modernism.

As expansive as it was, this impressionism — James’s version of it — also narrowed the field by taking only a positive view of its opportunities. James celebrates the impression, affirming its validity as the better part of experience. Other impressionists saw things with a more skeptical sense of how impressions could be fleeting, flimsy, or wrong. A more skeptical view was common in the discourse on impressions going back through Walter Pater and David Hume (and even as far as Plato) and up through Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf. Ambivalence was more typical for writers and philosophers who saw that these striking, provocative phenomena were also potentially deceptive and immaterial, that they could amount to nothing. James in “The Art of Fiction” is troubled by no such possibility. Here, impressions threaten no skeptical losses and work only by that wonderful magic whereby less is actually more.

Then again, the airborne impression does suggest some skepticism after all. Rather than attributing full validity to the subjective impression, it locates much of its basis in the empty space between subject and object — a standard kind of deconstruction for the impression, but here an especially risky one. If pulses of the air are a writer’s source of inspiration, that inspiration comes at once from the outside object (which makes the air pulse) and the subjective mind that can receive so much from so little. But the meeting place of the two is so literally vacuous. What happens when air embodies the impression’s way of undoing the difference between objective judgment and subjective feeling?

Dora Zhang offers an excellent answer to this question. In Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel, Zhang defines “James’s Airs” as the essential site of his descriptive project. Whereas realism had focused on solid objects and discrete persons, James’s modernism tries to describe the greater significance of the atmosphere around them: “James’s attention to the atmosphere inherits the realist novel’s social hermeneutic descriptive project while shifting its focus from solid objects to things in the air.”⁴ This shift makes all the difference by discovering a new “dimension of social action” in the mediating zones of social life: atmospheres are “epistemically meaningful phenomena that are perceiver dependent while still having a public or quasi- objective existence,” and they therefore redefine the relationship between subjective perspectives and objective truths.⁵ Because the air in James is “teeming with hints, pulses, and revelations that bear discernable messages” — rife with little things that really signify — the air becomes the very form of meaning-making, and as such it gives new life to fiction.⁶ It also redefines the impression as an airborne property, explaining why such a minimal thing should mean so much. The impression’s ethereal suspension makes it the secret substance of mediation; the impression is at once personal and public, perspectival and true because, hanging in the air, it simulates the apparent transparency of successful representation.

John Scholar sees it another way. His Henry James and the Art of Impressions (2020) offers the definitive, comprehensive explanation of what impressions mean to James’s aesthetic. Among the book’s vital new views is its account of the way the Jamesian impression is by turns cognitive (an act of understanding or recognition) and performative (the making of an impression). Whereas cognitive impressions “register experience,” performative impressions “are not adequate to reality — they do not represent something which already exists — but instead they create it; they predicate it; they are action.”⁷ Scholar reads James’s later novels for the key moment in which a character who has become capable of intense cognitive impressions becomes able to produce impressions of her own. Typically someone who has been duped by the deceptive impressions of Jamesian sophisticates, this character turns the tables by performing her own commanding appearances, taking charge of the dominant way things seem. In this dynamic, impressions also become a matter of dramatic exchange, of air traffic among people, and for that reason they might be said to enter into and even to constitute the social environment: this is one possible way to talk about how and why impressions become airborne. Going back and forth in social environments, they charge the air, pulsing it into something aesthetically substantial. In doing so, impressions also become environmental properties, no longer merely subjective perceptions or objective emanations but a matter of thickening social climate. In other words, impressions generate a social aesthetic in the air that embodies them.

This social aesthetic of airborne impressions changes what it means to be an atmospheric writer. No longer a matter simply of special sensitivity and an evocative sense of place, atmospheric writing becomes what it is for Anna Jones Abramson, whose vital work on “the age of atmosphere” (in writers including Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, and other modernists) discovers much more powerful relations among “air, affect, and technology” in modernist literature and culture. In articles including “Beyond Modernist Shock: Virginia Woolf’s Absorbing Atmosphere” and “Joseph Conrad’s Atmospheric Modernism: Enveloping Fog, Narrative Frames, and affective Attunement,” Abramson proves that new awareness of the atmosphere as a medium positioned air to mediate between personal affect and public life—and therefore to transform literary representation. Abramson recognizes “the mediating nature of air,” and how its “invisibility creates the illusion of direct experience for what is actually filtered transmission.”⁸ Such elusively filtered transmission could only become an inspiration to modernist writers keen to transform their practice; new narrative forms developed in order to register atmospheric ones, in works of fiction with forms of engagement as elusively essential as the air itself. Writers including Virginia Woolf made the air the locus of intersubjectivity — Woolf specifically finding a way “to represent an affective metropolitan climate that is more than the sum of the city’s many mental parts.”⁹ Form is the crucial focus here, since Abramson not only treats the content-based thematics of atmospheric determinism (how air quality becomes an explicit concern) but explains how modernist texts register and intervene in their modal environments. And so she sees how the airborne environment became a shaping power in fiction, too, affording new forms of environmental engagement. More specifically, the classic dissolving subjectivities of impressionist writing become environmental structures, proper engagements with realities that immerse people in wider worlds of endeavor.

Together with Zhang and Scholar, Abramson draws new aesthetic attention to the air around us. Abramson explains how modernist atmospheres mediate between personal affect and public life, a mediation Zhang describes as an essential new focus of modernist efforts to reenergize literary description. Scholar’s insight into the performative power of the impression explains how impressions become not only airy but airborne, launched into the world by the problem of representation. Seen this way, the airborne impressions become a vital new affordance; an atmospheric ecology emerges, in which the imagination is an environmentalist. This version of Jamesian impressionism becomes a form for thought about the relationship between atmospheric conditions and human endeavor — a focus for rethinking the relationship between environmental awareness and the creative imagination.

Impressionism has been known for a kind of environmental sensitivity, but a subjective kind, one that indulges the act of reception and its effects. But this relocated environmentalism shifts the focus to reciprocal engagements, and the sensitivity is mutual, as impressions cross the air and the atmosphere thickens with awareness. Just as true insight converts the pulses of the air into revelations, such pulses go the other way, when people put on airs and in other ways make impressions. This atmospheric impressionism becomes ecological, in many senses: it is a composite of elements and forces, but it is also about shaping the airborne environment, or at least taking part in its affordances. All this makes the air itself a forum for aesthetic engagement, and therefore a model for aesthetic forms.

Elsewhere, James calls this aesthetic environment “the enveloping air of the artist’s humanity.” In his introduction to The Portrait of a Lady (1881), James argues that the deciding question about any work of art must be “is it valid, in a word, is it genuine, is it sincere, the result of some direct impression or perception of life?”.¹⁰ For it to be one, it must be grounded in the soil of the artist’s “prime sensibility,” which must be rich and yielding. Such soil guarantees hardy growth — as does that “enveloping air of the artist’s humanity,” which “gives the last touch to the worth of the work.”¹¹ Here the role of air seems to have changed. It is no longer the source of inspiration, which has now become the seed that lands in the soil that nurtures direct experience. Air now intervenes later in the process, as the more seasoned atmosphere of “humanity” that ensures mature growth. But this is just to stress another aspect of air’s way of mediating between the personal and the public, to return to what Zhang and Abramson tell us about the mediatory quality of the modernist atmosphere. Thus, “humanity,” with its implication of all-embracing personhood. And thus an even fuller life for the airborne impression, which now also develops public meaning in the air — what Abramson calls “shared atmosphere” — in addition to pulsing from person to person.¹²

For James, air’s humanity exerts a moderating force on human relationships. Isabel Archer enjoys it in The Portrait of a Lady when she takes pleasure in the atmosphere at Gardencourt:

The large, low rooms, with brown ceilings and dusky corners, the deep embrasures and curious casements, the quiet light on dark, polished panels, the deep greenness outside, that seemed always peeping in, the sense of well-ordered privacy in the centre of a “property” — a place where sounds were felicitously accidental, where the tread was muffed by the earth itself and in the thick mild air all friction dropped out of contact and all shrillness out of talk — these things were much to the taste of our young lady, whose taste played a considerable part in her emotions.¹³

Here air is thick and mild, and therefore its pulses are pleasantly muffled. No friction or stridency troubles sociability, which doesn’t mean that Isabel’s impressions are muted (although it might put her off her guard). Rather it means that “privacy” shapes the environment, permitting a more direct and unfettered exchange of impressions. More tasteful, this environment seems thickened because its impressions can actually be more intense. They are free of public noise, better able to become the kind of Jamesian atmosphere Zhang rightly associates with his signature sociological achievements.

This condition contrasts with that which obtains when Isabel dreads the appearance at Gardencourt of Caspar Goodwood. Then the air becomes “sultry,” and apprehension “pressed upon her,” suggesting that a certain atmosphere can give impressions too much friction as well as just enough.¹⁴ Gilbert Osmond goes as far as to suggest that the times are sultry in this way: “to-day the air has grown so dense that delicate things are literally not recognised” he says, suggesting that no true impressions can penetrate the environment of a vulgar contemporary culture.¹⁵ This atmosphere contrasts with that of Rome, which James’s narrator calls “an exquisite medium for such impressions,” referring to the effect of “noble quietude” and blessed peace of Rome’s aesthetic environment.¹⁶ Rome’s air is in tune with its artful performances, which are therefore also impressions shared by one and all.

James often exploits the essentially social dynamic through which air can at once belong to one person and also strike another. When, for example, the narrator of Portrait notes that Mr. Touchett has an “air of contented shrewdness,” and (in the next paragraph) that Lord Warburton has “the air of a happy temperament fertilised by a high civilization,” the air in question is the quality of a person but also something he exudes into the atmosphere for others to register¹⁷ This kind of air is very much the kind of performance that Scholar finds in the most prodigious impressions; it is very much the mediatory atmosphere Zhang and Abramson describe. It literalizes the airborne quality of the impressions we make and receive, and it parses their environmental way of bridging gaps. Such airs can seem put on or genuine or effortless. In this sense, airs are like the word ‘impression’ itself, for their “semantic mobility” (to use Scholar’s term for the term’s mediatory ambiguity), which reflects their elusive atmospheric quality, their mobility among people and places.¹⁸

Of course, air can be involved in more direct performances, as when Isabel decides not yet to tell her cousin Ralph that Lord Warburton has proposed marriage to her because “she would have had to do herself violence to air this special secret to Ralph.”¹⁹ But even if this is no longer a matter of making or receiving impressions (but instead more direct communication), it still partakes of the association of air, atmosphere, and mediation. This kind of airing is just a more violent way of making an impression, and if it therefore seems to violate the principle of impressionist minimalism, that’s an important irony. The use of the word “air” here is meant to make gossiping sound more tasteful than it actually would be in this case; “air” is a euphemism that works because this word usually connotes something much more subtle.

Sometimes James’s characters must wait for the air to clear, so thick has it become with impressions (“she could only muffle her head till the air cleared”).²⁰ Some performances are so refreshing their air is large (as when Caspar Goodwood admires Isabel’s commitment to liberty and “there was nothing he winced at in the large air of it”).²¹ Airs are sometimes appearances, in the manner of impressions, and when Mrs. Touchett worries that Isabel’s marriage to Gilbert Osmond “would have an air of almost morbid perversity,” she worries about a false mediation of Isabel’s private feeling to the public world.²² Still at issue in all these cases is how air figures impressions are understood as environmental phenomena, at once cognitive and performative, personal and public, produced and received across the ether. The ether is both medium and message here, since it at once enables the transmission of impressions and gives them their airy form. Once again, air sustains impressions that are minimal yet essential, feeding the imagination in such a way as to make it a matter of public engagement. Airborne impressions take to the environment as agents for shared interest in its systematic meanings.

This elusive ecology takes a meaningful form thanks to what Zhang, Abramson, and Scholar tell us about impressionistic atmospheres. Moreover, clarifying James’s vision of it helps us see what air means for our impressions once air is a jeopardized environment. Of course, when James’s atmospheres are thick or sultry, dim or dark, the problem is metaphorical; although the air around him was already by 1881 an actually dirty miasma, a more toxic fog—as it had already been for Dickens and Blake—James tended to register its aesthetic properties, in a manner more indebted to the smoke of impressionist train stations or Walter Pater’s 1873 sense of the aesthetic value of the air that “extends beyond us,” “driven in many currents,” that “rusts iron and ripens corn.”²³ But what happens to “pulses of the air” when air is actually bad? Do they “convert” into revelations of anything other than environmental collapse—and should they?

Is there an impressionism of the Anthropocene? Is James’s ecological impressionism too aesthetic to be adequately environmental for our age—too much a matter of subjective imagining after all, rather than truly worldly exchange?

Airborne impressions are performances finely predicated upon the available environment. The air in which they circulate (according to James’s theory and practice) determines what they become, all the more powerfully because the air seems so insubstantial. James’s impressionism is all about this reversal, all about priming receptivity that is capable not only of registering the most airy impressions but also of knowing what difference airiness itself makes. Of course, this kind of awareness of the mediatory environment was vital to another post-Jamesian phenomenon: postmodern reflexivity, in which mediation becomes the problem. And in our contemporary moment, awareness of what’s airborne is focused on vectors of viral infection, making us even more painfully conscious of what mere pulses of the air can do. But the Jamesian version of this awareness has an environmental advantage precisely because its theory of mediation is ecological: the imagination that generates impressions out of air does so because of the air quality—because air’s condition provokes an imaginative response. The imagination takes a certain responsibility for its environment, in one way of thinking about impressionist mediation, and an impressionism of the Anthropocene might be the endgame of this kind of correlation between human creativity and its ecological resources.

In another way of thinking, however, James’s impressionism is after all an aestheticism that presumes the abundant purity of air—air as an inexhaustible given—and an impressionism of the Anthropocene is a contradiction in terms. It does seem more likely that James’s optimism about atmospheric genius would keep to its own figural environment rather than survive into our own very different reality. And indeed, the figure itself has its limits: the impression understood as a revelation imagined out of thin air necessarily becomes something of an absurdity if we put too much pressure on it. Only if this pressure is warranted by our present sense of atmospheric crisis does it make sense to press James on his impressionism, as it were, and in that case we might just conclude that the atmospheric implications of James’s impressionism are yet another warning. Even our impressions are ecological. For James, that was justification for the art of fiction. For us, it reconfirms the failure of the human imagination.