Anglo-American Landscapes: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American TravelLiterature by Christopher MulveyReview by: James TurnerThe American Historical Review, Vol. 89, No. 1 (Feb., 1984), pp. 93-94Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1855925 .

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General 93

Karl Popper, not to mention the adepts of the Chicago School, to embrace the most successful of all socialisms, that of the rich. Harry Laidler was enthusiastic about socialists but inadequately in- formed about their theories. Carl Landauer was transfixed by the SPD. Michael Harrington is an eloquent if not necessarily persuasive spokesman for democratic socialism. The author of the general history of socialism under review here has his own preferences, but he keeps them under control.

Albert S. Lindemann wisely declines to attempt an inclusive definition of socialism. Instead, he pro- vides a very good introduction to the origins of attempts to promote "cooperation and social jus- tice ... [emphasizing] the needs and rights of the community over the egotistical urges of the individ- ual" (p. xi). He calls attention to the paternalism of Owen, which other writers often overlook, and he finds that Fourier's ideas "resemble the fantasies of someone on an LSD trip" (p. 38). His discussion of Marx's political and journalistic activities indicates the esteem in which he holds the founder of the most important of the nineteenth-century move- ments; this does not quite emerge from his discus- sion of Marxist theory.

The roundabout approach to Marx leads into an appreciative discussion of the democratic socialists. Lindemann does not descend into advocacy, howev- er, but presents a sober analysis of SPD and SFIO efforts to cope with the emancipation of labor, the Great War, and the surge of fascism. This is the core of the book.

The section on Stalinist communism is conven- tional; the author is on less familiar ground. One hopes that his evaluation of Isaac Deutscher's error- laden hagiography as "one of the most valuable and penetrating ... biographies of Stalin" (p. 286) is an oddly disguised if astute assessment of the state of the art.

An unenlightening essay on the Cold War consti- tutes a pointless detour. The author rambles through this territory but ignores the cooperative movements, dismisses the Yugoslav experiments in a few paragraphs, and shuns the curiously success- ful Hungarian brand of socialism. The Scandina- vian, Italian, and Spanish socialists receive short shrift.

Lindemann takes dubious positions on a couple of developments that had profound consequences for European socialism. He speaks of the "enor- mous discredit" of the German military in the autumn of 1918 (p. 224). But the military was never defeated, and it emerged from the war with its standing actually enhanced. Further, Lindemann surely stands alone in identifying the 1939 Nazi- Soviet Pact as a "military alliance" (p. 314).

WOODFORD MCCLELLAN

University of Virginia

CHRISTOPHER MULVEY. Anglo-Amenrcan Landscapes: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Travel Lit- erature. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1983. Pp. xv, 293. $27.50.

Anglo-Amenrcan Landscapes falls somewhere between historical writing and literary criticism, and for that reason many historians may avoid it. More's the pity. It is an elegant and revealing book.

Christopher Mulvey has read widely in the travel narratives of American visitors to Britain and Brit- ish visitors to the United States during the nine- teenth century and distilled from these the images that tourists sustained of the two countries. "Im- ages" is the right word because Mulvey's concern is with responses to landscape (broadly defined to include cities and monuments) rather than concep- tions of national character or institutions. (These latter, of course, inevitably infiltrate.) "Sustained" is also the right word, for Mulvey points out that travelers carried preformed impressions with them, ready to be validated by the scenes they visited. Sights that did not fit expectations-such as Liver- pool for Americans, the Mississippi for Britons- produced confusion, disappointment, even despon- dency.

The book resists reduction to bare-bones summa- ry; its style is more reflective insight than sustained argument. There is a recurrent theme: Americans sought a mythological picture-book England whose ancient monuments, literary landmarks, lords, peas- ants, hedgerows, and sheep-cropped fields would supply an ancestral past that their own new nation lacked, a rootedness and social stability that they missed in their own dynamic democracy. English travelers went looking for England; America mostly failed to measure up. Their kit bags of European- honed Romantic sensibility and British chauvinism allowed them to admire the accepted picturesque and sublime views (the Hudson, Niagara) and grade other places according to degree of Englishness (Boston and upstate New York were almost British, Washington beneath contempt). But the English stood baffled before the vast and awkward Mississip- pi valley-save for those who learned to deploy statistics, which ultimately seemed the best way to cope with burgeoning America.

These themes display Mulvey's informed intelli- gence at work but, clearly, nothing of stunning originality. That is not a flaw. The excellence of this book lies in adding nuance, color, complexity, and shading to a picture whose rough outlines were already suspected. Thus Mulvey often chooses to turn over at length the responses of a few travelers rather than clip snippets out of ten or twenty "representative" books. It is Henry Ward Beecher at Stratford, Frederick Law Olmsted in the neighbor- hood of Chester, Charles Dickens on the Mississippi,

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94 Reviews of Books

Fanny Kemble at Niagara. At the end the reader has no neat schema in hand but a much deepened understanding of Anglo-American landscapes-the landscapes of the mind.

The book does suffer from one troubling omis- sion. Mulvey's interpretation requires that generally Americans would respond differently to English sights than British observers, and vice versa. But, lacking any comparative evidence, the reader can- not know for sure; in a few instances this reader doubts it. The numerous illustrations could also have been used more effectively. Really, though, Mulvey leaves little room for complaint.

JAMES TURNER

University of Massachusetts, Boston

GABRIEL P. WEISBERG, editor. The European Realist Tradition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1982. Pp. ix, 324. $25.00.

This highly interesting volume is a product of an international symposium held at the Cleveland Mu- seum of Art in 1980. Its main value is twofold: it examines realist art as not just an artistic phenome- non but also a sociopolitical force, and it extends this multilevel analysis to five European countries. The broadly conceived approach brings into our pur- view less familiar cultures, less well-known aspects of the style, and many neglected names.

The sociopolitical aspects of realism receive much attention. In covering a fifty-year span, the volume touches not only the democratic and iconoclastic beginnings of the style that replaced the outdated academic neoclassicism but also its transformation into the mainstream of European culture. Robert Bezucha's opening essay analyzes what made Jules Breton into the purveyor of the comforting bour- geois myth about the nature of rural society, setting it off against the more disquieting portrayal of the peasantry by Jean Francois Millet. Bezucha's de- scription of stylistic devices and philosophical out- look that made one type of realist painting accept- able is complemented by Albert Boime's excellently documented essay on the art policies of the Second Empire, which blunted the realism of the left and created the official style in service of the state. Gabriel P. Weisberg's contribution on patronage explains how the proliferation of museums, art associations, and exhibits outside of Paris helped bring the new style of painting to the provinces.

Whereas these chapters deal exclusively- with France, four others add the welcome geographic dimension. England and Switzerland offer exam- ples of a mixture of the national with the interna- tional. In England, the influences from France, combined with the native tradition of landscape

painting, gave rise to the popularity of what Ken- neth McConkey calls "rustic realism." In Switzer- land, however, according to Hans A. Luthy, French influence contributed to the appearance of harsh realism, best exemplified by Ferdinand Hodler. Francoise Forster-Hahn's chapter on Berlin realisnm argues that in that city it was the middle-class and democratic nature of local traditions that encour- aged the emergence of the new history painting by Adolph Menzel, challenging the old, heroic ap- proach of Cornelius and Kaulbach. Alison Hilton's essay on realism in Russia also underscores the specific native traditions, which imposed on realist painting the role of communicating ideas-or in the words of one of its spokesmen: "Painting gives reality to thought." But her discussion of Ilya Repin brings out the deeper issues that confront both the practitioners and the historians of realist art: despite the various programmatic labels, they do not define great paintings.

Three further contributions helpfully expand the range of the volume. Petra ten-Doesschate Chu provides a study of an educational reformer, Lecoq de Boisbaudran, who devised a system to encourage freer creativity by training students in memory drawing. Genevieve Lacambre's essay on the defini- tion of naturalism surveys the changing response of the French critics over some forty years. The vol- ume concludes with a chapter by H. W. Janson on the relationship of casting from life to realist sculp- ture.

The European Realist Tradition makes the reader sharply aware that the problem of realism is not so much one of similarities as of differences. In differ- ent countries it linked differently with other move- ments. Everywhere it defined itself in a variety of ways. And over time it manifested a number of conflicting trends. There is no one thread that connects Courbet with the countless painters and sculptors of realist art either in France or elsewhere in Europe.

ELIZABETH KRIDL VALKENIER

Columbia University

PETER LOEWENBERG. Decoding the Past: The Psychohis- torical Approach. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1983. Pp. xiv, 300. $20.00.

"What is the state of psychohistory?" is the ques- tion-well-intentioned but worn-so frequently asked at history conventions that I happen to attend. The answer is that psychohistory is healthy, is here to stay, and, having passed through its faddish stage, need no longer be the subject of either overreactive attacks or defenses. Critical attention can be focused on a particular psychohistorical work and not on the validity of the genre itself.

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