Abstract
The growth of the American literary market provided the Boston Cosmopolitans with a promising conduit to express their ideas. Following the Civil War, increasing numbers of magazines and inexpensive books multiplied alongside the growth of public libraries. As Henry James remarked in the British magazine Literature in 1898, “whatever [literature] may be destined to be, the public to which it addresses itself is of proportions that no other single public has approached.… It is assuredly true that literature for the billion will not be literature as we have hitherto known it at its best. But if the billion give the pitch of production and circulation, they do something else besides; they hang before us a wide picture of opportunities.”1 The Cosmopolitans attempted to convey some part of the experience of traveling abroad in literary pieces that were targeted toward a wide and growing reading public. In this chapter, I chose works that attempted to represent and in some cases to reproduce the sense of wonder and discovery the Boston Cosmopolitans felt during their journeys. The wide range of literary genres encountered—fiction, drama, travel literature, and popular philosophy— provides today’s readers with a broad phenomenological description of the development of cosmopolitanism.
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Notes
Henry James, “The Question of Opportunities,” in Literary Criticism: American and English Writers (New York: The Library of America, 1984), 651, 653.
Henry James also described the possibility for openness and intimacy between strangers on shipboard in “An International Episode.” See Henry James, “An International Episode,” in An International Episode and Other Stories (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 14.
See James Buzard, “A Continent of Pictures: Reflections on the ‘Europe’ of Nineteenth-Century Tourists,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 108 (1993), 31–32, 41. See also idem, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
See Jeffrey Alan Melton, “Touring Decay: Nineteenth-Century American Travel Writers in Europe,” Papers on Language and Literature 35 (1999): 206–208, passim.
Or, to borrow the words of anthropologist Michael Jackson, Howells anticipates a phenomenological approach to analyzing human experience that “attempt[s] to describe human consciousness in its lived immediacy before it is subject to theoretical elaboration or conceptual systematizing.” See Michael Jackson, “Introduction: Phenomenology, Radical Empiricism, and Anthropological Critique,” in Things as They Are: New
Directions in Phenomenological Anthropology, ed. Michael Jackson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 2.
William Dean Howells, A Chance Acquaintance (Boston: H. R. Osgood, 1874), 14.
This is an allusion to a passage in Book XI of Paradise Lost. See John Milton, Paradise Lost, 2nd ed., ed. Scott Elledge (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 266–67.
Howells, The Parlor Car, in The Sleeping Car and Other Farces (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1889), 46–47.
Ibid., 90–91, 95–96.
James, “An International Episode,” 33. The literary critic Tony Tanner contends that enjoying differences was the focus of Henry James’ work: “James heeded his own admonition [to seek pleasure in difference] all his life, and the whole edifice of his fiction is founded on an unending probing, exploring, and dramatizing of the differences between America and Europe.” See Tony Tanner, Henry James and the Art of Nonfiction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995 ), 3.
Leonardo Buonomo, Backward Glances: Exploring Italy, Reinterpreting America (1831–1866) (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996), 14.
Natalia Wright, American Novelists in Italy: The Discoverers—Allston to James (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1965), 129, 120.
Natalia Wright observes that even the noted Dante scholar Henry Wadsworth Longfellow “was less interested in the country itself … even after revisiting [Italy] in 1858–69 [his first visit was in 1827] than in its literature and legends.” See Wright, American Novelists, 19–20, 156, 159.
William Dean Howells, Venetian Life, 4th ed. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1907), 3–4. Tony Tanner writes: “The pleasure of Venice, the pleasure which is Venice, is pre-scribed, pre-viewed. The name permanently preempts the place.” See Tony Tanner, “Proust, Ruskin, James and le Désir de Venise,” Journal of American Studies 21 (1987): 5.
Natalia Wright asserts that after 1870 most American writers “represented Italy explicitly or by implication as a place of refuge from materialism and treated their material romantically … with the conspicuous exception of Howells and James.” See Wright, American Writers, 22.
Leonardo Buonomo writes that the “Italian sojourn of an American writer [during the nineteenth century] … was not generally characterized by any significant relationship with the local population. Cases like that of [Howells] … constitute exceptions rather than the norm.” See Buonomo, Backward Glances, 22.
See William Dean Howells to Henry James, May 1872; quoted in Wright, American Writers, 171. For Howells’ confession to his readers that he doubted “if I am gifted in that way [i.e., judging art] at all,” see Howells, Venetian Life, 142.
Tony Tanner notes that this “systematic and deliberate occlusion is crucial to James’ original transformation of the genre [of travel writing].” See Tanner, Art of Nonfiction, 12.
James’ sensitivity to the quality of life in the present moment was conveyed through the title of the compilation of his writings on Italy, Italian Hours (New York: Grove Press, 1959).
The Venetian essays of Italian Hours were originally published in the following years: “Venice,” 1882; “The Grand Canal,” 1892; “Venice: An Early Impression,” 1873; “Two Old Houses and Three Young Women,” 1899; “Casa Alvisi,” 1902. See “Note on the Texts,” in Henry James, Collected Travel Writings: The Continent (New York: The Library of America, 1993), 792–93.
See W. R. Martin, “‘The Eye of Mr. Ruskin’: James’s Views on Venetian Artists,” Henry James Review 5 (1983): 108–109.
This excerpt comes from the opening of chapter 2, “The Virtues of Architecture,” of The Stones of Venice. See John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, edited and abridged by J. G. Links (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 29.
Ibid., 300, 304, 314, 326. For James’ references to appreciating Venice in the company of a few friends, see ibid., 313. James’ praise of the potential of a small circle of friends to create an atmosphere conducive to intellectual and aesthetic discovery (in contrast to the impersonal dictates of the market economy) anticipates some of Randolph Bourne’s article of 1912 “The Excitement of Friendship.” See Randolph Bourne, “The Excitement of Friendship,” in Olaf Hansen, ed., The Radical Will: Selected Writings 1911–1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 106–114. As Casey Blake explains, Bourne hoped that he and his peers could use free discussion within a friendly circle as the basis for “a self-conscious critical intelligencia.” See Casey Nelson Blake, Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank & Lewis Mumford (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 67.
See James, Italian Hours, 322, 354, 362. James probably borrowed language from the poet Percy Bysshe Shelly to describe cosmopolitanism. In “A Defence of Poetry” (1820), Shelly asserts that the poet “not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and fruit of latest time.” James probably was attracted to Shelly’s “Defence” for two reasons. First, by quoting Shelly, James implies that cosmopolitanism should order “present things” and may also provide a glimpse of “the future in the present.” Second, Shelly also points out that everybody, not only poets, should find common elements in disparate people: “A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.” See Percy Bysshe Shelly, “A Defence of Poetry, or Remarks Suggested by an Essay Entitled ‘The Four Ages of Poetry,’” in Poetry and Prose, eds. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 482–83, 487–88.
Ibid., 332, 358.
This recognition that human ideals vary greatly from person to person was explicitly articulated in William James’ essay, “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” (1898): See William James, “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” in Talks to Teachers on Psychology; and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals (New York: W. W. Norton, 1958), 149.
See R W. B. Lewis, The Jameses: A Family Narrative (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), 528–40.
Some recent major interpreters of the American scene have overlooked the connections between James’ European travel writing and his The American Scene (New York: Penguin Classics, 1994). See Mark Seltzer, Henry James and the Art of Power (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 96–145; see also Ross Posnock, The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 141–166, 250–84. This may be a result of the critics’ interest in James’ more complicated fictional works as well as the general lack of attention given to the important role of travel in the lives of the Boston Cosmopolitans. Travel constantly exerts its influence on the Boston Cosmopolitans, however, and James’ analyses of Europe shape his analysis of America in terms of style and substance. Tony Tanner has noticed this connection in his Henry James and the Art of Nonfiction, 17, 23.
James, American Scene, 78. There are many moments throughout The American Scene when buildings speak. See Ibid., 34–35.
Ibid., 74.
For Henry James’ experiences in Newport, see Lewis, The Jameses, 103–14; and Lyndall Gordon, A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 31, 35–36, 42, 47–49, 52, 66–70.
See Lynne Withey, Grand Tours and Cook’s Tours: A History of Leisure Travel, 1750–1915. (New York: William Morrow, 1997), 7–30, for a thorough description of “The Grand Tour,” which referred to the travels by educated young English gentlemen on the European continent. See Withey, Grand Tours, 7.
William James, anonymous article, The Nation, September 21, 1876; quoted in The Letters of William James, ed. Henry James, 2 vols. (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920), 1: 190.
James’ resistance to systems of thought and his desire to base the findings of philosophy on specific human experience rather than abstract logic is central to most of his writings and has been ably discussed in previous work on James, most notably James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). See ibid., vii.
See Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory, 194. James opposed those systems of thought that claimed that principles precede and are more important than human experience. See also Henry Samuel Levinson, The Religious Investigations of William James (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 71.
On James’ popularity as a public philosopher, see Levinson, Religious Investigations, 10–11; Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory, 40; George Cotkin, Reluctant Modernism: American Thought and Culture, 1880–1900, Twayne’s American Thought and Culture Series (New York: Twayne, 1992), 48–50; and especially id., William James, Public Philosopher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 11–13.
For James’ initial support of the United States’ war against Spain, see George Cotkin, William James, Public Philosopher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 133; see also Robert Beisner, Twelve Against Empire (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), 41–42.
Information on the history of James’ Gifford Lectures is drawn principally from David Lamberth, William James and the Metaphysics of Experience, Cambridge Studies in Religion and Critical Thought, no. 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 98–106.
William James to Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison, February 7, 1897; quoted in ibid., 99.
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, ed. Martin E. Marty (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 31.
Ralph Barton Perry, “William James,” in Dictionary of American Biography, ed. Allen Johnson, 21 vols. (New York: Scribners, 1928–1964), 9: 600.
William James, letter to Boston Evening Transcript, April 15, 1899, in William James, The Works of William James: Essays, Comments, and Reviews, ed. Frederick H. Burkhardt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 164.
Ibid.
William James, letter to Boston Evening Transcript, March 1, 1899, in James, Works, 156–58. Robert Beisner makes an important point that James’ lamentation of America’s betrayal of the Declaration of Independence overlooked the long history of slavery, Indian removal, and western expansion, a history that arguably had already demonstrated a betrayal of the idealism of the declaration. See Beisner, Twelve Against Empire, 52.
William James, envelope catalogued with his “Introduction [for a systematic work on philosophy,]” dated 1904, in the William James papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University; quoted in Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory, 41.
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© 2008 Mark Rennella
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Rennella, M. (2008). Sharing the Experience of Cosmopolitanism through Literature. In: The Boston Cosmopolitans. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230611214_5
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