Abstract
In the last months of his life, William Dean Howells, the dean of American literature in the late nineteenth century, dedicated himself to composing some remembrances of Henry James. These pieces were, in the words of his daughter Mildred, “the last things Howells wrote and form the final act in a long friendship.” Writing in 1920, Howells was conscious of the fact that many Americans were angry with the recently deceased James because of his decision to become a British citizen in 1915. James had explained to his friends that changing his citizenship was a desperate last measure taken to protest the United States’ unwillingness to aid the British and the French, who were dying by the thousands during the first years of World War I.1
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Notes
In 1915, James explained his position to his friend, the painter John Singer Sargent: “I waited long months, watch in hand, for the [United States] to show some sign…. But it seemed never to come, and the misrepresentation of my attitude becoming at last to me a thing no longer to be borne, I took action myself [and became a British citizen].” James to Sargent, July 30, 1915, in The Letters of Henry James, ed. Percy Lubbock, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1920), 2: 493.
William Dean Howells, “The American James,” in Life in Letters of William Dean Howells, 2 vols., ed. Mildred Howells (New York: Russell & Russell, 1968), 2: 394, 397–99.
See Henry Hobson Richardson, “Description of the Church,” Consecration Services of Trinity Church, Boston, February 9, 1877, reprinted in New England Magazine n.s. 8 (1893): 156–62.
The words “Cosmopolitan,” “Cosmopolitans,” and “Boston Cosmopolitans” will be capitalized when they refer to the specific group of artists and intellectuals that are the focus of this study. Although scholars have many different working definitions of “cosmopolitanism,” when that word is used in this study it will refer (unless otherwise specified) to the definition I have previously supplied.
There are, of course, books that have treated some of these artists and intellectuals in a group setting. For example, see Patricia O’Toole, The Five of Hearts: An Intimate Portrait of Henry Adams and His Friends, 1880–1918 (New York: Ballantine Books, 1990). For Dennis Miller Bunker’s relationships with Isabella Stewart Gardner, John Singer Sargent, and other people in the Boston area, see Erica E. Hirshler, Dennis Miller Bunker and His Circle (Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 1995). There are other works that have traced significant interactions between two members of this group. See Ross Posnock, The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). The works have not included as many interconnections between the Boston Cosmopolitans as what I have attempted in this book nor have they treated the importance of travel in the lives of the Boston Cosmopolitans. Most important, no works of which I am aware have attempted to interpret the meaning of transatlantic/transoceanic travel and its effect on American artists of this era.
Some notable collections of essays have responded to these changes by analyzing contemporary cosmopolitanism. See Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, eds., Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, Cultural Politics, vol. 14 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); and Martha Nussbaum with respondents, For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism, ed. Joshua Cohen (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996). James Clifford has looked at the thorough mixing of the world’s various cultures in the twentieth century in two works. See James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); and James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
David Hollinger, Postethnic America (New York: Basic Books, 1995); Akira Iriye, “The Internationalization of History,” America Historical Review 94 (1989): 1–10; David Thelen, “Of Audiences, Borderlands, and Comparisons: Toward the Internationalization of American History,” Journal of American History 79 (1992): 432–62.
This distinction between “national” and “international” cosmopolitanism does not come close to exhausting the variants of cosmopolitanism. As Bruce Robbins explains, “Like nations, cosmopolitanisms are now plural and particular. Like nations, they are both European and non-European, and they are weak and underdeveloped as well as strong and privileged.” See Bruce Robbins, “Introduction Part I: Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism,” in Cosmopolitics 3. The categories of national and international cosmopolitanism that I have chosen are useful in distinguishing the two dominant variants of cosmopolitanism in the experience of the Boston Cosmopolitans.
Lilla Cabot Perry to Elizabeth Sturgis Grew, undated, Perry Family Archives; quoted in Meredith Martindale, Lilla Cabot Perry, an American Impressionist (Washington, DC: National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1990), 52.
Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrims Progress (New York: Signet Classic, 1980), 27.
Benjamin W. Labaree, “The Making of an Empire: Boston and Essex County, 1790–1850,” in Entrepreneurs: The Boston Business Community, 1750–1850, Studies in American Culture and Society 4 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1997), 357–60. Starting around the second third of the nineteenth century, Boston’s merchants and moneyed classes began to shift their investments to manufacturing (in textile cities such as Lowell and Lawrence) and to railroads. See Russell B. Adams, Jr., The Boston Money Tree (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1977), 58–103, 133–46.
See The Atlantic 47 (1881): 412.
In 1926 Mumford argued that the country’s intellectual high point, its “golden day,” occurred between 1830 and 1860, the age of Emerson: “That world was the climax of American experience. What preceded led up to it: what followed, dwindled away from it.” See Lewis Mumford, The Golden Day: A Study in American Literature and Culture (New York: W. W. Norton, 1926), 91.
Alan Trachtenberg, “Incorporation of America Today,” American Literary History 15 (2003): 760–61.
See John Tebbel, Between Covers: The Rise and Transformation of Book Publishing in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
For a good book on this subject, see Neil Harris et al., Grand Illusions: Chicago’s World’s Fair of 1893 (Chicago: Chicago Historical Society, 1993).
See Sam Bass Warner, Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870–1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962).
For a detailed account of James’s American Scene, see my discussion in Chapter 5. For an excellent discussion of Richardson’s work on railroad stations, see Francis R. Kousky, “The Veil of Nature: H. H. Richardson and Frederick Law Olmsted,” in H. H. Richardson: The Architect, His Peers, and Their Era, ed. Maureen Meister (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 63–72.
Matthew Arnold, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” in Victorian Poetry and Poetic, 2nd ed., ed. Walther E. Houghton and G. Robert Stange (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), 522, 527.
Casey Nelson Blake, Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank & Lewis Mumford, Cultural Studies of the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 107.
Henry James, “Recent Florence,” Atlantic 41 (May 1877): 591. In this article, James asserts “that there are a great many ways of seeing Florence, as there are of seeing most beautiful and interesting things, and that it is very dry and pedantic to say that the happy vision depends upon our squaring our toes with a certain particular chalk-mark.” See ibid., 590.
Henry James, “The Art of Fiction,” in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 4th ed., 2 vols., ed. Nina Baym et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 2: 435.
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© 2008 Mark Rennella
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Rennella, M. (2008). Introduction. In: The Boston Cosmopolitans. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230611214_1
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