Abstract
In articulating his hopes about his future literary accomplishments in 1867, Henry James described the combination of travel, friendship, and art that became a part of Cosmopolitan life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The process of creation for Boston’s Cosmopolitans during this time was strongly intertwined with their participation in a community of individuals who often traveled around the globe. This community can be described in three ways: a group of friends and associates who had expertise and interests in a variety of intellectual and artistic disciplines, who were acquainted with a variety of foreign cultures, and who constantly sought each other out for inspiration and criticism. These elements combined and were in many ways inextricably linked because each element strengthened the other two. As we saw earlier, the Cosmopolitans’ curiosity inspired them to travel wherever that curiosity might be best satisfied, often in the company of their friends.
Deep in the timorous recesses of my being is a vague desire to do for our dear old English letters and writers something of what Ste. Beuve & the best French critics have done for theirs … At the thought of a study of this kind, on a serious scale, and of possibly having the health and time to pursue it, my eyes fill with heavenly tears and my heart throbs with a divine courage. —But men don’t accomplish valuable results [by themselves] …, dear Sarge, and there will be nothing so useful to me as the thought of having companions and a laborer with whom I may exchange feelings and ideas. It is by this constant exchange and comparison, by the wear and tear of living & talking & observing that works of art shape themselves into completeness.
—Henry James writing from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Thomas Sergeant Perry, touring Europe, September 20, 18671
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Notes
Virginia Harlow, Thomas Sergeant Perry: A Biography (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1950), 284.
When Emerson went to Europe for the first time in late December 1832, he “took [Goethe’s] Italian Journey along with him [to Italy.].” See Evelyn Hofer and Evelyn Barish, Emerson in Italy (New York: Henry Holt, 1989), 9.
Garrison became an accomplished transatlantic traveler even before the Civil War through his three trips to Great Britain in 1837, 1840, and 1846. Garrison went to Great Britain to draw attention to his reform efforts and to gather political and financial support for abolition. See Walter M. Merrill, Against Wind and Tide: A Biography of William Lloyd Garrison (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), 68–69, 164–74, 189–95, especially 191–92.
In the inside cover of the first issue of the Atlantic, the editors made it clear that they wanted to create a magazine of national importance. Echoing James Madison’s conviction in The Federalist that virtue lay in the disinterested pursuit of the public interest, the Atlantic editors believed that they would command the public’s attention through a practice of disinterested editorial policies: The first assistant editor, Francis H. Underwood, envisioned that the Atlantic would be “the new literary and anti-slavery magazine.” See Atlantic 1 (1857), inside cover. See also Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, 1850–1865 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1938), 499–500.
David D. Hall, “The Victorian Connection,” in Victorian America, ed. Daniel Walker Howe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976), 84–85.
James Turner comments: “Remarkably cosmopolitan in their travels, the Boston merchants for the most part remained squarely New England in their style of life.” James Turner, The Liberal Education of Charles Eliot Norton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 5.
The origin of the phrase “Hub of the Universe” can be found in “Hub,” Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., 20 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 7: 458. See also Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, 4th ed. (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1892), 125.
A good recent article on the subject is written by Jonathan Leo Fairbanks, “MacMonnies’ Bacchante: Its Trial, Condemnation and Restoration,” Sculpture Review 42 (1993): 29–31. For a more detailed discussion of the Bacchante, see Chapter 7.
Christina Zwarg, “Margaret Fuller,” in A Companion to American Thought, eds. Richard Wightman Fox and James T. Kloppenberg (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995), 259–60.
Sec Peter Stanford, “Steam & Speed, Part I: How Steamships Paddled out of the Shallows into the Ocean World,” Sea History 64 (Winter, 1992–93): 14.
One of Henry James’ intimate female friends, the American writer Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840–94), dreamt of seeing Europe during her girlhood in Cleveland. Woolson’s biographer describes Woolson’s envy of a friend who had the opportunity to go abroad. At age eleven, Woolson wrote to her friend: “I wish I could be in ‘exile’ too…. I am Rhine-mad.” Woolson to Flora Payne, undated; quoted in Lyndall Gordon, A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 21.
William Dean Howells to Harvey and Jane Green, November 30, 1857, in William Dean Howells, Selected Letters, 1852–1920, 6 vols. (Boston: Twayne, 1979–83), 1: 17.
Howells’ biographer explains that although “Howells had hated Jefferson, Ohio, [Howells birthplace] with a vengeance … in the face of Eastern assumptions of moral and cultural superiority he felt a surge of pride in being a small-town Ohioan, and when he praised—and praised again—the genius of Mark Twain, he was not only making a literary judgment, he was thrusting under Boston’s face the importance of Hannibal, Jefferson, and a thousand other towns of the West.” Kenneth Lynn, William Dean Howells:An American Life (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Javanovich, 1970), 178.
When Howells became editor-in-chief of the Atlantic in 1871, promoting writers from the American West suddenly became even more intimidating. As an assistant editor from 1867 to 1871, Howells had been able to encourage the editor who preceded him, James T. Fields, to promote western writers without drawing attention to himself. Ibid., 167.
W[illiam] D[ean] Howells, “Recollections of an Atlantic Editorship,” Atlantic 100 (1907): 601–2.
Frank Luther Mott wrote that Howells succeeded in broadening the scope of the Atlantic: “A change came over the spirit of the Atlantic with what Howells calls his own ‘suzerain’—the seventies, by the middle of which the magazine had become a much more truly American periodical than it had been in its earlier years.” See Mott, American Magazines, 1850–1865, 506.
William Dean Howells and Thomas Sergeant Perry, “Introduction,” in The Library of Universal Adventure by Sea and Land: Including Original Narratives and Authentic Stories of Personal Prowess and Peril in all the Waters and Regions of the Globe from the year 79 A.D. to the year 1888 A.D., ed. William Dean Howells and Thomas Sergeant Perry (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1888), vii.
Meredith Martindale, “Lilla Cabot Perry: A Study in Contrasts,” in Lilla Cabot Perry: An American Impressionist (Washington, DC: The National Museum of Women and the Arts, 1990), 88.
James Turner writes that “by around 1830 the Boston elite had consolidated itself within these residences [in Boston: Beacon Hill, West End, South End]: a cluster of perhaps forty families, willing to absorb the likeliest new members, but mostly playing, going to school, marrying, dining, and doing business with each other.” Turner, Liberal Education, 4.
See Leon Edel, “Portrait of Alice James,” in Alice James, The Diary of Alice James, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1964), 6. See also Gordon, A Private Life of Henry James, 37–39, 77.
Henry to William James, November 22, 1867, in Henry James and William James, The Correspondence of William James: William and Henry, ed. Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley, 3 vols. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 1: 25.
Howells to William C. Howells, January 9, 1875, in Howells, Selected Letters, 2: 88.
Perry to John Morse, March 12, 1906, Thomas Sergeant Perry Papers, Special Collections, Colby College, Waterville, Maine; quoted in Martindale, “Lilla Cabot Perry,” 65.
Lynn, William Dean Howells, 294. After Howells left the Atlantic, he traveled in Europe and worked independently for publishers from Boston and New York, initially under the terms of a long-term author’s contract with James R. Osgood. It was only in 1886 that Howells began to contribute regularly to New York’s Harper’s Monthly. See ibid., 141.
On hearing of Emerson’s initial dissatisfaction with his editorial decision, Howells had written, “Of course this is a matter for you to decide: but I venture to say that none of your readers would attach more or less value to any poem of yours because it was printed a month sooner or later.” The poem was eventually published in February 1876. Howells to Emerson, January 22, 1874, in Howells, Selected Letters, 2: 51–52.
“Bostonitis” and “Bostonianism” are Adams’ terms. Unhappy with what he believed was the anachronistic education he received during his younger days in Boston and Cambridge, Adams ascribed all sorts of evils to Boston for the rest of his life. See Samuels, Henry Adams (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1989), 122, 252.
See Henry James, The Bostonians (New York: Penguin Classics, 1986).
Henry James to Henry Adams, March 21, 1914 in Henry James, Henry James, Selected Letters, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1987), 419–20. See also Samuels, Henry Adams, 446.
James to Isabella Stewart Gardner, December 7, 1881, Archives of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
Henry James, French Poets and Novelists (London: MacMillan, 1893), 104.
[Thomas Sergeant Perry], “Recent Literature: French and German,” Atlantic 44 (1879): 808.
Howells quoted in Albert J. Salvan, Zola aux Etats-Unis, Brown University Studies, vol. 8 (Providence, RI: Brown University, 1943), 46.
Henry James to Thomas Sergeant Perry, November 2, 1879; quoted in Harlow, Perry, 304.
Thomas Sergeant Perry, “Zola’s Last Novel,” Atlantic 45 (1880): 694.
William Dean Howells, “Recent Literature,” Atlantic 42 (1878): 118.
Henry James to William Dean Howells, May 17, 1890, in Percy Lubbock, The Letters of Henry James (New York: Scribner’s, 1920), 163–64.
Henry James, “John S. Sargent,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 75 (1887): 683.
In an essay written on Henry James in 1918, T. S. Eliot made a similar point, arguing that “it is the final perfection, the consummation of an American to become, not an Englishman, but a European—something which no born European, no person of any European nationality, can become.” T. S. Eliot, “On Henry James,” in The Question of Henry James: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. F. W. Dupee (New York: Octagon Books, 1973), 109.
Thomas Sergeant Perry to John Morse, November 15, 1906, in John T. Morse, Thomas Sergeant Perry: A Memoir (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1929), 68. Lilla Cabot Perry and Claude Monet paraphrased in Eleanor Cabot Bradley autobiography (privately published, 1988). Both works quoted in ibid., 119.
Thomas Sergeant Perry to Moorfield Story, April 13, 1889, in Selections from the Letters of Thomas Sergeant Perry, edited by Edward Arlington Robinson (New York: Macmillan, 1929), 30.
Another intriguing example of the presence of Europe in Boston’s literary consciousness can be found in the Atlantic of 1881. In March of that year The Atlantic published “Boston to Florence,” a short poem written by Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Sent To ‘The Philological Circle’ Of Florence For Its Meeting In Commemoration Of Dante, January 27, 1881, Anniversary Of His First Condemnation.” See The Atlantic 47 (1881): 412.
Perry, Letters, 30. On the separation of church and state, see Georges Dupeux, “La IIIe République, 1871–1914,” in Histoire de la France de 1852 à nos Jours, ed. George Duby (Paris: Larousse, 1987), 172–73.
Thomas Sergeant Perry to William James, July 11, 1907, in Perry, Letters, 46.
Thomas Sergeant Perry to Moorfield Storey, June 6, 1889, in ibid., 34.
Thomas Sergeant Perry to Moorfield Storey, April 13, 1889, in ibid., 33.
Henry James, French Poets and Novelists (London: MacMillan, 1893), 78.
Ibid., 81. James’ description of the “English speakers” assessment of the modern world is remarkably similar to some passages of that famous empiricist, Edmund Burke, and his description of man’s prostration before a sublime and infinite God. Writing a little more than a century before James, the Englishman contended that when “we contemplate so vast an object … of almighty power [i.e., God] … we shrink into the minuteness of our own nature, and are, in a matter, annihilated before him” (emphasis mine). That the same feeling of the “infinite” or “sublime” is inspired, according to Burke in the 1750s, by God, and according to James in the 1870s by modern civilization, is a measure of how complex modern life had become to James and many of his contemporaries. See Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Esquire in the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, in The Harvard Classics, vol. 24, ed. Charles W. Eliot (New York: P. F. Collier and Son, 1963), 58.
Tony Tanner describes James’ melding of different cultural tendencies in his writing: “I am suggesting, very simply, that James the novelist uses American conscience in English society in books written in emulation of the French.” See Tony Tanner, Henry James and the Art of Nonfiction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 31.
Henry James, The American (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962), 367–68.
William Dean Howells, Venetian Life, 4th ed. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1907).
Ibid., 38–39.
Alex Zwerdling argues that writers like Henry Adams and Henry James tried to create closer ties between themselves and America’s “mother” county, England, in an effort to defend themselves from the changing character of America that was being transformed by immigration, while some English citizens felt anxiety in losing their nation’s economic and military power: Alex Zwerdling, “Anglo-Saxon Panic: The Turn-of-the-Century Response to ‘Alien’ Immigrants,” Ideas from the National Humanities Center 1 (1993), 34.
Racism certainly existed among the Boston Cosmopolitans, as Zwerdling and Leans have shown. However, the process of frequent travel often had the effect of eroding the racism of some of the more conservative Cosmopolitans. In addition, exploring reasons other than racism for the discomfort some of the Cosmopolitans in places like New York’s Lower East Side opens some new lines of inquiry, such as investigating the Cosmopolitans’ encountering of massive poverty and squalor in the United States on a scale that had not been seen before.
William Dean Howells to James M. Comly, October 22, 1871, in Howells, Selected Letters, 1: 380.
See William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 58–59.
Ibid., 63.
Ibid., 162.
Ibid., 449.
Henry James, The American Scene (New York: Penguin Classics, 1994), 106.
Ibid., 91.
Charles Eliot Norton to S. G. Ward, July 14, 1897, in Norton, Letters, 2: 254.
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© 2008 Mark Rennella
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Rennella, M. (2008). Travel and Creativity: the Role of Travel in Cosmopolitan Invention. In: The Boston Cosmopolitans. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230611214_4
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