The Boston Cosmopolitans: International Travel and American Arts and Letters, 1865-1915

The Boston Cosmopolitans

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The Boston Cosmopolitans International Travel and American Arts and Letters, 1865–1915 Mark Rennella

THE BOSTON COSMOPOLITANS

Copyright © Mark Rennella, 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS. Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978-0-230-60382-0 ISBN-10: 0-230-60382-3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rennella, Mark. The Boston cosmopolitans : international travel and American arts and letters / by Mark Rennella. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-230-60382-3 1. Boston (Mass.)—Intellectual life—19th century. 2. Boston (Mass.)—Intellectual life—20th century. 3. Cosmopolitanism— Massachusetts—Boston—History. 4. Intellectuals—Travel—Massachusetts—Boston—History. 5. Artists—Travel—Massachusetts— Boston—History. 6. International travel—Social aspects— Massachusetts—Boston—History. 7. Literature and society— Massachusetts—Boston—History. 8. Arts and society—Massachusetts—Boston—History. 9. Public spaces—Massachusetts—Boston— History. 10. Boston (Mass.)—Biography. I. Title. F73.5.R46 2008 306.4’819097446109034—dc22

2007035492

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: April 2008 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

To my sons, Davis and Benjamin

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CONTENTS

Introduction

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1

The “Poetry of Motion”: The Effect of Travel on the Lives and Thought of the Boston Cosmopolitans

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Charles Eliot Norton and the Dawning of Cosmopolitanism in Boston

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Travel and Creativity: The Role of Travel in Cosmopolitan Invention

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Sharing the Experience of Cosmopolitanism through Literature

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Expressing Cosmopolitanism through Art

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Architecture: The Cosmopolitan Contribution to Public Space

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World War I and the Demise of the Boston Cosmopolitans

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Afterword The Boston Cosmopolitans: Contexts and Controversies

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Notes

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Selected Bibliography

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Index

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n 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 To counter this lingering, mistaken belief that Henry James had somehow betrayed his country, Howells called one of these remembrances, “The American James.” The piece recounts their conversations in the late 1860s when they discussed James’s family history in New York City and Albany as well as his ambitions to publish in The Atlantic Monthly, where Howells was working as the assistant editor. Howells fondly recalls the details of these first months: I was seven years older than James, but I was much his junior in the art we both adored. . . . Our walks were by day and by night but our sessions in my little house were twice or thrice by night a week and on Sunday were always after our simple family supper. . . . He was a constant sufferer [of physical ailments] . . . and it was a form of escape from this misery for him to talk of what he was writing with the young pair [Howells and his wife] whom he frequented. . . . Our walks by day were only in one direction and in one region. We were always going to Fresh Pond, in those days a wandering space of woods and water where people skated in winter and boated in summer.

For these two young men who had already traveled great distances around the globe, it seems appropriate that they used their outings through Cambridge as a way to stimulate their conversations.

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Although Howells’ “American” credentials were indisputable, his essay deliberately minimizes the distinctions between what one might call “American” and “foreign” influences on the two writers during their early years. “We were of like Latin sympathies,” Howells declared. “[H]e was inveterately and intensely French,” because of an early education that included many private schools and tutors in French-speaking Europe, with subsequent visits to Italy. For his part, Howells’ continental education took place during the Civil War when, as a reward for a campaign biography of Lincoln, he was appointed American consul to Venice (1861–64). So, “with . . . three or four years’ life in Italy” in common, Howells explained, the two could easily meet “on common ground.” Besides, whatever their foreign interests and influences, the young Howells and James “now joined in an American present” and were eager to explore ways to capture and depict the life and character of American culture in its post–Civil War phase.2 In other words, Howells in 1920 was voicing lessons learned by himself and his peers over more than a half century of travel, thought, and work: that American artists were intimately tied to the cultural history of Europe and the rest of the world, and that the creative options available to an artist from America should not be confined by any national boundaries. Howells and James’s willingness to explore the world’s artistic past to illuminate the issues facing the American present was shared by many of the artists and intellectuals who made Boston and its environs one of the most vibrant cultural centers of the United States in the fifty years following the Civil War. This vibrancy was fueled by a spirit of cosmopolitanism, the disposition to see one’s native culture as just one branch of human culture in general. For these artists and writers, cosmopolitanism was simply a worldliness that opened up a cornucopia of history’s ideas and art to the curious American mind. Indeed, Howells and James would have been inspired not only by their own travels but also by the many examples of cosmopolitan art that adorned the Boston area during their lifetimes. Three works of architecture shaped Boston’s cityscape with the same cosmopolitan spirit that energized Howells’ private conversations with Henry James. In 1877, the architect Henry Hobson Richardson explained that he based Trinity Church on Romanesque precedents from the Auvergne region of central France to solve a

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knotty architectural problem: How does one construct a church whose tower must be in the center instead of the corner, as was the case in most church construction? It had to be in the center because, as Richardson explained, a corner tower, “from at least one side, would nearly be out of sight” on Trinity Church’s unique site on Boston’s Copley Square.3 Almost twenty years later, when the architect Charles Follen McKim took up the challenge of building a library to face the complex façade of Trinity Church, he chose a subdued neoclassical design that would complement but not compete with Richardson’s original creation. Around 1900, Isabella Stewart Gardner also decided to make her mark on the Boston landscape, constructing a unique museum/home with a magnificent collection of art from around the world. When she realized that the Venetian Gothic exterior she had planned would not survive through the many Boston winters, she solved this problem with a typically American solution: she improvised and simply moved the Gothic ornamentation from the exterior to the interior, where it remains today. These architectural accomplishments represent only the most visible legacy of Cosmopolitan art from a circle of artists and intellectuals who spent significant portions of their lives in the Boston area. I have called this score of men and women the Boston Cosmopolitans. Some were friends and colleagues, most were acquainted with one another, and some were very close, as was the case with Howells and James.4 Some of the members of this collection of friends and acquaintances are highlighted later in this introduction. Trinity Church probably would never have been successfully completed without the collaboration of the artist John La Farge, who achieved worldwide fame for his innovations in the manufacture of stained glass—innovations that were designed specifically to enhance the lighting of the church. In the field of painting, both Dennis Miller Bunker and Lilla Cabot Perry helped to introduce Impressionism to Boston—and America—through their canvases, teaching, and writing. The historian and autobiographer Henry Adams, aided by Cosmopolitan artists he had befriended in Boston, combined Eastern and Western aesthetics to create the Adams Memorial (1891), a moving sculptural work dedicated to the memory of his deceased wife. The versatile Augustus Saint Gaudens culminated his career in Boston with the Shaw Memorial (1897), a sculpture influenced by European art and created to honor the heroism of the Massachusetts 54th Regiment, one of the first all-black regiments

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that fought during the Civil War. Isabella Stewart Gardner not only brought the world to Boston in the form of an eclectic art collection but also provided a venue for artists, musicians, and intellectuals from all over the world to meet and exchange ideas. In the field of literature, William Dean Howells introduced foreign cultures to an American audience through fiction such as Their Wedding Journey (1872) and The Lady of the Aroostook (1879), nonfiction such as Venetian Life (1866), and criticism in the “Recent Literature” section of Boston’s most important magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, edited by his friend Thomas Sargeant Perry, who was Lilla Cabot Perry’s husband. While Howells and Perry were introducing European literature to Americans, Howells’ friend Henry James examined American cultural traits made more clearly visible off a European background in fictional works such as The American (1877), Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and highly original travel literature such as Italian Hours (1909). Henry James’ brother, the Harvard philosopher William James, translated the openness and curiosity that was characteristic of this cosmopolitan experience into his pragmatism and works such as “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” (1899), in which he supported his arguments by referring to French, American, English, and Russian writers. These examples represent only a fraction of the cosmopolitan activity that flowed through Boston in the fifty years following the American Civil War.5 The oldest member of the Boston Cosmopolitans, Charles Eliot Norton (1827–1908), helped to promote cosmopolitanism through his role, from 1874 until 1898, as Lecturer on the History of the Fine Arts as connected with Literature at Harvard University, where he became the most influential teacher of art history in the United States. His insights were derived from a lifetime of travel dating back to the 1850s. The theme of cosmopolitanism has caught the attention of many scholars in recent years because it provides a possible alternative to the resurgence of ethnic, national, and religious divisiveness that has reasserted itself globally since the end of the Cold War. Deadly conflicts arising from these crises have occurred within and across existing national borders and have put severe pressure on conceptions of national identity and national sovereignty. Economic globalization and the elimination of many travel restrictions between the East and the West have also focused scholars’ attention on the effects of the

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increasing mobility of people, capital, and ideas in the modern world. The recent growth of environmental problems on a global scale has also reminded people of various nationalities of their common human problems on Earth.6 The porous condition of national boundaries at the end of the twentieth century has motivated some scholars to call for new ways to look at national identity and history. David Hollinger has offered an alternative to ethnic balkanization in the United States in his Postethnic America, which argues that individuals should see themselves as being able to choose among many possible identities—ethnic, professional, regional, sexual, and so on—without feeling that any one of these identities is necessarily more important or influential than another. In the field of history, Akira Iriye emphasized in his article “The Internationalization of History” that American historians should “search for historical themes and conceptions that are meaningful across national boundaries.” In the absence of such studies, the “key conceptual frameworks” of international and diplomatic history have been the “interest and relative power of nations,” which have focused on competitions and violent struggles between nations and tended to exclude the study of peace. David Thelen has argued that this “internationalized” American history might begin “with the recognition that people, ideas, and institutions do not have clear national identities. Rather, people may translate and assemble pieces from different cultures. Instead of assuming that something was distinctively American, we might assume that elements of it began or ended somewhere else.”7 Cosmopolitanism is an especially useful theme today because it can be applied to the concerns voiced by Hollinger, Iriye, and Thelen. Hollinger has used the term in an attempt to reimagine American identity as one characterized by individual choice and not predetermined by ethnic origins. This might be understood as “internal” or “national” cosmopolitanism, one that attempts to bridge the differences between people within a nation. Complementing Hollinger, Iriye’s call for recontextualizing American history in world history and Thelen’s reminder that many ideas have complex national origins might be characterized as constituting an “international” cosmopolitanism—one that serves to illuminate the connections and interactions between peoples from different nations.8

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The Cosmopolitans from nineteenth-century Boston believed in using an international approach to understanding their native land because, among other reasons, it had proved to be so fruitful in their own lives and work. As these world travelers from Boston aged into the twentieth century, many of them tried to pass on their cosmopolitan example of maintaining a healthy and respectful curiosity about cultures far from their native land. As the painter Lilla Cabot Perry advised her granddaughter in the 1920s: “Remember when you go to a country, try to plunge into the inner life of the country and to really know the people and their point of life, their ambitions, ideals, etc.”9 In using Boston as the focal point in a study of the effect of travel on American culture after the Civil War, I do not want to claim that the most significant international influences on American culture were exclusive to that city. Up the East Coast from Baltimore to Philadelphia and New York and moving west to Chicago and San Francisco, strong cosmopolitan interests in arts and letters were taking hold and influencing the culture of many American cities. As Mark Twain put it so clearly in Innocents Abroad, “Everybody was going to Europe [in 1867]—I too, was going to Europe. . . . The steamship lines were carrying Americans out of the various ports of the country at the rate of four or five thousand a week.”10 But it can be argued that, of all these cities, Boston’s ties to the rest of the world were among the most influential in the country. Colonial New England had never developed a robust economy based on farming or manufacturing; instead, fishing, shipping, and trade kept the engine of the region’s economy humming. Between 1830 and 1850, the “number of coasting vessels arriving annually at Boston doubled from 3,000 to an astounding 6,000, or very nearly twenty a day throughout the year.” Transporting cargo from adjacent American ports, these vessels also brought goods from around the globe. In addition to well-known ports in Great Britain and the European continent, Boston had especially strong ties to the East with places like China, India, and the East Indies. Toward the middle of the nineteenth century, Boston’s merchants branched out to more exotic places, such as Madagascar and Zanzibar.11 As a result, many businessmen kept regular ties with the outside world. “They remained Bostonians,” comments historian Russell B. Adams, Jr., “loyal to the city’s rich heritage of traditions, but the scope of their vision ranged far beyond Boston and Massachusetts.”12 Many of the

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artists and intellectuals discussed in this study were the inheritors— directly or indirectly—of both the wealth and the vision derived from Boston’s role in world commerce. The Boston Cosmopolitans came from a city that also boasted of its great national influence in the fields of arts and letters. Boston’s intellectual accomplishments helped the city to earn the sobriquet “The Athens of America” during the antebellum period. This consciousness of being America’s premier intellectual city lifted the horizons of many Bostonians (and many New Englanders as well), who felt that their region often represented and communicated the best of America to the rest of the world. Into the latter third of the nineteenth century, Boston was a city that, somewhat paradoxically, held itself to be fairly aloof from the rest of the United States but saw itself perhaps more easily as participating in a world community of intellect. As James Turner has pointed out, Boston’s moneyed class often directed the bulk of their charitable donations to local (rather than national) organizations—such as Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University—whose great resources would eventually help to create institutions with international reputations.13 An intriguing example of the abiding presence of the outside world in Boston’s intellectual consciousness can be found in Boston’s premier literary magazine of the time. In March of 1881, 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.” In this poem, Holmes depicts Boston and Florence as sister cities: “Proud of her clustering spires, her new built towers, / Our Venice [i.e. Boston’s Back Bay], stolen from the slumbering sea, / A sister’s kindliest greeting wafts to thee, / Rose of Val d’Arno, Queen of all its flowers!”14 In making this somewhat obscure connection between Boston and Venice, Holmes was not writing just for an isolated literary elite. Many of Boston’s businessmen had a deep respect for erudition throughout the nineteenth century and actively encouraged each other to maintain an amateur interest in some type of scholarship.15 Although the burgeoning economic and cultural strength of New York would eclipse Boston in terms of the scale of its activity by the late nineteenth century, Boston would remain an important contributor to America’s continuing cultural interactions with Europe and places farther away. One of the most influential and enduring

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movements in nineteenth-century American architecture, the Richardsonian Romanesque, was inaugurated with H. H. Richardson’s Trinity Church (1877), built in Boston’s Back Bay. Boston’s high-cultural interest in Italy could be seen in the city’s fascination with Dante that stretched back to the origins of the Dante Society and Longfellow’s efforts to translate The Divine Comedy and culminated in Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Fenway Court, where some of the earliest editions of Dante’s masterpiece were housed. Bostonian art collectors were among the first in America to collect and extol French impressionism. Boston cultivated an interest in Japan begun by Commodore Perry, which contributed, in part, to the gathering of one of the most extensive collections of Asian art in the world, which found a home in the Museum of Fine Arts. Boston was also the birthplace of American pragmatism, fostered in great part by the cosmopolitan experiences and vision of William James, professor of philosophy at Harvard University. The culture of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Boston, and especially its contributions to a cosmopolitan outlook in arts and letters, became the target of prominent intellectuals who were traumatized by the brutal end of the Victorian era: World War I. In 1911 George Santayana first introduced the term “genteel tradition” to signify a line of thinkers and writers whose abstract culture was without life and spontaneity—and without sufficient reference to the present age. This was soon picked up by Van Wyck Brooks, who asserted the need for Americans to come of age. In the 1920s, intellectual icons such as Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) sneered at the European interests of elite Victorians, condemning them for abandoning an “organic” American aesthetic—as if creativity could or should respect national boundaries.16 More recently, academics’ distaste for the rich or intellectual Victorian elite in American history has perpetuated the obscuring of the history of foreign travel by Americans. Historians often took Victorian elites to task for leaving the United States for long periods of time, ignoring the fact that frequent travel offered fresh perspectives on their country that would have been difficult to obtain if they had remained tethered to the United States. During the last twenty to thirty years, many cultural historians have interpreted most of the prominent architectural accomplishments of the American nineteenth century as having been stained by a symbolic collusion with sinister (i.e., European) forces. One of the

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most influential of these voices bluntly repeated this criticism in a recent volume of American Literary History: “institutions of ‘high’ culture arose in palatial piles of marble planted at the center of cities, emblems of the intimate terms upon which genteel culture and high wealth, also housed in marble, treated each other.”17 Although there is certainly some truth to the connection between Victorian wealth and Victorian art, the connection need not only be a sign of something dangerous or harmful to American culture. On the contrary, one might look at places such as the Boston Public Library and appreciate how artists such as the architect Charles Follen McKim helped to persuade people of great wealth to part with their money to build institutions that promoted the public good. When the idea of a conspiracy between Boston’s Victorian art and great wealth wanes, one may begin to appreciate anew how much of the literature, philosophy, painting, sculpture, and architecture of this time tell us about the accomplishments of the artists who created these works of art. In essence, the Boston Cosmopolitans were able to translate physical travel around the globe into what might be understood as “travel of the mind.” This travel of the mind fueled their intellectual curiosity and flexibility, which, in turn, facilitated making connections between ideas from a variety of cultures from around the world. Travel of the mind, an aspect of their cosmopolitanism, also encouraged the Boston Cosmopolitans to reintegrate their encounters with the world’s cultural diversity into original, eclectic, challenging and often-delightful intellectual and artistic work. Although the Cosmopolitans shared many similar experiences, they were hardly of one mind. Indeed, in some cases members of this cosmopolitan group engaged each other in lively debates for many years. Adams was a particularly lively devil’s advocate, challenging the aesthetic theories of John La Farge in the 1880s and throwing barbs at the optimistic philosophy of William James in the first years of the 1900s. Exchanges like these grew from the Cosmopolitans’ dependence on each other for new ideas and constructive criticism. Similarly, the Boston Cosmopolitans often engaged issues of public concern, and they disagreed with many political and cultural trends of their country as much as they disagreed with one another. Their disputes with American life and culture reflected a serious commitment to making positive contributions to their country.

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This cosmopolitanism had an opportunity to influence American life thanks to the growth of new markets for cultural work. The increasing post–Civil War demand for art and architecture along with a boom in publishing that made magazines and newspapers cheaper and more easily available than ever before provided the unique opportunity for all of the Boston Cosmopolitans to have an effect on public life.18 Just as opportunities were growing for architects, artists, and writers to display their work in public, the public’s access to these works also increased. The legions of people who came to visit the Beaux Arts–inspired “White City” of Chicago’s Columbian Exposition (1893) within the short period of six months attests to Americans’ curiosity about the art and architecture and the enormous efforts they made to satisfy that curiosity.19 On a regional scale, the literature in McKim’s Boston Public Library would be linked to increasing numbers of people through the streetcar system that connected Boston to its suburbs.20 Combining their belief that beautiful art, architecture, and literature were needed to improve Americans’ quality of life with their conviction that Americans should be exposed to ideas and traditions from around the world, the Boston Cosmopolitans often applied the lessons they learned from their travels to specific problems emerging in modern America. In travel literature such as Venetian Life, William Dean Howells often reflected on the temperate and humane pace of Italian life and urged his readers to consider how Americans’ contrasting high-paced business schedules blinded them to the advantages of living in a society that valued social interaction and polite conversation. (James Russell Lowell had written in a similar vein in Rome.) In his travel narrative The American Scene, Henry James urged his fellow Americans to take the “aesthetic view” of the rational layout of most American cities (in contrast to the serpentine streets of many European cities) and to understand how efficient perpendicular streets could trample the human soul. Similarly, H. H. Richardson molded the “aesthetic view” into the realities of modern America through humanizing public spaces such as railroad stations.21 The Cosmopolitans’ enthusiasm about the “aesthetic view” of life can be seen as an extension and modification of Matthew Arnold’s essay of 1865, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.” Arnold urged his readers to learn from “the best that has been thought and said in the world.”22 Arnold, an English intellectual

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with worldwide influence during the nineteenth century, hoped that high culture (i.e., “the best”) would provide, in the words of Casey Blake, “the moral glue otherwise absent in competitive individualism, with training in elite culture socializing the working class into habits of deference and national loyalty that would stabilize a capitalist order.”23 In other words, Arnold believed in dictating moral values from the upper classes to the lower classes in an attempt to mitigate, but not eliminate, the social problems caused by modern industry. Although the political ends of Arnoldian “culture” were short of revolutionary, searching for “the best that has been thought and said in the world” could have a bracing and liberating effect in an American context. Many of the Boston Cosmopolitans believed that some art was better than others but resisted the idea that the standards appropriate for judging art could be ordained by the few for the many. Writing in the Atlantic in 1877, Henry James chafed against what he believed were the narrow moral lessons drawn from specific works of art by the English art critic and historian John Ruskin. The “luckless mortals” who accepted Ruskin’s standards found themselves, according to James, in “a sort of assize court, in perpetual session.” In response to Ruskin’s aesthetic criteria, James contended: “art after all is made for us and not we for art.”24 James’ more flexible standards for judging “the best” were succinctly described in his essay “The Art of Fiction” (1884): “The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.” Novels and other forms of art are interesting, he contended, if they reflect “the direct impression of life” experienced by their creators. In James’ view, art gave a true expression of the idiosyncratic viewpoints of individual artists: The best art is “as various as the temperament of man.”25 Although the “best” could take many forms, conveying “the direct impression of life”—or, in other words, being true to the variety of human experience while expressing it forcefully and artistically—could only be achieved, according to James, by a few talented artists. Like Arnold, the Boston Cosmopolitans appealed to “the best in the world” in an attempt to fight the parochialism that limited the political and social choices of their respective native lands. Although many countries have suffered at one time or another from narrowmindedness, American solipsism could remain particularly strong because of Americans’ belief in the exceptional character of their

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nation, a belief protected and insulated by physical distance from many of the world’s cultures. Through their repeated interactions with different peoples, the Boston Cosmopolitans went far beyond exceptionalism or even the fawning Anglophilia held by many American elites in the late nineteenth century. Although the cosmopolitanism practiced by the artists and writers in this study varied greatly, the age of steamship travel they lived in was a common denominator in their lives, as well as the lives of their fellow artists and writers throughout America. This cosmopolitan movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—or cosmopolitan “turn” in the culture as it might be described today— was broad and deep; nonetheless, it remains largely forgotten or misunderstood by modern Americans who find themselves in the midst of the very globalization that the Boston Cosmopolitans began to explore creatively 150 years ago. Their explorations of the world moved them, each in their own way, toward an open-ended cosmopolitanism, a sensibility that aimed to make Americans aware of political and cultural choices that exceptionalism did not allow. Shunning this cosmopolitan perspective, Americans from a variety of economic classes have conspired, in effect, to maintain the status quo. Indeed, the Cosmopolitans’ worldly freedom of mind is also a prerequisite for any effort on the part of concerned citizens who are committed to the cause of sustaining a healthy American democracy. Although many nineteenth-century Americans did not possess the time or money to travel the world on steamships and trains, as did Henry James and William Dean Howells, the Boston Cosmopolitans did their best to introduce the American public to the experience of travel through literature, art, and architecture. In other words, the Boston Cosmopolitans shared discoveries normally reserved to a privileged segment of American society with a broader audience. This book traces the progression of cosmopolitanism from the private experience of a group of artists and intellectuals to finished works of monumental art that shaped public space. The first and most important ingredient of cosmopolitanism in late nineteenthcentury Boston was travel. Spanning the globe brought the Boston Cosmopolitans face to face with a wide sampling of the world’s cultures; in addition, the act of long-distance travel itself helped to prepare many of the Cosmopolitans to adapt to foreign places and

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peoples. Chapter 1 discusses the growth of steamship travel after the Civil War and its crucial role in shaping the outlooks of the Boston Cosmopolitans. The narrative then focuses in Chapter 2 on a specific trip made from Liverpool to Boston by the oldest of the Boston Cosmopolitans, Charles Eliot Norton. This voyage of 1873 brought Norton face-to-face with the premier intellectual of antebellum America, Ralph Waldo Emerson. After ten days on board with Emerson, Norton’s life was changed in very unexpected ways and he was inspired to make a break from Emersonian Transcendentalism to what would become Boston’s cosmopolitanism. In Chapter 3, we see how the younger Cosmopolitans who learned much from Norton would also consciously use travel as tool to inspire and prompt their own creative endeavors. The second half of the book examines how cosmopolitanism shaped many specific kinds of art: literature, painting, sculpture, and architecture. The detailed examination of many specific works of art help to show the many illuminating and surprising ways that cosmopolitanism became woven into the fabric of American art. The work of the Boston Cosmopolitans can be seen as a translation of the findings they made during their travels, including the benefits of cultural diversity, the pleasing sense of being disoriented during travels to new places, an appreciation for leisure time, a growing interest in history, and most important, a renewed critical stance on the strengths and weaknesses of American culture. The narrative ends with a brief look at the greatest challenge to Boston’s cosmopolitanism: World War I. The delightful appreciation of the world’s cultures through travel that shaped the lives of the Boston Cosmopolitans was upended by international conflict. For those Cosmopolitans who survived to see World War I, their world seemed threatened with complete destruction. Their reactions amounted to a passionate defense of the future of cosmopolitanism—a future whose final outcome is still undecided. For those readers interested in placing the story of The Boston Cosmopolitans in the context of cultural and literary history, a detailed “Historiographic Note” follows. The topics of the evolving etymology of the terms “cosmopolitan” and “cosmopolitanism” as well as the cultural history of Boston in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries receive special attention. In addition, there is an extended discussion of famous Americans who also made international networks

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and travel a central part of their lives—from Cotton Mather to Benjamin Franklin to Adoniram Judson, a pioneering American evangelical missionary who lived and preached in Burma between 1813 and 1845. This discussion underlines the Boston Cosmopolitans’ unique approach to encountering and understanding foreign cultures.

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T H E “P O E T RY O F M O T I O N ”: T H E E F F E C T O F T R AV E L O N T H E L I V E S A N D T H O U G H T O F T H E B O S T O N C O S M O P O L I TA N S

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n April 1903, Henry James wrote to his brother William of his plans to visit the United States for the first time in twenty years. He was worried about the expense of traveling around the United States for any length of time; nonetheless, he was convinced that he should not make his trip any shorter than six months. “I say 6 months,” Henry explained, “because I want and need the material and impressions that only that time would give me.”1 The next month William wrote back and expressed the fear that his brother’s refined sentiments might not sustain the shock of life in the United States. William imagined the “good many of the désagréments to which you will inevitably be subjected, and imagine the sort of physical loathing with which many features of our national life will inspire you.” William thought that it might be better for Henry to remain in England to avoid the shocks of twentiethcentury America so he would not return to England feeling “done with America forever.”2 Henry was indignant. “What you say of . . . [s]hocks in general,” he shot back to William, “is utterly beside the mark—it being absolutely for all that class of phenomena, and every other class, that I nurse my infatuation” to return. If he did not go back to the country of this birth, the alternative was “to settle down to a mere mean oscillation from here [i.e., his house in Sussex] to London and from London here—with nothing (to speak of) left, more to happen to

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me in life in the way of (the poetry of) motion.” He also added that William seemed very cavalier about dismissing Henry’s desire to travel: You speak of the whole matter [of foreign travel] rather, it seems to me, “à votre aise”; you make, comparatively, and have always made, so many movements; you have travelled and gone to and fro—always comparatively!—so often and so much. I have practically never travelled at all—having never been economically able to. . . . These visions I’ve had, one by one, all to give up—Spain, Greece, Sicily, any glimpse of the East, or in fact of anything; even to the extent of rummaging about in France; even to the extent of trudging about, a little, in Switzerland. Counting out my few dips into Italy, there has been no time at which any “abroad” was financially convenient or possible.3

The “few” times Henry James traveled to Italy amounted to fourteen visits over his adult lifetime.4 Although Henry was hardly deprived of the opportunity to travel, his complaint to his brother indicates how eagerly he and the rest of Boston Cosmopolitans anticipated seeing a variety of people and places around the world. As Henry underlined in 1903, his long absence from his “native land” made America increasingly intriguing for him, “and that the period there which should represent the poetry of motion, the one big taste of travel not supremely missed, would carry with it also possibilities of the prose of production (that is the production of prose).”5 Henry repeated the phrase “poetry of motion” once again in the letter to convey the feeling of wonder and discovery that travel often offered to the Boston Cosmopolitans, opening up new ideas that could be translated into their work. Henry’s love of travel was hardly unique among the Boston Cosmopolitans. His frustration with the relatively few voyages he was able to take during his lifetime is symptomatic of the central role travel played in their lives. Henry’s dissatisfaction stemmed from the fact that he was unable to take advantage of all the new opportunities for long-distance travel that had grown exponentially only within his lifetime. Stunning technological improvements in railroad and steamship technology since the mid-nineteenth century made travel over land—and especially overseas—increasingly available to these artists and intellectuals, who entered their professional lives in the years following the Civil War. The world, in short, had opened up to travelers after 1865 in a way that was nothing less than revolutionary.

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These technological changes, in turn, opened up unique experiences that made these artists and writers from Boston increasingly cosmopolitan.

A S HORT H ISTORY OF T RANSATLANTIC T RAVEL , 1600 S TO 1800 S Before the 1860s, long-distance travel across the land, and especially across the ocean, could be extremely hazardous and expensive. The Puritans who sailed from Europe to New England in the first half of the seventeenth century often paid £5 per person to participate in voyages that took an average of ten and a half weeks (seventy-three days)—although some voyages lasted up to twenty or even twentysix weeks, if bad weather or weak winds delayed their progress. Puritans approached their voyage to America with a feeling of dread, and many anticipated that they would be deeply affected by their experiences aboard ship, provided they could survive them.6 By the early 1800s, sailing ships were faster and safer than those the Puritans used, although the rate of improvement in the time it took to cross the Atlantic was quite low. In two hundred years, the average time it took to cross the Atlantic had decreased only by 50 percent: thirtysix days westward across the ocean, and twenty-four days eastbound.7 In contrast to sailing ships, steamships promised faster speeds and reliability, as well as a quicker rate of technological improvement. One of the first transatlantic steamers, The Great Western (1838), crossed the Atlantic in one-third of the time it took its sailing competition, taking thirteen days westward, and returning to Europe in eleven days, thus outpacing the creeping rate of improvement in the speed of sailing ships of the previous two centuries.8 But before the 1860s, this speed could be difficult to maintain. These early steamships were hampered by engines that could not safely run at high pressure and wooden hulls that could not easily maintain their integrity at high speeds;9 in addition, the progress of many of the early steam vessels across the ocean was often plagued by the necessity of stopping every three or four days to clean the salt off the ship’s engines.10 If travelers were not discouraged by these inconveniences, they encountered two other impediments to their enjoyment of the

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transatlantic trip: the ubiquitous clouds of coal dust floating around the ship11 and the relatively high costs of travel. In 1850, the average cost of a voyage for passengers from Britain to the United States was £35 (approximately $157) for first-class and £20 ($90) for secondclass passengers; on the way back to Europe, the charges were slightly lower: $120 for first class and $70 for second.12 The relatively high cost of these trips may be put into perspective when one realizes that twenty-four years later, the average annual family income in Massachusetts was only $763 dollars.13 In general, travel before the 1860s resembled work much more than pleasure. In fact, the root of the word English word “travel” is the Old French word travaillier, which means “to work.”14 This was the dreary and demanding world of travel that Charles Dickens depicted in his travel narrative of 1844, American Notes. Beginning in England, when Dickens boarded the very first Cunard steamer, the Britannia (1840), the opening section of American Notes foreshadow the series of dangers that Dickens encountered during his trip. Soon after this hint of what was to come, Dickens describes his trials: monotony, cold, bad food, cramped quarters, poor company—and waking up in his sea-soaked quarters one stormy night while the Britannia went on “staggering, throbbing, heaving, wrestling, leaping, diving, jumping, pitching, throbbing, rolling, and rocking . . . until one feels disposed to roar for mercy.”15 During the 1840s, when Dickens first traveled to America, steamship travel was financed mainly through government contracts that paid shipping companies such as Cunard to transport international mail. Unfortunately for Dickens, the famous man of letters took a back seat to the epistolary cargo of the Britannia. As for the United States–based Collins Line (1847–58), one of the few companies that attempted to make a profit from transporting passengers rather than mail or other cargo before the Civil War, technical limitations in engine and hull technology, along with the well-publicized accidents that such limitations caused, soon turned the venture into a financial disaster.16 It was only in the early 1870s that leaders in the shipping industry, such as the Cunard Line, began to expand their passenger capacity significantly.17 The increased demand for travel caused by rising immigration to America after the Civil War encouraged companies from all over the world to compete with the British Cunard Line steamers. The Holland America Line, the French Line, the Hamburg

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American Line, and the English White Star Line were just a few of the many transatlantic shipping companies that emerged after 1865.18 With this competition, prices for transatlantic travel fell steadily downward from the 1860s until the end of the nineteenth century. In 1860, the cost of first-class passage to cross to America from Britain was about £17 ($76.50); in 1863 the one-way passage dropped to £13, and prices scraped bottom at £9 in 1883. In 1890, prices recovered slightly to £10 (about $45, or $41.28 in 1860s dollars).19 For steerage passengers, prices were approximately one-half the cost of first-class passage. In an effort to attract more passengers who wanted to travel inexpensively but not in steerage, most shipping lines introduced an intermediate one-way fare in the early 1890s ranging from £7 to £8 ($31.50 to $36.00), which price would fall during the late 1890s. In addition to the falling costs of first-class, second-class, and steerage passage during the last third of the nineteenth century, traveling across the ocean became even more attractive then, because most shipping lines by this time could promise that their ships would cross the Atlantic safely in an average of ten days.20 However, the Boston Cosmopolitans, along with many other Americans who enjoyed overseas travel, did not choose to go abroad simply because technological improvements in steamships made leaving home easy. The Civil War may have also made Americans psychologically predisposed to travel. After years of sacrifice and bloodshed, many Americans were ready to shift their interests away from national concerns and indulge their curiosity in the less harrowing challenges of international travel. As Mark Twain’s popular novel of 1869, The Innocents Abroad, suggests, traveling to Europe became a popular pastime among a broad range of America’s middle class. “Everybody was going to Europe [in 1867],” Twain reported enthusiastically. “I too, was going to Europe. . . . The steamship lines were carrying Americans out of the various ports of the country at the rate of four or five thousand a week.”21 By going to Europe and places farther afield, Americans were not necessarily just escaping from the difficult realities of post–Civil War America; many were also indulging a healthy curiosity about the outside world. For the Cosmopolitans in particular, travel provided access to networks of accomplished foreign colleagues—networks that anticipated the vibrant intellectual circles that would be emerging a few decades later with the institutional support of the modern American university.

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As improvements in technology and declines in prices continued through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, a traveler’s journey could be just as interesting and enjoyable as his or her destination. Less than a hundred years after Charles Dickens complained about his discomfort aboard the twelve thousand-ton Britannia, Thomas Wolfe celebrated the steamship as a symbol of promise and pleasure. The protagonist in Wolfe’s autobiographical Of Time and the River (1935) looks upon a giant, sixty thousand-ton ship in the evening, waiting to take its passengers on a voyage from Cherbourg, France, to America: Her enormous superstructure with its magnificent frontal sweep, her proud breast which was so full of power and speed, her storied decks and promenades . . . all of this, made to move upon the stormy seas, leaning against eternity and the gray welter of the Atlantic at twentyseven knots an hour, tenanted by the ghosts, impregnated by the subtle perfumes of thousands of beautiful and expensive women, alive with the memory of the silken undulance of their long backs.22

Although Wolfe’s purple prose increases the dramatic contrast between his depiction of ocean travel and that of Charles Dickens, it is nonetheless striking that the steamship could excite such passion in a writer of the 1930s. As the nineteenth century progressed, it became quite common for Boston’s Cosmopolitans to expect that steamship travel would also be comfortable and enjoyable. For example, when Isabella Stewart Gardner received a letter in January 1884 inquiring as to whether she was enjoying herself during her travels from Singapore to India, Gardner gently chided her correspondent for asking such a silly question: “Of course it is a pleasant voyage, my dear, . . . or I should not be writing. At least it is so far—a soft, cool breeze, a still calm sea. The ship is good, an entertaining unEnglish looking but very English Captain, and a few rather interesting passengers.”23 A few years later, Gardner’s younger friend, Dennis Miller Bunker, jokingly speculated that she would find quarters on board a ship that were less damp and less noisy than the rooms he let in the Back Bay: “The middle of the Atlantic can’t be as cold and wet as Dartmouth Street, and no stateroom could vie with the perfumed heat of this most interesting apartment, and the rattle of your propeller is as nothing to that of the B and A under my window.”24

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As Bunker wrote this letter in 1888 it was clear that steamship lines had been able to combine speed, size, safety, and comfort for a rapidly increasing number of American ocean travelers25—passengers whose numbers had grown to an estimated forty thousand per annum in the years immediately following the end of the Civil War. This represented at least a fivefold increase in the number Americans who traveled annually to Europe between the 1820s and 1850s—a number that ranged between two and eight thousand.26 Even for fictional characters this estimate was common knowledge. In response to an Englishman who claimed that her “purposes” in traveling to Europe seemed “mysterious,” Isabel Archer in Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady (1880–81) replies: “Is there anything mysterious in a purpose entertained and executed every year, in the most public manner, by fifty thousand of my fellow-countrymen—the purpose of improving one’s mind by foreign travel?”27

A PPROACHING A “P HILOSOPHY OF T RAVEL”: T RANSFORMATIONS IN L IMINAL S PACE Isabel Archer’s rhetorical question assumed that she and her interlocutor agreed that one’s mind was “improved” through foreign travel in the 1880s. The result of these encounters might, in the best cases, lead to a constructive questioning and self-examination of one’s own culture and traditions, a questioning that could result in a recalibration of previously unquestioned beliefs and habits; or, as Isabel Archer stated, the “improvement of one’s mind.” However, there was another stage of transformation that took place at the beginning and end of the journeys abroad: the act of traveling itself. Many people who have commented on traveling have noticed in passing that in traveling for an extended period of time on a ship, ocean voyagers enter a unique space. Melvin Maddocks has commented that in “[s]peeding between two worlds, the great liner became a third world in itself,”28 though few people have tried to make sense of this “world between worlds” and how it might affect those who enter it.29 One notable person who did spend some time analyzing and speculating on the effect of travel on human beings was George Santayana, a member of Harvard University’s Department of Philosophy and a colleague of one of the most important of the Boston Cosmopolitans, William James.

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In “The Philosophy of Travel,” written around 1912 and posthumously published,30 Santayana begins with an understated rhetorical question: “Has anybody considered the philosophy of travel? It might be worth while.” Like many of his Cosmopolitan acquaintances, Santayana grew up in a world shaped by travel on a grand scale. During his childhood, his parents traveled frequently. Even when he was left at home, his parents’ voyages abroad made distant places like China and Manila “familiar names and images to me in childhood.” Traveling vicariously through his parents’ experiences, Santayana came away with an unforgettable “sense of great distances in this watery globe, of strange amiable nations, and of opposed climates and ways of living and thinking, all equally human and legitimate.” Santayana’s childhood expectations concerning travel seem to have been more than satisfied by the voyages he took as an adult. What he eventually discovered, in addition to the countries he explored during his adult life, was that travel itself provided a profoundly unique stimulus to his thoughts: [W]hat charm is equal to that of ports and ships and the thought of ceaseless comings and goings, by which our daily needs are supplied? The most prosaic objects, the most common people and incidents, seen as a panorama of ordered motions, of perpetual journeys by nights and day, through a hundred storms, over a thousand bridges and tunnels, take on an epic grandeur, and the mechanism moves so nimbly that it seems to live . . . things not alive in themselves but friendly to life, promising us security in motion, power in art, novelty in necessity.31

For Santayana, travel enhanced life, making connections literally and symbolically on the wheels that move trains and steamships along arcs stretching across the globe. Cosmopolitans like William James would have heartily agreed with Santayana that railroads and steamships were “not alive in themselves[,] but friendly to life”—a life full of wonder and unpredictability. For both men, as well as the majority of Boston Cosmopolitans, travel engendered a growing, albeit sometimes uneven, respect for cultures and peoples different from their own. More important, travel played a critical role informing both their own views of the world and their philosophies. Santayana’s essay provides first-hand evidence that travel emerged as an influential element of

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the American intellectual experience during the late nineteenth century. The task at hand, then, is to respond to Santayana’s request to attempt a philosophy of travel and to explain the effect of travel on the lives and ideas of Boston’s Cosmopolitans in the era between the Civil War and World War One. Anthropologist Victor Turner provides ways to describe the transformations that can occur during a long journey in which travelers who are en route enter a “world between worlds.” He observes a curious resemblance between the religious quest of a pilgrimage and the more leisurely goals of the traveler or tourist: [A] tourist is half a pilgrim, if a pilgrim is half a tourist. Even when people bury themselves in anonymous crowds on beaches, they are seeking an almost sacred, often symbolic, mode of communitas [i.e., an individual’s strong sense of belonging to a group], generally unavailable to them in the structured life of the office, the shop floor, or the mine.32

Turner adds, in an insight particularly important for an understanding of the travels of the Boston Cosmopolitans, that the experience of pilgrimage (as well as travel and tourism) places the pilgrim in a liminal space. This space is an “in-between” social arena in which social hierarchies are leveled. This leveling opens up the potential for self-assessment and re-creation: “It has become clear to us that liminality is not only transition but also potentiality, not only ‘going to be’ but also ‘what may be.’”33 Once occupying this liminal space, the pilgrims, as a group of equals, experience the potential of communitas, the spontaneous creation of sympathy and potential fraternity with one’s fellow travelers/pilgrims.34 Pilgrimage, Turner explains, is a democratizing phenomenon (and a potentially revolutionary one) in which accepted social distinctions can be discarded and in which the individual’s religious experience is given precedence over the dicta and rules held up by society and its priests or ruling classes. The experience that most of the Cosmopolitans shared during their many long journeys abroad also resembles the transformative experiences that are an integral part of the pilgrim’s quest.35 In search of adventure and inspiration, the Cosmopolitans often returned from their journeys with a very different way of looking at the world, as we shall see.

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The Cosmopolitans, similar to many groups of travelers, certainly did not all share the same goals or the same agendas each time they boarded a train or steamship. The opportunity to bridge the gaps of class, ethnicity, or culture during an extended journey was not always sought after; at times, some Cosmopolitans felt this mingling to be a nuisance. In the case of the young Henry James, descriptions of common folk who may have shared a train ride in America or Europe did not often enter his letters (or his fiction, for that matter); instead, his attention was often drawn to the towns and the countryside outside the train. In some cases, the Cosmopolitans chose to travel for pure personal indulgence and resented reminders of people or situations that had proved to be a source of annoyance at home. In 1899, Henry Adams became annoyed with his life in Washington, feeling that the interminable rounds he made between casual socializing and formal dinner parties had transformed him into what he called “a mere ball of flesh, a round puffy protuberant mass.” As an antidote, Adams prescribed travel for himself: “I want to go—go—go— anywhere—to the devil—Sicily—Russia—Siberia—China—only keep going.”36 At times Adams hoped that travel might allow him to avoid certain ethnic groups: During a voyage by steamship in 1892, Adams wrote of his deep disappointment in finding that many of his fellow passengers in first class were Jews.37 It was also possible that travel could paradoxically increase one’s feeling of nationalism. As early as 1867, even the young Henry James—who was already an experienced traveler at the age of twenty-four—believed that a cosmopolitan American artist was somehow superior to his European counterparts. In a letter to Thomas Sergeant Perry, James made this problematic assessment of the American version of cosmopolitan art: I feel that my only chance for success as a critic is to let all the breezes of the west blow through me at their will. We are Americans born—il faut prendre son parti [one has to take one’s side]. I look upon it as a great blessing; and I think that to be an American is an excellent preparation for culture. We have exquisite qualities as a race, and it seems to me that we are ahead of the European races in the fact that more than either of them we can deal freely with forms of civilization not our own, can pick and choose and assimilate and in short (aesthetically etc.) claim our property wherever we find it.38

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Henry James’s description of American cultural potential strongly suggests that to him, being American can mean being able to combine characteristics of many cultures, especially the European cultures from which most Americans could trace their ancestry.39 But did this preclude the possibility of European artists doing the same kind of thing? And did this mean that art shaped by cosmopolitan influences is necessarily superior to more local or regionally influenced art? The perspective of the older Henry James, as we will see, would turn out to be much suppler. No matter what their agendas, though, and despite their prejudices, the repeated travels of the Boston Cosmopolitans opened up countless opportunities for them to learn from other people and cultures in liminal space. William Dean Howells jokingly referred to his own peripatetic nature in a letter to Charles Eliot Norton written from Lake George, New York, on July 14, 1887: “Dear friend: You will not be surprised to find that I am here, for by this time you oughtn’t be surprised at any whereabouts of mine.”40 Some of the more literary Boston Cosmopolitans, just as Emerson had done in the previous generation, traveled to meet with some of the leading writers and thinkers of their day. American visual artists, as Henry James pointed out in his biography of William Wetmore Story, were particularly attracted to the idea of learning their craft in Europe because of the dearth of art schools in the United States through most of the nineteenth century. They were also eager to learn from the example of the ancient masters of Renaissance Italy or classical Greece, whose works were largely unavailable for close inspection in America. During their stays abroad, many American visitors to Europe also traveled together in small groups to share in the joys of discovery. For example, Augustus Saint Gaudens fondly recalled in his memoirs (dictated in 1906) a journey through southern France taken in 1878 that he shared with his good friend the architect Stanford White and White’s associate, Charles F. McKim. In addition to the great diversity of sights he saw as “they passed under stone bridges and by towns with churches with stone spires,” Saint Gaudens was impressed by the unique smells and sights that surrounded them as they progressed towards their southern destination: “the smell of garlic . . . pervaded our ship from the tip of her bow to the end of her stern. She was thoroughly impregnated, in side and outside, upside and down, and in every direction, with that perfume.”41 In

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this scene, Saint Gaudens references to the smell of spices underscore the sculptor’s enjoyment of the unique and uncanny atmosphere that often greets travelers during long journeys on trains and steamships. As Thomas Wolfe strongly suggested in Of Time and The River, the ships traveling across the Atlantic in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also became an important site of the imagination—a place that allowed people to think and act in ways that they might not allow themselves to do otherwise. William Dean Howells depicted the connection between oceanic travel and the imagination in his novel, The Lady of the Aroostook (1879). In this novel, a young man and woman, Staniford and Lydia, begin a romance on board the Aroostook. Toward the end of the story, the couple discusses the magical effect of being together on board ship for such a long time: “I wonder, [Staniford] said, “if you have anything of my feeling, nowadays. It seems to me as if the world had gone on a pleasure excursion, without taking me along, and I was enjoying myself very much at home.” “Why yes” she said, joyously; “do you have that feeling, too?” “I wonder what it is makes us feel so,” he ventured?” “Perhaps,” she returned, “the long voyage?” “I shall hate to have the world come back, I believe,” he said, reverting to the original figure. “Shall you?”42

Oceanic travel could open up imaginative possibilities far beyond the space of a ship’s decks. With improvements in steamships making travel across the Atlantic as easy, if not easier, than overland travel to California and other western destinations on the American continent, crowded and time-worn Europe began to emerge as a locus of the imagination that was as powerful and evocative as the untamed American West. Certainly the two destinations offered different possibilities for travelers. William Dean Howells describes these two contrasting attractions in The Lady of the Aroostook (1879). The main character, the young Staniford, makes this comparison while explaining to his friend the reasons why he chose to travel to Italy. “I think a bit of Europe will be a very good thing for the present, or as long as I’m in this irresolute mood. If I understand it, Europe is the place for American irresolution.” Europe, then, offers a place where Staniford might make up his mind about his future vocation in America.

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Staniford also anticipates the possibility that Europe might actually offer options for a vocation that were not as easy to pursue in America: “Well, I may form some tie in Italy. Art may fall in love with me, there. How would you like to have me settle in Florence, and set up a studio instead of a ranch,—choose between sculpture and painting, instead of cattle and sheep?”43 Boarding a ship to cross the Atlantic with the knowledge that the trip would be safe (if not enjoyable), and with the expectation that arriving in far-off lands might be exhilarating, the Boston Cosmopolitans often entered their “world between worlds” in high spirits. It is little wonder, then, that they found themselves particularly open to contacts with people and ideas they might not encounter during their normal daily routine. William James wrote to Charles Eliot Norton from England in 1902, casually reporting that during his voyage to Europe he had met one of the most important cultural critics of the day: “Henry D[emarest] Lloyd, whose name you know as that of a state-socialist writer, sat opposite to us [during the transatlantic journey], and proved one of the most ‘winning’ men it was ever my fortune to know.”44 In 1892, Henry Adams met Rudyard Kipling, who was introduced to him by Henry James. In another trip in 1902, this time to Europe, Adams enjoyed being “coddled all the way over,” as he was pleased to tell, by his young actress friends Elsi de Wolfe and Ethel Barrymore.”45 Traveling for many days on the secure but relatively small space of an ocean-going vessel, Boston’s Cosmopolitans began to expect the unexpected. Serendipitous encounters during their travels became an essential part of their personal, professional, and intellectual development. William Dean Howells may have, in fact, owed the beginning of his literary career to the steamship. His first book found a publisher thanks to a fortuitous literary acquaintance that Howells started while traveling on the Cunard steamer Asia from London to Boston in late July 1865. The acquaintance was Melancthon M. Hurd of the New York and Cambridge publishing company of Hurd & Houghton. On the ship, the men established a friendly relationship, playing games such as ring toss, shuffleboard, and euchre. A few weeks later in New York, after meeting by chance on the street, Howells discussed his manuscript of Venetian Life with Hurd, who “accepted the manuscript [for publication] on the spot, without even asking to read it.”46

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Thomas Sergeant Perry made a jocular allusion to this possibility of communitas in a letter to William James written on October 20, 1909, from Giverny, France. He playfully protested that James’s recent work, The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to “Pragmatism,” was so good that he was unable to stop reading it before the start of a trip back to the United States: “You have beautifully ennobled philosophy by making it seem human instead of a thing of formulas. Your comparisons and joyous chaff delight me. No wonder the bigwigs hate you. I keep opening your book, reading it with delight. I can never keep it for the ship (I am sure it will bring to shore crew and passengers all devoutly sworn to the new faith).”47 Perry imagined that his voyage back to the United States would open up an opportunity for him to become a philosophical evangelist who could use liminal space on a transatlantic steamer to transform his fellow travelers into devotees of William James. Perry’s joke hinged on the fact that traveling can indeed be a transforming, and potentially sacred, experience. Once the Cosmopolitans arrived at their destinations—destinations not restricted to the European continent—they were very conscious of the unique opportunities that became available to them only through travel. John La Farge, for example, was acutely aware of the effect of travel on his world view. La Farge’s travels through liminal space were recorded in a book called An Artist’s Letters from Japan (1897), in which he described the 1886 trip that he and Henry Adams made to Japan. Although La Farge did not denote the experience as liminal per se, his assessments of his own intellectual self-questioning and subsequent insights closely resemble the transformative nature of pilgrimage experiences. Similar to countless other travel accounts, La Farge’s narrative takes note of the novelties Japan has to offer to the Westerner. He mentions in the beginning of this work that the Japanese seem strangely indifferent to nudity and that the unique shapes of the trees in Japanese landscape painting were not a result of aesthetic eccentricity, but were actually derived from “the curious shapes of the Japanese pines” themselves.48 La Farge attempts to view Japan without being encumbered by too many preconceived expectations, and he claims that he deliberately avoided reading anything about the country during the ocean voyage.49 Although La Farge tried to avoid the influence of others in his own assessment of Japan, he felt free to accept or reject certain Japanese

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customs. He unambiguously registers his disgust at some of the traditional food he ate during his stop at a village inn: “We sat down on the straw-matted porch inside, the whole front of the building open, and drank miserable, herby tea, and tasted the usual sweet balls of sugary stuff.” But La Farge is just as quick to admonish himself for not being sufficiently open-minded to have taken quicker advantage of some of the country’s greatest pleasures. Staying at a hotel in the city of Utsunomiya, about 75 miles north of Tokyo, La Farge writes that he had been reluctant to take a bath with “‘honorable hot water,’ which is the Japanese necessity, and obtained cold, against protest. I had yet to learn,” La Farge reflects, “the luxury and real advantage of the Japanese hot bath.”50 The reader of An Artist’s Letters from Japan finds his representation of the country intertwined with the feelings and prejudices of the author, but the reader may conclude that for all its idiosyncrasies, An Artist’s Letters from Japan provides a balanced portrait of the country, and he or she may see that Japan is neither a utopia nor a dystopia. What the reader does discover is that Japan provided La Farge (and his readers) with a welcome change from life in the United States. In Japan, La Farge enjoyed the feeling of dislocation—a dislocation that directs the traveler’s journey into liminal space. This journey entailed two critical elements: physical dislocation and intellectual/cultural disorientation, the former much more common than the latter. Indeed, physical dislocation is a given state for any traveler in a foreign land, and it is the first thing that La Farge remarks on in his book. On leaving the ship, he observes that one of the most subtle but powerful conveyors of this dislocation was the influence “of odor, the sense of something very foreign, of the presence of another race [that] came up with the smell of the boat.”51 The next step, intellectual/cultural disorientation, is certainly more difficult because it forces the traveler, who is deprived the opportunity to relax in the familiar customs of his own country, to be constantly aware of himself. La Farge’s long-time friend Henry James created many fictional characters that experienced this discomfort when forced to adjust to a new way of life. A perfect example of such discomfort is Mr. Waymarsh, a character from The Ambassadors (1903), whose distress at being an American in Europe is only assuaged by his indulging in the familiar activity of purchasing expensive luxury items—in this case, jewelry.52 But for those travelers such as La Farge, who were enthusiastic

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about the potential for discovery in new lands, the opportunity to be disoriented could be “deliciously upside-down” from normal experience. By enjoying the distinct pleasures of Japanese culture, La Farge discovered a means to question the American tendency to derive pleasure mainly from production and profit: “if we, Western lovers of the tree, do not quite like the Japanese refinement of growing the cherry merely for its flowers, yet how deliciously upside-down from us, and how charming is the love of nature at the foundation of the custom!”53 Being placed “upside-down,” so to speak, in Japanese culture, La Farge found himself in a space that offered him the opportunity to reevaluate himself and his native culture, as he did when he compared the Western and Japanese assessments of the value of cherry trees. The transforming potential of travel becomes clear when La Farge analyzed the effect of entering liminal space on his own mind. Reflecting on how he encountered many new ideas during his travels in Japan, La Farge made it clear that he did not judge American beliefs, as a whole, to be “better” or “worse” than the beliefs of the Japanese. In dialogue with an imaginary skeptic who claimed that La Farge did not need to “come this distance” to learn about the virtues of art as manifested by the Japanese, he explains the most important advantages he found in traveling abroad: If there is anything good here [the skeptic wonders], it must resemble some of the good that we have with us [in the United States]. But here at least I am freer, delivered from a world of canting phrases, of perverted thought, which I am obliged to breathe in at home so as to be stained by them. Whatever pedantry may be here, I have not had to live with it, and I bear no responsibility in its existence.54

For all his praise of Japan, La Farge was never tempted to live there permanently. It was the temporary quality of his stay that made it valuable, for in leaving a few months after he arrived, La Farge avoided being influenced by the “cant” and unquestioned beliefs that every culture maintains. Instead of indulging in constant comparisons between the United States and Japan, traveling abroad gave La Farge the much more precious opportunity to examine and change his old habits, to begin to think differently from the ways he had been accustomed to thinking at home.

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During their travels, the Cosmopolitans would discover that Americans were participants in a world of astonishing variety. While exploring the world’s cultures by steam and by rail, the Cosmopolitans became more at ease with their limitations in attempting to assimilate or understand all of this diversity. John La Farge expressed a sophisticated understanding of these limitations after his trip to Japan: Although he found much in common with other Japanese artists, he could not claim to have “gone native,” to have understood the Japanese as well as they understood themselves. There were traditions, history, culture, and geographical context that made the Japanese distinctly interesting. Thus, as the Cosmopolitans matured, they began to see American culture as being on an equal footing with the world’s older cultures, all of which contained their own forms of brilliance and backwardness, their own creative possibilities and their own versions of sterile “cant.” The important discovery the Cosmopolitans made was that they could admire other cultures without putting their American identity at risk and that they could be proud of their own American education and outlook without denigrating the ideas and traditions of foreign cultures.

H ENRY J AMES ’ S C ONTEMPORARY H ISTORY OF N INETEENTH - CENTURY C OSMOPOLITANISM Around 1900, Henry James had the chance to analyze in retrospect the emergence of the cosmopolitan world of the middle of the nineteenth century when he was commissioned to write a biography of a fellow cosmopolitan from Boston, the expatriate William Wetmore Story (1819–95), a sculptor who spent much of his life in Italy, living principally in Florence and Rome. In the many subtle details of the preface to William Wetmore Story and His Friends, James provided a description of how this cosmopolitan world began and developed. In writing this work (which critics then and since have described as James’s first attempt at autobiography55), James showed that his cosmopolitan life, like the life of William Wetmore Story, grew out of an international network without which any single, aspiring cosmopolitan would probably have been left floundering at sea. While analyzing the emergence of the American cosmopolitanism that played such an important role in his own life, Henry James

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looked back with some nostalgia at the experiences of such early cosmopolitans as Story, who first left Boston in the 1840s to visit Italy. During his many visits to Rome, James himself often saw Story until the sculptor’s death in 1895. Story, he explained, was one of the “Precursors” of the Cosmopolitans of Henry’s own generation, who reached adulthood after the Civil War. The first words of this biography were dedicated not just to Story but to Story and his friends—to those who created one of the first American transnational networks.56 James explained that the first small wave of American cosmopolitans went to Europe before 1860, ignorant of what they would find but arriving at a moment when life in Europe was much cheaper, less hurried, and above all, new. As of 1903, however, he felt that “All the discoveries now are made, and, with this, most of the feelings, the sweetest and strangest have dropped. We know everything in relation to the objects that used to excite them—everything but that we do feel. We are in doubt of that—everything has been so felt for us.” Yet what had been gained for Americans who chose to follow this transnational path after the Civil War, while different, was certainly as precious: “The dawn of American consciousness of the complicated world.”57 Above all, James conveyed a feeling of gratefulness for these pioneers of American culture, experience, and consciousness—pioneers who did not actually discover the land mass of the European continent, like the “great explorers . . . who have bequeathed us the round globe to hang up in our drawing-rooms for ornament.” Instead of conquering or dominating the world, these pioneers of American culture searched the depths of Europe and encountered a strange world of foreign languages and ideas to supplement their New World experience. Their mistakes and difficulties provided important lessons, which would eventually make the European continent physically accessible and culturally important: “Europe, for Americans, has, in a word, been made easy.”58 Without these precursors, James added, “we settled partakers of the greater extension [towards Europe] should still be waiting for our own.”59 Who exactly were the Precursors making up these transnational networks, and what sort of lessons did they teach the Cosmopolitans of Henry James’s generation? They were, according to James, the “artist fraternity in especial, the young Americans aspiring to paint, to build and to carve, and gasping at home for vital air.” Those

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precursors included people such as Horatio Greenough (1805–52), another sculptor from Boston living in Italy, and Luther Terry (1813–1900), an American painter who was a friend and neighbor of William Wetmore Story in Rome. In addition to artists, Story’s friends abroad included Margaret Fuller (1810–50), who lived in Italy during the last years of her life, and James Russell Lowell (1819–91), a Bostonian Italophile to whom Story turned for advice on his Italian journey.60 By 1900, James acknowledged, the vibrancy of the plastic arts in contemporary America was a fait accompli—a product of increasing American patronage combined with many self-sufficient and reputable American art schools filled with artists who had improved their skills in Europe and had also brought back continental teaching methods (often modeled after the école des Beaux Arts in Paris).61 But in antebellum America (and far into the era after the Civil War), art schools and art patronage were both scarce. To learn the sculptor’s or the painter’s art from masters of the present, and to see the masterpieces of the past, the aspiring artist would have to pack his or her bags and head to Europe. The lessons these artists taught the Americans who would follow them consisted—James implied—in helping to select the most fertile artistic and intellectual ground in Europe. As a young man, James himself experimented with different European models for his art. Although he idolized Balzac as a young man, James felt uncomfortable with his short attempt to live in France in the 1870s and eventually chose to live in England. In his biography of Story, James strongly suggested that the valuable lessons he learned from France and England depended on the trial and error of those who preceded him in less promising territory: We [Henry James and his generation] have left the formal discipline of Dusseldorf and Antwerp and Munich, we have left even that of Venice and Florence and Rome, far behind; but it is all because they showed us the way, through having had first to find it, with much more or less comic and tragic going and coming for themselves.62

Although the specific “lessons” Henry James learned were probably not identical to those of, for instance, his brother William, his sister Alice, or his long-time friend Henry Adams, his description of the world of the Precursors does provide a detailed example of the effect

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of cosmopolitanism (as well as the influence of a specific American cosmopolitan network) on his intellectual development, and it also suggests that other members of his family and his friends could have learned similar lessons. In addition, James’s own interactions with an “artist-fraternity” (a fraternity of American artists who felt the need of a European education) during his lifetime provide an opening glimpse of the cosmopolitan world that he inhabited after 1865. This process of artistic and intellectual maturation was not easily or quickly accomplished. When the Cosmopolitans began to explore the world outside the United States after the end of the Civil War, they confronted strong American habits of thought that were hostile to this spirit of openness and curiosity. An example of this confrontation occurred in 1873, when Charles Eliot Norton traveled form Liverpool to Boston with one of the most revered men of American letters, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Their voyage together changed the direction of Norton’s life and offers us a glimpse at the beginnings of cosmopolitanism in Boston.

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his story of cosmopolitanism in Boston begins with Charles Eliot Norton. Although Norton was not the first intellectual from Boston to interest himself in promoting the study of the art and traditions of the Old World, his success in this field was phenomenal. Most notably, he inaugurated the study of art history in America while teaching as Lecturer on the History of the Fine Arts as Connected with Literature at Harvard University from 1874 until 1898. His writings and lectures made him a long-time favorite of Harvard students, respected by many of his colleagues, and admired by most educated Americans of his day. As Norton’s most recent biographer James Turner points out, “knowing of Norton was in fact a touchstone of whether one was well educated” in the late nineteenth century.1 His goal to educate Americans about the history of European art and architecture was not simply intended to create a public of enthusiastic connoisseurs. Art history, for Norton, was only a means to a very idealistic end. He stated that his ultimate goal was to replace Americans’ materialistic desires with “an education that shall train men to set a true value on things of the spirit . . . and to seek for wisdom as better than wealth.”2 Norton’s ambition was nothing less than to persuade a materialistic culture to give up materialism. Looking back from today’s perspective, Norton’s attempt to use the history of the fine arts in the West as a weapon against materialism may seem like trying to hold back the tides with a bucket. Most

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twenty-first-century Americans have been taught that art collecting and museum building during the late nineteenth century were a manifestation of a more vulgar competition among the upper crust of the Gilded Age—an attempt by old-money elites to find ways to out-do their rich friends while simultaneously distinguishing themselves from upstart nouveaux riches industrialists, who might have had money but who lacked, in the elites’ eyes, pedigree and taste. In short, art collecting seems to have been a product of materialism, not an alternative to it. Although many nineteenth-century elites certainly collected painting and sculpture as weapons in their internecine status wars, this was a distortion of the pressing moral lessons Norton hoped to teach a broader American public through art. To a large degree, he succeeded in getting his message out through his lectures at Harvard, his writings, and especially his influence on many artists and intellectuals around the country. In a posthumous assessment of Norton from 1909, Henry James testified to Norton’s abiding presence. Despite not having seen Norton often in the years immediately preceding his death, James wrote, he felt the “sense of [Norton’s] activity [was] . . . so constantly fed by echo and anecdote and all manner of indirect glimpses, that I find myself speak[ing] quite with the confidence and with all the attachment of a continuous ‘assistant.’”3 Writing to express his approval of his brother’s article, William James acknowledged that “dear old Charles remains great from his appreciative sensibility, and his kindliness and helpfulness to struggling talent. He had a finger in every good thing of his time, and a very various good things too—only he had no vision, and was all imitation.”4 William James’s mixed feelings about Norton point both to Norton’s great influence on the younger generation of Boston Cosmopolitans as well as the changes and innovations that the younger generation eventually applied to his teachings. The story of those innovations occupies the remaining chapters of this book, but before then our task is to understand how Norton’s version of cosmopolitanism arose in the first place. To do that, we have to go back to a crucial year in the education of Charles Eliot Norton: 1873. During the summer of 1873, Charles Eliot Norton set aside some time in his country cottage in Ashfield, Massachusetts, to commit to writing some recollections of his recent European life. During the

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war years, Norton had dedicated himself to the task of rallying Northern public opinion behind the war, through his tireless efforts for the New England Loyal Publication Society5 and as an important contributor to The Nation, founded by E. L. Godkin with the help of Norton in 1865.6 Exhausted from his efforts for the Union cause (which were focused on writing and distributing patriotic propaganda), Norton seized the opportunity in 1868 to travel through Europe with his family: his wife, his children, and his mother, Catherine Eliot. He hoped that the newly reunited United States would continue its forward progress during his travels abroad. Observing from Europe, Norton was greatly encouraged by President Johnson’s departure from the White House after the November 1868 election, but Norton also believed that Johnson’s successor, President Grant, did not promise much improvement. Greed and materialism returned to the nation despite the heroic idealism of many Union dead, and the dawning era soon developed into the morally meandering and politically feckless years of the Gilded Age. As early as July 1869, Norton reacted to America’s errant course by canceling “his subscription to the Boston Weekly Advertiser which ‘disgusted me once a week with my native land.’”7 Although this disgust motivated Norton to avert his eyes momentarily from the problems of democracy in the United States, similar signs of political chaos and corruption around Europe were attracting his attention. Political tragedies such as the massacres of the Paris Commune in 1871 seemed to stem from the same abuses of power and growing corrupting influence of money that were also plaguing the American political system.8 Much worse for him than observing political corruption in Europe and the United States, Norton endured the sudden death of his wife in Dresden, Germany, in February 1872. Norton and his wife, Susan, had enjoyed a very happy marriage. For the most part, their travels in Europe had been enjoyable, although they later regretted having leased their house in Cambridge to Professor Louis Agassiz of Harvard through the spring of 1873. When Susan died in February of 1872 as the result of complications following the birth of their third son, Norton went into shock. In one of the few passages in which Norton referred to his deceased wife in his journal entries, he recorded his despair on what would have been, for him, a day of celebration. Just nine months after he became a widower, Norton described this wrenching moment: “My birthday. The children

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gave me pretty little presents, and their unconsciousness of my loss and theirs almost breaks me down.”9 Shady Hill, Norton’s family home in Cambridge, now felt eerie, lacking the warm presence of his beloved spouse of ten years, but there were some shreds of continuity to hold on to. For Norton, writing in a journal was a familiar activity, and one he had practiced for many years, neatly jotting down his experiences at home and abroad in small, bound ledgers.10 Norton had by this time already proved himself to be a man of substantial talent, having established himself as a writer, editor, and literary entrepreneur. In addition to his work with The Nation, he had edited the North American Review from 1863 to 1868.11 But in the summer of 1873 at the age of forty-five, Norton returned home in search of a vocation. Unemployed and unsure of himself, he was in limbo. Back in his own country with an uncertain future, Norton was an ocean away from his recent European life, where he had not only explored the past firsthand but had also cultivated close friendships with luminaries such as Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin.12 Norton’s angst was only increased by another disappointment: his recent extended meeting with Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was approaching his seventieth birthday. Norton’s return voyage of 1873 had given him the opportunity to speak face to face with America’s most famous intellectual. The two men shared a ten-day trip back to Boston from Liverpool on the steamship Olympus in May 1873. In April 1873, Norton had expected the upcoming journey to offer a great learning experience because Emerson had “made the best of life, and is master of its fit conduct;—serene, simple, with generous sympathies, and liberal interests, with large thoughts, and kindly wisdom. It makes one happier and better to be with him.”13 Norton’s journal entries of April 1873 showed that he looked up to Emerson as a sort of father figure, as somebody who could help to guide him through troubled times. In fact, during the trip, Emerson and Norton’s conversations became increasingly warm and personal, punctuating the monotony of long days traveling over the ocean. Norton remembered that taking care of his children “occupied or broke up the occupation of the days at sea”: “The days were for the most part gray and chilly. . . . We had no adventure, no alarm. I had little talk with anyone but Emerson.” Their intimacy increased on the days when, Norton noted, they “would smoke our cigars together.” And every evening around

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9:00 p.m., after the children had gone to sleep, Norton remembered, “Emerson and I had two hours together ‘till at eleven the lights were extinguished in the saloon.”14 The two luminaries of New England been acquainted for years but had never had the occasion to speak to one another for hours on end for such an extended period as ten consecutive nights. Although Emerson’s intellect was beginning to fade at this late time in his life, Norton enjoyed their many hours of leisurely talk. Their conversations meandered over a wide range of topics: the lives and work of mutual acquaintances, literature, politics, America, Europe, religion, and philosophy. When talk about abstract topics flagged, they returned to exchanging stories about people they both knew well: Andrews Norton (Norton’s father and Emerson’s teacher at the Harvard Divinity School), Ruskin, Carlyle, James Russel Lowell, and Margaret Fuller.15 From this beginning, their discussions soon ventured into far more revealing statements. Emerson “blushed like a youth one day,” Norton recalled, “when I spoke to him of his influence on the men of my generation; and of its being one of the chief factors of the intellectual conditions of America at the present time.”16 Eventually, their exchanges inspired Emerson to speak about himself—a topic that this polite, charismatic, but reticent man did not readily pursue. For instance, Emerson described the painful time when he decided to leave the ministry, his subsequent physical weakness and despondency followed by a recuperative trip to Europe in 1833, and his astonishment at the controversy surrounding his Divinity School address of 1837. Eventually, Norton learned so much about his interlocutor that he felt confident enough to summarize Emerson’s character in a few words: “As one learns to know him, familiarly, day after day, one learns how natural to him, how true to his own character is his own poetry. The poet and the man are one.”17 Emerson not only treated others with kindness but also exuded charismatic warmth derived from his youthful buoyancy. Norton was impressed by “Emerson’s simplicity, modesty, [and] manliness [which] were conspicuous in his talk. There is not a touch of vanity or conceit in him; all sweet and pure and generous.” “[His] youthful capacity for enjoyment . . . the youthful zest of his curiosity,” Norton added, “keep him among the young.” This living combination of youthful innocence and sagacious experience perplexed and frustrated Norton. “He is,” Norton remarked, “the

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most innocent, the most inexperienced of men who have lived in and reflected on the world.”18 In Norton’s view, Emerson paid a great price for maintaining this innocent outlook. The optimism and kindness that made personal interactions with Emerson so satisfying also made him a less discerning and critical observer of the world than he might otherwise have been. “His judgment,” thought Norton, was often “mastered by a sentiment. . . . He is over generous often in his views of men and their words, the very sweetness of his being, at times, obscures his moral, or at least his intellectual perceptions.”19 Norton recoiled, as much in surprise as in disbelief, when listening to Emerson’s position that “man is always better than himself. This world is happy, and for happiness; it is meant for the happy. It is all the time improving.”20 Today, one might wonder why Emerson’s obstinate optimism would cause Norton to feel such consternation in 1873. Did it not appear by that time that Emerson had long passed his most productive and most influential years? More important, if he was indeed shutting himself up in a cocoon spun from his imagination, why should anyone else be concerned? Scholars of the next generation such as Charles Eliot Norton could tackle the moral and political problems of the post–Civil War era and leave Emerson’s legacy to be assessed and analyzed by future generations. In Norton’s view, however, Emerson’s sunny outlook on life, society, and the future of humankind still informed the beliefs of Americans in general. While jotting down his reflections on Emerson in his journal, Norton often explicitly associated Emerson’s shortcomings with the faults of his country: [N]ever before in intercourse with him had I been so impressed with the limits of his mind. . . . His optimism becomes a bigotry, and though of a nobler type than the common American conceit of the preeminent excellence of American things as they are, has hardly less of the quality of fatalism. To him this is the best of all possible worlds, and the best of all possible times.21

After having so recently studied various cultures and many different times during his five years in European cities, museums, and archives, Norton was singularly unimpressed by what he perceived as Emerson’s presentism. Specifically, Emerson refused to temper his high hopes for himself and for humanity after the brutal lessons of

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the Civil War, and Norton felt that if so brilliant a man refused to acknowledge these lessons, then American culture as a whole was even less likely to veer from its perennial hope in a better future. Writing to Carlyle in 1875, Norton confirmed his 1873 observations that Emerson and America continued blithely to accentuate the positive in any circumstance: “His invincible optimism is still the creed of the vast majority of us, and he will not live to lose one jot of his faith. He rebukes me for my doubts.”22 In this criticism of Emerson’s tendency to see his experience as, at least, the potential experience of all men, Norton reveals an important element of his cosmopolitan education and beliefs: that the truths and experience of human culture recorded in the civilizations of the present as well as those of the past are too diverse to be extrapolated from the life of a single individual. Emerson’s thought and poetry may have been beautiful to admire, but their beauty— divorced from the pain as well as the variety of the world—seemed almost purely aesthetic. On the Olympus, Norton encountered aspects of Emerson that he would never forget: “His serene sweetness, his pure whiteness of his soul, the reflection of his soul in his face, were never more apparent to me; but never before in intercourse with him had I been so impressed with the limits of his mind.” Norton found that Emerson’s devotion to seeing life as happy had led him to dismiss rather than confront those who contradicted him.23 This led Norton—in private—to dismiss Emerson’s philosophy. Writing to Carlyle in 1875, Norton explained that Emerson “strikes me always now as emeritus—happy alike in the past and in the present, but not likely to do any more work for his generation.”24 Conversations with Emerson in 1873 on the Olympus also engaged Norton because they painfully reminded him of his own optimism during the Civil War. Although Norton never explicitly made this connection between his own beliefs and those of Emerson, he must have heard the echoes of his thoughts during the 1860s when he confronted Emerson’s insistence on the Olympus that everything that happened in the world somehow was part of a beneficent plan. Emerson’s conviction that the world was progressing— however slowly, and despite evidence to the contrary—toward a better future harmonized with Norton’s earlier belief that the Civil War would have a great salutary effect on the North in particular and on the United States as a whole. Norton had even contrived to see a

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great benefit in the Union’s defeat at Bull Run (July 1861), for the longer the war continued, he predicted, the more radical the reforms following the war would be. As James Turner explains, Norton believed that only a “‘longer training of adversity’ was needed to overcome ‘the corruption of opinion & the feebleness of character’ that forty years of ‘so-called prosperity’ had bred in ‘our public men.’ And only a protracted struggle would force the people to realize that ‘the true end of the war’ was ‘the civilizing of the Southern states.’”25 Norton had been particularly cavalier in his approach to the deaths of the thousands that would result from this “civilizing” process,26 and although he maintained a polite and frank correspondence with a few wealthy Southerners whom he had befriended before the war, he held a position that would lead to the physical extermination of those same Southern friends.27 As Turner shows, Norton complacently believed that the war would provide the energy of reform that would eventually eliminate all the corruption and villainy currently plaguing the United States. Slavery, materialism, and the “mass of ignorance” would fade in the coming years, “so that the commonwealth should assume slowly, imperfectly always, but ever more nearly, the image of the ideal.”28 Eight years later, however, preoccupied by the loss of his wife and his awareness that America’s political ideals had been betrayed by political scandals and ever-present materialism, Norton must have become impatient with Emerson. When Emerson offered homiletic gems such as “Order, goodness, God are the one everlasting, selfexistent fact,” or “There can be nothing so good as existence. . . . Pain, sorrow are of no account compared with the joy of life,”29 Norton must have wondered whether Emerson had paid attention to the recent failures of Reconstruction, the corruption of American politics, and the materialism that had overturned the ideals many had died for just a few years before. It also must have stung Norton to hear cavalier words about death and sacrifice, similar to those he had first articulated during the Civil War, after the death of his wife, Susan. After returning to America in 1873, Norton dedicated his own work to addressing what he now defined as the dangerous consequences of Emersonian “fatalism” on the republic. As James Turner points out, Norton’s long stay in Europe made him more sensitive to the peculiar problems of the United States. Looking at American

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political scandals and turmoil from abroad in the 1860s stung deeply, “for,” Norton explained, “one feels here ever more strongly than there [i.e., the United States] the responsibilities we are under to mankind at large and recognize even more clearly our deplorable shortcomings.”30 In the face of the depressingly real moral failures of the American government during Reconstruction, Emerson’s benign generalities seemed increasingly dangerous to Norton because they would only further weaken any tendency that Americans had to improving themselves through healthy self-criticism and, especially, self-awareness. Shortly after his trip across the Atlantic with Emerson, Norton wrote a searching passage in his journal, passionately denouncing the overly optimistic self-reliance that had been associated with Emerson: But such inveterate and persistent optimism, though it may show only its pleasant side in such a character as Emerson’s is dangerous doctrine for a people. It degenerates into fatalistic indifference to moral considerations, and to personal responsibilities; it is at the root of much of the irrational sentimentalism in our American politics, of much of our national disregard of honour in our public men, of much of our unwillingness to accept hard truths, and of much of the common tendency to disregard the distinctions between right and wrong, and to excuse guilt on the plea of good intentions or good nature.31

In short, Norton’s meeting with Emerson moved him to protest what he saw as the unwillingness of Americans to take responsibility for their actions, as well as their inability to see and respond to difficult moral situations presented to them in the post–Civil War world. Although Emerson would have not admitted a connection between his philosophy and any world in trouble or in decline, Norton was convinced that the two were closely linked. The most worrying aspect of Emerson’s Transcendentalism in the 1870s was that it could do nothing to change the tradition of American materialism, especially in its development and acceleration in the very new economic conditions of what would be known as the Gilded Age. Norton certainly was not the only American intellectual to worry that the sacrifices of the Civil War had only delayed, but not deterred, America’s headlong run into “unrestrained individualism.” Walt Whitman made a very similar analysis in his prose-poem Democratic Vistas. The nation’s most famous poet spoke for many when he wondered aloud in his work of 1868 if the vast potential energy

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exhibited by Americans during the Civil War could be channeled into constructive national goals. As of that year, Whitman hoped that America’s citizens might value something more than just a prosperous economy: Are there, indeed, men worthy of the name? Are there athletes? Are there perfect women, to match the generous material luxuriance? Is there a pervading atmosphere of beautiful manners? Are there arts worthy freedom and a rich people? Is there a great moral and religious civilization—the only justification of a great material one?32

Democratic Vistas posed many important questions about the future of American culture to Whitman’s reading audience, but the eloquent author of Song of Myself had few solutions to the problems he saw on the nation’s horizon. In the face of a culture that seemed united mainly in its focus on the satisfying individual desires, Whitman could only hope to summon a new group of writers and thinkers whose ideals could help to shape a coherent national prospect: “Come forth sweet democratic despots of the West.”

For people like Charles Eliot Norton and many of his associates who lived or worked in Boston, effective responses to escalating American materialism were just as difficult to find as they were for Whitman, but their approaches to solving these problems were quite different. Unlike Whitman or his mentor Emerson, most of Boston’s postwar intelligentsia felt little confidence in oracular pronouncements. Although Norton felt quite sure that he had found blind spots in Emerson’s Transcendental Eyeball, he was uncertain after returning to America in 1873 how he might convey his findings to others. Norton believed in the central importance of education and its potential to mold the people of the republic into responsible citizens.33 The problem was, how might one teach Americans about the limits of Emerson’s vision when that vision so closely paralleled the outlook of the nation as a whole?34 One of the first steps Norton took to confront Emersonian optimism was to investigate the origins of Emerson’s beliefs. Not surprisingly, a glimpse into the past helped to give Norton a plausible explanation for Emerson’s ideas as well as their popularity. In a journal entry of May 1873, Norton attempted a biographical analysis of Emerson. Born in 1803, Emerson’s identity (Norton referred to Emerson’s “soul”) took shape in the context of “the innocent America before 1830.” The assumptions of the earlier era, that “the 4th of

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July, the Declaration of Independence, the common school, and the four years Presidential term were finalities in political science and social happiness” did not correspond to the more recent “and less childlike epoch of our modern democracy.”35 The problem that marred Emerson’s ideas and menaced America’s future lay in not acknowledging that the nation had changed much since 1830. But new circumstances demanded that Emerson—and Americans in general—think anew and act anew. Norton lamented that Emerson had failed to see that “this [postbellum] generation is given over to the making and spending of money, and is losing the capacity of thought.”36 What Norton wanted to give postbellum America was an updated version of Emerson’s “American Scholar” of 1837 in an effort to lead the young American nation toward something like adulthood. The “American Scholar” address has most often been remembered as Emerson’s declaration of American intellectual independence from foreign influence—a message that had already been conveyed by many of his contemporaries in the early 1800s.37 More significantly, it also analyzed and protested against increasing specialization in the nation’s economy. Emerson was most sensitive to how this creeping specialization affected those Americans with whom he had the most in common: scholars and writers like himself. He believed that changes in the economy had created scholars who knew books but who were slowly losing contact with other aspects of life and labor. Distancing himself from the variety of life around him had reduced the American scholar from being a well-rounded “Man Thinking” into a specialized thinker, cut off from seeing the world through the experience of other kinds of honorable labor. Emerson urged the American scholar to keep himself vigorous and his work relevant by deliberately directing his interest toward the reality of everyday life. To avoid becoming a bookworm, the scholar should “embrace the common” and, in so doing, would approach the universal though the study of many current particulars and thus become “Man Thinking”: I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give me insight into to-day, and you may have the antique and future worlds. What would we really know the meaning of? The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan. . . . [S]how me the ultimate reason of these matters . . . — and the world lies no longer a dull miscellany and lumber room . . . but

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By immersing themselves in the pecuniary opportunities and exigencies of a rapidly growing, uncertain economy, all Americans, Emerson implied in 1837, risked losing their “Manhood”—their ability to see the universal. The danger for Americans was particularly acute if their scholars, whose business it was to be visionary, could not lift their eyes from their books. After 1873, Charles Eliot Norton’s life followed the spirit but not the letter of Emerson’s most creative cultural criticism. To provoke Americans to regain “the capacity of thought,” Norton, too, would warn his countrymen against the dangers of narrow-minded materialism, but his remedy differed greatly from his predecessor’s. First of all, Norton exchanged the breadth of Emerson’s visions for the depth of detailed knowledge of the past, certainly not believing that “the antique and future worlds” could be contained in the firkins and pans of the present. More important, Norton distrusted Emerson’s tendency to link wisdom too closely to individual experience. What truly kept Americans attached to money and the making and getting of it was that they knew little else. Americans, like Emerson, lacked an appreciation of the wider world, which barred them from gaining knowledge or much interest in the lives, histories, and values of foreign cultures. Although Emerson often described how all of life was rooted in “one design,” largely inferred from personal experience, Norton would come to believe that human experience could not be “resolvable into a single affirmation”; instead, an understanding of human culture and history could best be approached by the study of the many cultures of the present and the past.39 In addition to being culturally landlocked, Americans were caught in an eternal present. They were “uninstructed by the past,” Norton wrote in 1873, “as if the Millennium were not really so far off.”40 Without cultural and temporal perspective, the bulk of American freedom would be squandered in the unconscious mimicry of materialists of earlier generations. Emerson’s cheery outlook that all the variety of life resolves itself into the good would be of no help: “No serious man who knows anything of human nature and history,” Norton wrote to a friend in 1873, “can cherish the optimistic fatalism that is still characteristic of the American temper, and that finds expression in the general confidence that somehow, however

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men may act and behave, everything will come out right in the end.”41 Looking out from Ashfield in the summer of 1873, Norton began to search for a means to teach Americans to become more modest about themselves and less complacent about the future. Hiding from the brilliant light of Emersonain visions, Norton would try to direct Americans to learn from the shadows and mysteries of the European past. This move away from Emerson also pushed Norton toward a new vocation. In 1874, Charles Eliot Norton began a long career as a professor of fine arts at Harvard University. Although his courses were always devoted to art history, he was usually trying to show his students more than the aesthetic qualities of a painting or a column. Art had a moral significance for Norton because it served as an index for the ideals and aspirations of the community from which it came. Many of Norton’s early lectures at Harvard were condensed and recast into book form in his Historical Studies of Church-Building in the Middle Ages—Venice, Siena, Florence, first published in 1880.42 Norton treated the history of churches and cathedrals as architectural morality plays demonstrating the reasons behind the rise and fall of great civilizations. His moral was that the art and architecture created in these cities during their most glorious days could only have been created by cultures that valued the beauty in nature. Once a race or people became attuned to beauty, artists would soon follow with great works. Sensitive above all others to this “reawakened sense of beauty” in the Middle Ages, “which in most men,” Norton wrote, “was still vague, illusory, [and] undefined, [it] filled the consciousness of the artist with definite conceptions capable of realization in his art.”43 Logically, it followed that once the love of beauty was supplanted by less noble impulses (such as greed or self-love), the art of that culture would inevitably suffer.44 Addressing his lectures and his book to an American audience that had long been taught the virtues and the potential of selfreliance, Norton tried to show that great art had never been the product of an individual will. On the contrary, many cultural and historical factors had to coalesce to create the conditions that would make beautiful and noble art possible. After the year 1000, medieval Italy, Norton argued, became part of a larger European culture shaped by Roman law and Christian piety. This shared culture made it possible for the artist to address the needs and beliefs of the great majority of the people of Europe: “In the fullest sympathy with his

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contemporaries, because the sources of his inspiration were the natural sources of spiritual life common to them and to him, but from which he drew more deeply than the rest, he revealed their own inward selves, and enlarged the scope of their imaginings.”45 As the artist drew from the general beliefs of the culture in which he lived, his works helped to further unite the people within a culture by revealing and elaborating on the beliefs they all shared in common. The artist of medieval Venice, however, would never have had the opportunity to create without the stability and prosperity that could turn the people’s attention away from their immediate physical concerns and then direct their interest toward the future, toward leaving a cultural and artistic legacy for generations to follow. Churches built on decades if not centuries of effort were “undertakings . . . that required stable modes of life and implied confidence in the permanence of established order.” A Venetian historian writing in the middle of the sixteenth century was so impressed by his city’s past accomplishments that he believed that Venice’s culture and government “gives sign, moreover, that it will endure forever.”46 Norton was quick to point out that such predictions were not to be trusted—nobody could predict how future generations might transform any cultural legacy—but this prediction was a symptom of the “faith” Venetians had in their city and their affection for its physical beauty. Their faith and affection combined to create a truly great city, one “that in the imagination of her people . . . became personified as a half-divine ideal figure,” one of the few cities of modern times that could rival the grandeur of ancient Rome.47 The great churches such as St. Mark’s in Venice arose when those elements that encouraged stability and harmony combined with religious fervor and, especially, the energy of local pride. Because those people who began to build a church like St. Mark’s knew that they would never see its completion, it was understood that this art form, the Medieval basilica, would be the living work of generations, each one contributing its skills and insights to the glory of the community.48 St. Mark’s in particular was not the product of a slavish respect of tradition. Rather, it combined the unique genius and talents of successive generations in an art form that could develop only from a fertile combination of respect for the past and innovation. Venice after the year 1000, according to Norton, was the ideal city for such creations: “Secure within her broad moat of waves, her foundations were firmly set. Rising in the dawn of modern Europe,

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she linked the tradition of the old civilization to the fresh conditions of the new.”49 Norton, like his friend and contemporary across the Atlantic, Matthew Arnold, believed that the late nineteenth century was not an era that encouraged great art. Both agreed with the contention that they were living in an era of criticism: not one lacking in energy but one that lacked the discernment of how best to direct its energy. For Arnold, the task of the critic in the nineteenth-century Britain was to help his culture by combining minute observation of the changing world with a search for art and ideas outside of his culture to help make sense of these changes. In Arnold’s words the critic was to strive “to see the subject as in itself it really is” and “to try to know the best that is known and thought in the world.”50 But the unique conditions of American culture, a culture characterized by its restless energy and an obsession with the future, required that Norton include history as a major element of his criticism. In fact, one might argue that, in nineteenth-century America, history was criticism. For a culture that believed, as Norton saw it, that “the Millennium was really not so far off,” history was the essential foundation to see the United States as in itself it really is. By lecturing on the rise and fall of civilizations of the past, Norton demonstrated that any given society was as capable of achieving grandeur as it was of falling into decay and decadence, and the United States was no exception. Norton’s voyage with Emerson provides us with one of the most detailed accounts of the intellectual discoveries and changes of the Boston Cosmopolitans that were initiated or accelerated on the liminal space of a ship or a train, but Norton’s experience on the Olympus was not singular. Long-distance travel across the land and sea became a commonplace occurrence for the Boston Cosmopolitans after the Civil War, yet unlike Norton, who reached maturity before the triumph of transoceanic travel, the younger Boston Cosmopolitans became accustomed to the increasing availability of steamships and trains to take them wherever they wanted to go in a relatively short amount of time. Because travel occupied an increasingly large segment of their experience, these Cosmopolitans began to approach travel as a catalyst for their own creativity. In Chapter 3, we look at some of the ways in which travel provided unique opportunities that promised to invigorate their work and expand their ideas.

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T R AV E L A N D C R E AT I V I T Y : T H E R O L E O F T R AV E L I N C O S M O P O L I TA N I N V E N T I O N 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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n 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

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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. Although these three important elements of Cosmopolitan interaction could describe the personal dynamics of groups of intellectuals from many eras, the immediate post–Civil War period opened up opportunities to the Cosmopolitans that were unique. The speed and safety of transoceanic steamship travel had not been available during previous ages of cosmopolitan intellectual activity such as the Renaissance in Italy, the apex of the French Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, or even the more recent triumph of American Transcendentalism in the 1830s and 1840s. Steamship travel satisfied the minds of many American intellectuals of the late nineteenth century who wanted to study the cultures of the world that, for most members of previous generations, had remained accessible principally through written accounts—accounts of foreign countries and cultures that were valuable but that were nonetheless secondhand. The steamship not only effectively made the distances separating cultures less daunting, but it also facilitated long-term relationships between the Cosmopolitans, any one of whom could not be counted on to be in one place for too long. When a desired meeting between certain members of this group was thwarted by physical distance, they bridged these divides either through letters or by traveling across the globe to exchange ideas with one another, and when they could not arrange a meeting or express their ideas adequately through words, many of the Cosmopolitans would share their experiences by visiting places around the globe that their friends had recommended. Travel can thus be seen as the crucial element that distinguished the Boston Cosmopolitans from most American intellectuals who had preceded them: Without the option of long-distance travel, their lives, their friendships, and their work would have been very different. As with any experimentation, some travels were disappointments, leading to ideas and artifacts that were neither fruitful nor very interesting, but no matter what the end product, the unique opportunities found in the growth of long-distance travel proved to be an inspiration for many American artists and intellectuals, who decided to expand their experience as far as the steamships could take them.

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In this chapter we see how the Cosmopolitans were able to integrate travel in a variety of creative endeavors: from Isabella Stewart Gardner’s networking with artists in France to William Dean Howells’ depiction of Venice to an American audience. In addition to integrating foreign influences into their work, some of the Boston Cosmopolitans applied their ability to explore foreign cultures to their investigation of culturally diverse places within the United States, particularly New York City. Before looking at the influences of travel on Cosmopolitan creativity, however, it is useful to examine how welcoming post–Civil War Boston was to foreign ideas. Understanding the limits of Boston’s openness to the outside world will help us appreciate some of the reasons why the Boston Cosmopolitans were eager to use travel as a catalyst for their intellectual and artistic work.

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The Boston of 1865 was not an insular city. Its history as a major center for international trade in the first half of the nineteenth century, and its self-consciousness as a cultural capital of national—and therefore worldwide—importance made many Bostonians curious and appreciative of foreign ideas. Transcendentalism owed much to Emerson’s trip to Europe in the early 1830s; it was then that Emerson committed himself to advocating the creation of a great national literature that followed the spirit of the ideas of important European literary theorists, such as Goethe and Carlyle, who were advocating the nurturing of national literary traditions.2 Boston’s transatlantic connections were further strengthened through the work of abolitionists, especially the efforts of Boston’s most infamous antislavery activist, William Lloyd Garrison, and his participation in the foundation of the American Anti-Slavery Society (1833), an organization that cultivated connections with abolitionist societies in Great Britain.3 In the same spirit of reform, Boston’s Atlantic Monthly was founded in 1857 in the hope of influencing national policy on slavery and of guiding national taste in art and literature.4 Boston was also an important destination for some notable European intellectuals, such as the British poet Arthur Hugh Clough, who accepted Ralph Waldo Emerson’s invitation to visit Massachusetts in 1852. According to historian David D. Hall, Clough’s presence solidified

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the informal Unitarian ties between Boston and England by introducing Boston’s literati to the work of up-and-coming English writers such as Matthew Arnold.5 Although some Bostonians welcomed European art and thought into their daily lives, there were definite limits to the city’s tolerance of foreign influence.6 In 1857, Oliver Wendell Holmes was the first person, at least in writing, to refer to Boston as “the hub” in his book, “The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.”7 (Holmes used the term ironically when he called Boston “the hub of the solar system”; by the late twentieth century, the phrase had taken a slightly altered form as the “hub of the universe.”) “The Hub”—still used by Bostonians as a synonym for their city—is a telling sobriquet that well summarizes Boston’s complicated relationship with the outside world in the mid-nineteenth century. Although many Bostonians, through their education as well as through New England’s maritime commerce, were familiar with and curious about the outside world, Boston’s undisputed leadership in American letters in the first half of the nineteenth century persuaded some of the educated people in Boston that their city was culturally self-sufficient. For some, this pride could turn into stifling self-satisfaction, and at times, attempts to integrate foreign art and sensibilities into Boston’s culture were strongly rebuffed, as when public pressure in the 1890s forced the Boston Public Library to withdraw the now-infamous nude statue, the Bacchante, approved by the library’s architect Charles Follen McKim and executed by McKim’s old friend Frederick William MacMonnies.8 Although it is true that by the 1850s Boston’s role in international economics, politics, and culture was already considerable, maintaining these international connections before 1865 came with significant investments in time and effort. Emerson’s sailing from Boston to Italy during the winter of 1832–33 took almost seven weeks.9 Eighteen years later, New England and American letters suffered an enormous loss: Margaret Fuller, returning to America after a three-year stay in Italy, drowned when the ship she was traveling on sank a few miles off the coast of Long Island.10 Although accidents could happen to any ship of any era, the sailing ships that most people traveled on in the antebellum period were much more vulnerable to unpredictable changes in the weather on the Atlantic than were the steamships of the late nineteenth century.11 For many Americans intrigued by the European past and present, traveling overseas

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before 1865, no matter how much they desired to go, would prove to be a tantalizing but unrealizable dream.12 In addition to the technological improvement represented by the steamship, the Civil War itself in many ways laid the foundation of a unique postbellum cosmopolitanism. During the war, Americans who may never have had the motivation or opportunity to travel around the country were taken hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles from their homes during their military service. They saw great portions of the United States and became accustomed to the experience of traveling long distances. The North also greatly expanded the infrastructure of the American railroads during the war, which would lead to the linking of the eastern and western coasts of the United States only a few years later. Similar to many other American tourists, the Boston Cosmopolitans certainly reveled in the sheer delight of encountering the strange, the beautiful, and the unfamiliar that Europe and other distant places had to offer. Their ability to cross the oceans cheaply, frequently, and easily depended a great deal on the demand for travel generated by popular tourism and immigration, but as the years passed after the Civil War, the Cosmopolitans’ repeated interactions with foreign cultures made their travels a regular part of their lives and work rather than an occasional and exceptional trip to a faraway land. What might have been strange and novel for many American tourists in Rome or London became more commonplace to the Cosmopolitans. The remainder of this chapter is dedicated to exploring how travel and the international networks that it helped to support influenced Cosmopolitan creativity. It is appropriate, then, that this story begins far away from Boston.

W ILLIAM D EAN H OWELLS : A N O UTSIDER ’ S P ERSPECTIVE ON B OSTON Part of the story of Boston’s cosmopolitanism begins in the backwoods and small towns of antebellum Ohio. It was there that a young William Dean Howells received his early education in some of the less attractive sides of travel, accompanying his father’s restless search across the state for work and financial solvency principally as a journalist or journeyman printer. Luckily for the bookish William, his father’s travels eventually brought him into contact with experienced

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writers who encouraged the young man’s efforts to produce publishable work. Howells’ most cherished adolescent dream, in fact, was to pursue a literary profession someday in Boston, the “Athens of America” and antebellum America’s capital of writing and publishing. Although he kept an admiring eye on the developments of New England’s literary life, Howells’ appreciation of the intellectual culture that produced writers such as Emerson, Lowell, and Longfellow was not uncritical. As early as 1857, the twenty-year-old Howells felt that the rising star of New England letters, the Atlantic (which began publishing that same year), suffered from a surprising provinciality. Writing to some old friends in November of that year, Howells praised the magazine for some of its latest pieces, such as Oliver Wendell Holmes’ charming “Autocrat at the Breakfast Table” and Emerson’s “Illusions.” “Don’t you think, though,” Howells queried his friends, that “it’s a little too Bostony in its flavor?” Howells noticed from the beginning that the Atlantic’s aspirations to attract the attention of the whole United States were undercut by the magazine’s provincial tone. Even from 1850s Ohio, Howells could sense that Boston’s best literary intentions sometimes fell short of realization.13 When he moved to Boston in 1866 to accept a position as assistant editor for the Atlantic, Howells, a self-trained polyglot and already experienced world traveler, was regarded with suspicion by many native Bostonians because of his questionable Western roots, and as a consequence, Howells was uncomfortable with the Eastern snobbery he encountered. Although the quality of his work was beyond question, his pedigree was not.14 Howells understood that his editorial decisions would receive unusual scrutiny, and he was cautious not to offend the provinciality of many of his readers.15 Nonetheless, Howells endeavored to make the Atlantic live up to the promise of its name. Looking back at his tenure as editor in the 1870s, Howells wrote in the Atlantic of November 1907 that “we were growing, whether we liked it or not, more and more American. Without ceasing to be New England, with ceasing to be Bostonian, at heart, we had become southern, mid-western, and far-western in our sympathies. It seemed to me that the new good things were coming from those regions rather than from our own coasts and hills.”16

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In addition to supporting Western writers such as Mark Twain and Bret Harte,17 Howells opened the pages of the Atlantic to foreign literature. Countless reviews of literature from abroad, written by one of his closest friends from the Boston area, Thomas Sergeant Perry, were added to the Atlantic’s pages as well as stories with international themes by the then little-known Henry James. All three men were interested in international art and literature and often met together in Boston to discuss the latest cultural and political developments in Europe, and they maintained their literary discussions long after Howells moved away from Boston. The persistence of their international interests as well as the endurance of the friendship between Perry and his wife and Howells left a strong impression on the work of these two writers. Seven years after Howells resigned as editor of the Atlantic in 1881, Perry and Howells collaborated on an overview of literary and historical adventures from around the world in The Library of Universal Adventure by Sea and Land. This collection, published in 1888, attempted to present a comprehensive overview of tales of adventure, some well known and some obscure, from all the continents of the world. Although the editors acknowledged in the preface that these tales were derived from a great diversity of the world’s cultures, they argued: It is not the national quality in all these experiences which gives them their supreme value; it is their human quality, the witness they bear to the devotion, the courage, the inexhaustible resource, the noble selfsacrifice, and the otherwise incredible effort and patience which great exigencies develop in men, whether captive, or castaway, or lost amid tropical deserts or on fields of wandering ice.18

Howells and Perry further emphasized the common links between the diverse peoples of the world by including a map that traced Sir Francis Drake’s circumnavigation of the world between 1577 and 1580. In a retrospective piece published in the Atlantic in 1907, Howells voiced his regret that Perry’s reviews on foreign literature in the 1870s “had a unique value too little recognized by the public.” Beyond his ability to write “cleverly and facilely,” Howells explained, Perry “knew not only more of current continental literature than any other American, but more than all the other Americans.”19 The

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friendship between Howells and the both Thomas Sergeant and Lilla Cabot Perry continued well into the 1900s and was recorded in a rare portrait of William Dean Howells—a work that began when Howells came to visit the Perrys in August 1912 in Hancock, New Hampshire.20 While they remained in Boston, Perry, James, and Howells also shared the advantages and disadvantages of their outsider status. Whether this status was voluntary (because of temperament) or involuntary (because of class or geographic background), it made them only partially integrated members of New England’s elite social circles, which intertwined through years of association and intermarriage between a few family clans.21 Although the outsiders were welcomed into New England for their talent, they often suffered from a lack of confidence and acceptance from many of the people with whom they worked and socialized on a daily basis. For his part, Henry James lamented the sad atmosphere of his family’s house22 and complained of the lack of social and cultural activity available in post–Civil War Boston and Cambridge. Writing in 1867 to William James (who was studying in Berlin that year), Henry blamed some nagging health problems on the lack of social options available: An important element in my recovery I believe is to strike a happy medium between reading &c, & “social relaxation.” The latter is not to be obtained in Cambridge—or only a ghastly simulacrum of it. There are no “distractions” here. . . . Going into town on the winter nights puts a chill on larger enterprises. I say this not in a querulous spirit, for in spite of these things I wouldn’t for the present leave Cambridge, but in order that you may not let distance falsify your reminiscences of this excellent place.23

Henry James’ remarks to his brother typify the ambivalent feelings that many of James’ cosmopolitan circle felt about life in these cities. Both Howells and Perry chafed against what they felt was the pressure to conform quietly to public opinion. Howells complained of the “dour” and supercilious quality of conversations that he had at many a social gathering in Boston and its sister city, Cambridge. He expressed his disappointments frankly in a letter to his father written in 1875: “So far as I can see, society in Cambridge is as sanely and morally organized as it can be; people are amiable and benevolent, and yet it always leaves a bad taste in the mouth. I suppose there was

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reason at the bottom of the austerity of several of the sects, like the Puritans and Quakers: a great amount of quietness is necessary to the possession of one’s soul, and to the protection of one’s self against one’s self.”24 Perry also made his discomfort crystal clear in a letter written to a friend in 1906: “In Boston, any expression of dissatisfaction is regarded as a gross breach of good manners. You are expected to tread on tiptoe, and not speak above a whisper. . . . A man whose statements cannot be denied, whose arguments cannot be answered is pointed at with horror, as a disturber of the peace.”25 Although their complaints were authentic, both men remained ambivalent about life in the Boston area. The city and its environs had many familial and professional connections to offer them, and they were as much attracted by the city’s tradition of supporting the arts and learning as they were repulsed by its restrained and sometimes insular culture. Howells, for instance, remained connected to the Boston area long after he had made the decision to leave the Atlantic. His attachment to his old home motivated him to go back and forth between New York and New England as late as 1888, moving to New York, Boston, Cambridge, and then back to Boston.26 Being just outside the inner circles of the “Hub”—a nickname for Boston that many Bostonians used with too little irony—proved to be quite a strain for Howells, who found that some of his literary associates were quick to offend. Many of Boston’s literati possessed considerable egos that stretched their thin skins to the breaking point, such as the time when Emerson withdrew a poem for publication in the Atlantic in 1874 after Howells did not publish it as quickly as Emerson would have liked.27 Luckily, Howells was confident in the soundness of his editorial decisions. In fact, the Cosmopolitans’ resistance to Boston’s intellectual and cultural smugness, which Howells had sensed from reading the Atlantic in Ohio, may have been the engine behind his and many of the Boston Cosmopolitans’ most creative efforts. The artistic and intellectual contributions of these outsiders to Boston’s hub came from a educated outsider’s perspective: namely, that Boston was not “the Hub,” but rather a hub, which was connected to larger networks of thought and culture across the globe. The precarious position on the edge of Boston’s inner social circles provided a vantage point to people like Howells and Perry from which they could explore the rest of the world, both physically and intellectually. The experience of living

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for long periods in Boston, yet not feeling entirely comfortable with the city’s culture and habits, prepared Howells, Perry, and many of the Boston Cosmopolitans to welcome the changes and discoveries that they would encounter in the liminal world of international travel. In the context of Boston’s intellectual life after the Civil War, travel abroad and keen interest in the intellectual life of the world could be seen as creative acts of resistance. In a high-brow culture as proud and self-conscious as that of Boston,28 the pressures to conform to the outlook of the dominant Brahmins were great. Many of the Cosmopolitans resisted them by vocally criticizing Boston for its superciliousness. Henry Adams, who willingly exiled himself from Boston to Washington, D.C., often complained that he was touched with “Bostonitis” or “Bostonianism,” a chronic condition that marked those afflicted with acute self-consciousness and ridiculously high moral standards, both of which inhibited the afflicted from enjoying themselves.29 Henry James, writing from his chosen home in Europe, mercilessly portrayed the postbellum reform efforts of many Bostonians as laughably impotent and confused.30 Nonetheless, whether or not they were thankful or resentful for the role Boston played in the early part of their nation’s life and their own, they were still somehow deeply affected by their Boston roots. Henry James made the case for his connections to Boston when his friend Henry Adams berated him for having portrayed too sunny a picture of Boston around the 1850s in James’ autobiographical Notes of a Son and Brother (1914). Adams recorded his criticisms in a letter to a friend: “Why did we live? Was that all? Why was I not born in Central Africa and died young. Poor Henry James thinks it all real, I believe, and actually still lives in that dreamy, stuffy Newport and Cambridge, with papa James and Charles Norton—and me! Yet, why!” James, who was hardly an apologist for Boston and New England culture, condescendingly replied to Adams’ complaints that Notes of a Son and Brother had “reduced me to a pulp.” “I still find my consciousness interesting,” James wrote. “Cultivate it with me, dear Henry—that’s what I hoped to make you do.”31 Cultivating each other’s minds and experiences was exactly what the Cosmopolitans were able to do throughout their lives. Although the physical and cultural distance separating James and Adams from Boston could be interpreted as a conscious rejection and deliberate separation from Boston’s influence, the record of the travels and

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friendships of the Cosmopolitans could put quite a different spin on their tenuous connections with the “Hub.” The places where James, or Adams, or any of the Cosmopolitans found themselves—whether in their homes or on their travels far away from Boston—constituted outposts of Cosmopolitan consciousness, a consciousness that buoyed those who remained in the Boston area and that satisfied the curiosity and fueled the creativity of all the people who participated in the Cosmopolitan network. Many Cosmopolitans, in fact, described themselves as products of their traveling experiences and believed that their identities were not anchored in the boundaries of one specific place. Writing to Isabella Stewart Gardner from New York in 1881, Henry James spoke for many Cosmopolitans when he portrayed himself as “coming from . . . London & Paris—& Boston.”32

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When Howells took over as editor-in-chief at the Atlantic in 1871, he was already an accomplished Cosmopolitan. During most of the Civil War, Howells served as American consul to Venice and came back to the United States with the ability to speak fluent Italian as well as the material for one of his first published books, Venetian Life (1866). These credentials served him well in the first years he spent in Boston after becoming an assistant editor for the Atlantic in 1867. As mentioned earlier, Howells’ experience in Italy was particularly impressive to influential Italophiles such as James Russell Lowell, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Charles Eliot Norton; the latter, in fact, became a good friend of Howells and helped him find his first home in Cambridge. Howells was quickly invited to become part of the elite group of intellectuals from the Cambridge area, headed by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, involved in reading, discussing, and translating Dante.33 During his first years in Boston, Howells also met often with Henry James and Thomas Sergeant Perry. The three men looked to each other for intellectual stimulation as well as companionship.34 Howells, brilliant but largely self-taught, was an eager pupil of these new friends, who offered their opinions on Russian, German, English, and especially French literature.35 French literature had

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attracted the attention of these men mainly through the accomplishments of two contemporary writers: the recently deceased Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) and the up-and-coming Emile Zola (1840–1902). Balzac’s ability to dramatize the inner lives of French people from a wide range of social backgrounds and the pathos that his writing conveyed deeply impressed all of these men, especially Henry James. In comparison to the English literary tradition that, in James’ view, eschewed the topic of human passion, French literature dared to describe “ardent love in a thousand forms . . . with its clustering attributes of sensuality and jealousy, exaltation and despair, good and evil.”36 Zola, who cast an unwavering eye on some of the most brutal aspects of humanity, was greeted with less than unanimous enthusiasm by this trio. Perry, who admired the polished and passionate writings of the French critic Sainte-Beuve (1804–69), was dumbfounded by Zola’s great popularity. In December 1879 Perry wrote in the Atlantic that “M. Zola is right in disliking bad writers, creators or critics, but why foam at the mouth this way? That a man who is capable of such exaggeration, who sees everything so distorted, should set up for a realist is certainly surprising.”37 In contrast, Howells’ interest in his French counterpart was so great—despite Zola’s choice of “noisome” subject matter—that Howells had to admit in 1882 that he “read everything of Zola’s that I can lay my hands on.”38 In a letter from Paris in 1879, Henry James wrote to Perry, that “I admire [Zola] more than you, & mean to write an article . . . about him. . . . Zola’s naturalism is ugly & dirty, but he seems to me to be doing something—which surely (in the imaginative line) no one in England or the U.S. is, & no one else here.”39 Although Perry wished he could ignore Zola, he was forced to come to terms with him because, as Perry admitted in the Atlantic of May, 1880, “to denounce so popular a writer is something like denouncing the east wind.”40 No matter how much they disagreed about literary issues, the three men maintained great respect for one another and consistently sought out each others’ opinions on the merits and defects of their own work and of the latest trends in world literature. In 1878, Howells offered qualified praise for Henry James’ collection of essays, French Poets and Novelists, by comparing him to one of the James’ favorite French writers, Sainte-Beuve.41 Howells’ attempt to achieve fame as a realist was often inspired by the example of Zola, even

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though the French writer’s popular success also drove Howells to despair. On one occasion, Henry James had to reassure Howells that he should not read too much into Zola’s superior book sales and his overwhelming popularity. In a letter of 1890, Henry James tried to convince Howells that although “you are less big than Zola . . . you are ever so much less clumsy and more really various and moreover you and he don’t see the same things.”42 Howells transformed his informal literary discussions with these friends into a new section of the Atlantic, “Recent Literature,” which he introduced in 1871, during his first year as editor-in-chief. Thomas Sergeant Perry, who was known throughout Boston and Cambridge for his voluminous reading, was put in charge of “Recent Literature” and wrote steadily for ten years on American and foreign literature. The majority of Perry’s output as a reviewer spanned the years of Howells’ tenure as editor of the Atlantic, which ended in 1881. In those ten years, Perry wrote more than 350 reviews for the Atlantic, with particular emphasis on German and French literature.43 “Recent Literature,” then, was a tangible product of Howells’ international interests and provided a means for the readers of the Atlantic to keep in contact with some important trends in European thought and culture.

M AINTAINING C ONTACT WITH THE O UTSIDE W ORLD Henry James recognized early on how much American art was a product of the European past and present. Commenting on the pervasive influence of Paris on Boston and the rest of America in an 1887 article on the painter John Singer Sargent, he wrote, “It sounds like a paradox, but it is a very simple truth that when today we look for ‘American’ art we find it mainly in Paris. When we find it out of Paris, we at least find a great deal of Paris in it.”44 But this paradox becomes a “simple truth” by expanding the meaning of the word “American.” The “simple truth” that James found for himself at an early age, and that was confirmed by the work and experience of his fellow Cosmopolitans, was that to be American could include being European—or Asian or African. The Cosmopolitans’ particular attraction to Europe came from their understanding that Europe’s distance from the United States did not make Europe unimportant, because European history was also American history.45

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Although Americans could feel an attraction to their European roots, those long and sometimes barely visible connections required careful consideration and cultivation. The most basic element of that cultivation would have to include maintaining persistent contact with Europe, and because most of the Cosmopolitans did not become expatriates, they would had to use travel as well as complements to travel that could bring Europe closer to them. The international connections to Boston maintained by Thomas Sergeant Perry and his wife Lilla Cabot Perry provide striking examples of how the intellectual and artistic life of Europe became part of the everyday life of Boston Cosmopolitans. The interests and lives of this couple follow some of the strongest ties that linked Boston with life across the Atlantic: art and literature in France. Commenting on Lilla Cabot Perry’s life in France, art historian Meredith Martindale notes that “so many friends [of the Perrys] flocked annually to Paris that Thomas Perry remarked in jest that the capital of France was simply a ‘suburb’ of Boston.”46 The time they spent in France together—approximately eleven years—certainly supports the assertion that the Perrys had succeeded in making France a real second home.47 From 1887 until 1909 the Perry family was in constant movement around the globe and spent most of their time abroad in France. Their quasi-expatriate lives began from a complex series of causes. Although Thomas Sergeant Perry published books, wrote reviews for many literary magazines, and taught at Harvard and Radcliffe, his efforts had brought him little worldly fame or success. His books, which included literary criticism and literary anthologies that attracted favorable critical response, came and went with little notice by the American reading public,48 and he was often at odds with the directors of many important institutions at which he could have developed a career, such as Harvard, the Boston Public Library, and the Museum of Fine Arts. Perry’s disputes with local institutions may have indeed provided motivation for his leaving. For example, although he was a popular instructor at Harvard, Perry butted heads with the director of the English department, Professor A. S. Hill, and was openly contemptuous of Harvard’s president Charles Eliot. In 1895, Perry was incensed when a colleague, A. P. C. Griffen, lost his job at the Boston Public Library, and Meredith Martindale argues that Perry’s disagreements with the directors of the Museum

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of Fine Arts provided a motivation for leaving Boston again around 1905.49 While America in general and Boston in particular were becoming hostile places for Thomas, Lilla’s promising ability as a painter was making moving to France an attractive option. By the mid-1880s the couple had agreed that Lilla would improve her artistic talents in Paris; she began to prepare for her studies by taking lessons at Boston’s Cowles Art School, receiving instruction from some of the best painters in the area, including Dennis Miller Bunker. The couple’s finances, despite their connections to prominent families, had always been precarious,50 and in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was still cheaper for the Perrys to live abroad in Europe than to stay at home in Boston.51 Once Boston knew of the Perry family’s travels, and especially of their relationship with great artists like Claude Monet, it was only a matter of time until their friends and acquaintances would try to exploit their connections.52 In November 1906, one of Boston’s least inhibited citizens, Isabella Stewart Gardner, persistently tugged at her social connections to the Perrys for such a chance: “My dear Lilla, I am in Paris for two weeks, and I do want to come and spend the day with you if I can. Tell me which day is appropriate.” The Perrys reacted to Gardner’s intentions with some skepticism. As Thomas wrote to a friend of the meeting, “Mrs. Gardner came down, not so much for nos beaux yeux [our beautiful eyes], but for those of Monet.” To avoid her, the Perrys decided that November would be a good time for a long-planned bicycle trip to Brittany, and they wrote that they were “sorry” that they would be gone for those same two weeks. Eventually running out of excuses to dodge Gardner, Lilla brought the letter to Monet “who groaned and said, ‘Well, my friend Pissarro is in trouble . . . I’ll see if I can’t sell some of his paintings for him.’” Although she left Giverny without finding a Pissarro to her liking, Gardner did succeed in taking advantage of the opportunities available through the Boston Cosmopolitans’ international network to contrive a meeting with one of the most famous artists of the nineteenth century.53 More than the Perrys’ physical presence in France kept Boston in contact with the outside world. Thomas Sergeant Perry’s many personal letters to his friends, for instance, constituted only one segment of an epistolary web of news and ideas that spread from Europe to Boston. His published letters provide a striking record of

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the persistence of European culture and history in Boston’s cultural and intellectual life. Perry found it perfectly natural to include a rambling discourse on European history in a letter congratulating an old friend, Moorfield Storey, on the birth of his son. From Venice in 1889, Perry sketched out what he believed would be the best course for young Charles Storey’s education: I often think of him, and if he were only here I should like to begin his education with a hasty sketch of Venetian history, pointing out to him the perils of republics, to carry out the lessons of history through the remoter past and down to the elections of Harrison. . . . I know that he would like the churches, and while I would gladly let him gaze his fill at the lights and the curtains, and altars and pictures and tombs, yet, without bigotry, I should rather hint than urge the perils of the Church of Rome, and give him a brief sketch of Protestantism and what it has done, with an account of each separate sect, and a brief anecdotal history of the leading divines of Boston and vicinity.54

Although Europe was thousands of miles away from Moorfield Storey in 1889, it entered quite naturally into his transatlantic conversation with Perry, a conversation that made the European past and present a real part of Boston’s everyday life.55 In addition to keeping up with the latest personal news from abroad, Cosmopolitan correspondence maintained an open channel with the latest developments in European politics and intellectual life. In letters to William James written from Paris between 1905 and 1907, Perry shared his interest in the intriguing formal and legal separation between church and state that the French government pursued in the wake of the Dreyfus affair.56 More important than political fireworks for the Cosmopolitans in Boston was having access to the latest European publications. It was a matter of course that Perry would include a list of the best of the latest European books and articles to read and would also report on the effect of some James’ works on European intellectual life. Writing from Giverny in 1907, Perry offered the following news: I am sending you a Revue Bleu with what seems to me a good article in it by Paul Gaultier, a new writer who differs from many by having something to say.—I observe the [English] “Spectator” opens what promises to be a very heavy cannonading on your anarchistic book [Pragmatism], and I fancy there will be firing all along the line.57

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In return, Perry often asked his correspondents to keep him informed about the latest events from Boston and Cambridge and requested that they send him the latest editions of some American magazines and newspapers. Writing from Paris in June 1889, Perry wrote to his friend Moorfield Storey: “The Boston Herald is dull; the Record, foul; the Post heavy; the Advertiser, odious, but nevertheless, send me the 1st paper you can lay your hands on.”58 Like most of the Cosmopolitans, Perry’s travels away from the United States for long periods of time did not mean that he was disengaged from life at home. “I have seen many people and many lands,” Perry wrote to one correspondent in 1889, “but I return with gratitude to a wise Providence that made me an American. These fellows over here [in Europe] have a magnificent past all around them, but what a present! And, apparently, what a future! But of course America has got to be steered, too.”59 Whether or not America would permit itself to be steered by people like Perry certainly was in doubt, but his strong desire to contribute something positive to the United States, even when he was abroad, supports the assertion that the Cosmopolitans often used their European experiences as a way to improve their understanding of America. In other words, Perry and the Boston Cosmopolitans were not inclined to treat Europe as an escape from America. Henry James’ constant movement between the cultures of the United States, England, and France inspired him to analyze their respective intellectual traditions. In one work of criticism, French Poets and Novelists (1873), James takes a moment to explore the subtle differences distinguishing English and French intellectual habits for an American audience. In one section of this work, James compares what he believes are the strengths and weaknesses of French and the Anglo-American literary styles and prejudices (which he calls the French and English “imagination”). He introduces this comparison during a discussion of Balzac. Although dazzled by Balzac’s powers of observation and description, James does find some significant shortcomings. James describes Balzac as narrowminded and simplistic in some cases; furthermore, he often thought too highly of himself. Although James applauds Balzac’s keen observations, he also criticizes Balzac’s attempts to combine his subtle observations into a “fantastic cohesiveness. A French brain alone,” James asserts, “could have persisted in making a system of all this.” However, it is impossible, in James’ view, to separate the good from

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the bad: Balzac’s pretentious goal of encompassing all of human life in a series of novels certainly could not be met—but his ambitions did help him accomplish quite a lot.60 Nonetheless, James remained uneasy with his preference for Balzac. He arrives at a solution to his divided feelings about Balzac by comparing the shortcomings and advantages of the French imagination in the work of Balzac to the strengths and weaknesses of the English (or “English-speaking”) imagination. In assessing the French and English styles of thinking, James asks himself the question of whether it is possible to decide “whether the French imagination or the English . . . is more potent” in facing the seeming chaos and complexity of the late nineteenth century. Although James cautiously hesitates to offer a definitive statement as to which style he preferred, the advantages of the French style seemed to be highlighted by a comparison to the timid empiricism of the Anglo-American world. “The civilization of the nineteenth century,” James notes, “is of course not infinite, but to us of English speech, as we survey it, it appears so multitudinous, so complex, so far-spreading, so suggestive, so portentous—it has such misty edges and far reverberations—that the imagination, oppressed and overwhelmed, shrinks from any attempt to grasp it as a whole.”61 Although James acknowledges that his own work owed much to the literary traditions of the English-speaking world, he is not satisfied with the timidity and seeming powerlessness of what he describes as the “English” style of thinking in the face of modern change. In contrast, French culture and thought provide a welcome alternative to the feeling of being “annihilated” by the almost sublime difficulties of the present. Even though the French imagination faced the same difficult nineteenth-century civilization as the English imagination did, the French imagination “easily dominates it [i.e. the difficult nineteenth century] . . . and without admitting that the problem is any the less vast, regards it as practically soluble.” In the following passage, he presents his defense of French thought by responding to an imaginary analysis by a skeptical English interlocutor: He would be an incautious spirit who should propose hereupon to decide whether the French imagination or the English is the more potent. The one sees a vast number of obstacles and the other a vast number of remedies—the one beholds a great many shadows and the

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other a great many lights. If the human comedy, as Balzac pours it, condensed and solidified, out of his mould, is a very reduced copy of its original, we may nevertheless admit that the mould is of enormous dimensions. “Very good,” the English imagination says; “call it large, but don’t call it universal.” The impartial critic may assent; but he privately remembers that it was in the convenient faculty of persuading himself that he could do everything that Balzac found the inspiration to do so much.62

James, the “impartial critic,” weighing pros and cons, agrees with the particulars of the English criticism that the French imagination as seen in Balzac’s work was indeed inexact. Yet the same impartial critic might find that the overall effect of the Balzac’s oeuvre greatly exceeded the sum of its parts. The English critic’s disparagement of the details of Balzac’s Human Comedy could also blind one from the immense achievements Balzac’s work, which were just as real as its failures. In comparing the French and English imaginations, James was setting a course for the development of his own literature, which would incorporate Balzac’s talent for observation and inference with the “English” discomfort with Balzac’s claim to have condensed all of humanity’s drama into his novels. James’ remedy for Balzac’s overreaching would be to integrate into his own work the understanding that the habits and beliefs of one culture did not, and could not, encompass all of human life. What James would explore in many of his novels were the differences between cultures and the difficult but not impossible task of translating the habits and beliefs of one culture so they might be intelligible to people from another. Because he was a participant in a cosmopolitan group whose members kept each other in contact with many parts of the world, James would not easily forget that every culture had its particular traits. Indeed, his work embodied his deep respect for the unique qualities of the cultures he encountered through his own travels and correspondence.63

E XPLORING THE C ONTEXT OF OTHERS ’ L IVES : P ORTRAYING S UCCESSES AND FAILURES With their respect for foreign cultures and their curiosity, the Cosmopolitans were motivated to go beyond offering a simple account

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of the new sights they encountered in their travels. Much of their work was dedicated to analyzing their attempts to understand and perhaps empathize with people who came from a variety of cultural backgrounds. It is important to note that the word attempt best describes their efforts because the Cosmopolitans often failed to bridge the cultural gaps (created by class, ethnicity, education, national and regional differences, as well as more peculiar circumstances) that made people strangers to one another. The Cosmopolitans understood how wide these gaps could be and were often unafraid to admit that their attempts to understand and represent people different from themselves ended in frustration and failure. They usually avoided the mistake of blaming these “others” for being somehow evasive or unfriendly to their attempts to understand, or “make contact,” with them. Thus the subject of much Cosmopolitan art and thought included an investigation of the subtle difficulties involved in stepping out of one’s own cultural clothing and donning, if only in the imagination, the habits of another. Deciphering social customs and habits was one of the most subtle and imposing obstacles to understanding foreign cultures. James often explored these difficulties through portraying intelligent American men and women attempting to understand unfamiliar European culture. In The American (1877), James depicts the attempts of a young and successful American businessman to be master of his own fate in a European context. Buoyed by a desire to expand his education through living in Europe after his business success immediately following the Civil War, the protagonist, Christopher Newman, soon finds himself bewildered and confused in the context of French aristocratic society. The main tension of the novel centers on Newman’s interest in Claire de Cintré, the widowed daughter of the Bellegardes, a declining but proud aristocratic family led by its widowed matriarch Madame de Bellegarde. In his interactions with the Bellegardes, Newman encounters the plight of poor aristocrats holding more tightly to social forms and customs as their position in society becomes more precarious. Although they are tempted by Newman’s wealth to give him their consent to marry Madame de Cintré, the Bellegardes eventually defend their pride by refusing his entreaties, treating him disdainfully, and finally, forbidding their daughter to see him. Perplexed by their unwillingness to accept him, stung by their rebuff, and antagonized by their snobbery, Newman later

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threatens that he will expose family’s dark secret: a letter written by Monsieur de Bellegarde on his deathbed accusing Madame de Bellegarde of plotting to murder him. Lacking the will or desire to destroy the family’s reputation, Newman decides that scaring the family into believing that he would reveal their secrets was enough and throws the incriminating letter into a fire. He does so in the presence of one of his closest friends in Europe, Mrs. Tristram, the French wife of an American expatriate and Newman’s old friend, Mr. Tristram. As the evidence that could bring down the Bellegarde family turns to cinders, Mrs. Tristram and Newman discuss the American’s decision to relent even after the Bellegardes thwarted his attempts to marry Madame de Cintré: “You tried by the threat of exposure to make them retract [their resistance to his marriage proposal].” “Yes, but they wouldn’t. I gave them their choice, and they chose to take their chance of bluffing off the charge and convicting me of fraud. But they were frightened,” Newman added, “and I have had all the vengeance I want.” “It is most provoking,” said Mrs. Tristram, “to hear you talk of the ‘charge’ when the charge is burnt up. Is it quite consumed?” she asked, glancing at the fire. Newman assured her that there was nothing left of it. “Well then,” she said, “I suppose there is no harm in saying that you probably did not make them so very uncomfortable. My impression would be that since, as you say, they defied you, it was because they believed that, after all, you would never really come to the point. Their confidence, after counsel taken of each other, was not in their innocence, nor in their talent for bluffing things off; it was in your remarkable good nature! You see they were right.”

Newman then instinctively turned to see if the little paper was in fact consumed.64 James skillfully filtered the story of The American through the protagonist’s viewpoint, so that the reader shares Newman’s surprise when he realizes the he has been outwitted in a game of emotional chess. Indeed, the title of this novel, The American, seems designed to advertise to American readers that they would be learning something about themselves. Nineteenth-century Americans reading this novel learned that different kinds of people lived their lives according to different rules and expectations. In this dramatic

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clash of cultures, the French winners were able to understand their adversary’s culture and used this knowledge to defeat an attractive, intelligent, and honest man whom most Americans might expect to succeed in realizing his goals. The frustration that many Americans felt in trying to acclimate themselves to the rules and habits of a foreign culture was only part of the Cosmopolitan experience in Europe. Some Americans living abroad felt that they had indeed begun to understand the intricacies of a foreign culture—and some even felt that they had become accepted visiting members of a foreign society. William Dean Howells had the opportunity to observe Italian culture close up during his three years as American Consul to Venice during the Civil War. He drew on these experiences in one of his first books, Venetian Life (1866). Whether or not he really did manage to decipher a foreign culture well enough to empathize with Venetians is hard to determine, but Howells employed his literary talents skillfully to convey his belief that, at least at times, he did become Venetian.65 In the second chapter of Venetian Life, Howells offers a slow and languorous introduction to the ethos of the city, imitating Venice’s leisurely pace and enticing his American readers to take part in it. Before bringing his American reader into Venice’s mood, Howells acknowledges (as much for his reader as for himself) that many Americans might find that this European city does not follow a work ethic that an American would recognize. Venice, a city run by the Austrians in the 1860s and at the nadir of a centuries-long economic decline, was not as festive and colorful as many travel writers had depicted, but their choice to omit the ugliest parts of the picture is understandable: “The charm of the place sweetens your temper, but corrupts you.” The rest of the paragraph continues the same balancing act between loving and condemning Venice for what Americans might perceive as the city’s vices. Slowly, Howells goes from one end of the scale to the other until he decidedly chooses, at least for a moment, to love Venice: when I began to write the sketches which go to form this book, it was as hard to speak of any ugliness in [Venice], or of the doom written against her in the hieroglyphic seams and fissures of her crumbling masonry, as if the fault and penalty were mine. . . . One’s conscience, more or less uncomfortably vigilant elsewhere, drowses here, and it is

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difficult to remember that fact is more virtuous than fiction. In other years, when there was life in this city, and this sad ebb of prosperity was full tide in her canals, there might have been some incentive to keep one’s thoughts and words from lapsing into habits of luxurious dishonesty, some reason for telling the whole hard truth of things, some policy to serve, some end to gain. But now, what matter?66

Although Howells feigns to abandon an attempt to depict Venice realistically, he is actually employing his rhetoric to reproduce the very different world view of nineteenth-century Venetians, whose vision of reality, at least as Howells sees it, did not include anything like a work ethic. To understand truly the life of this city, he implies, the American reader first has to abandon his or her habit of interpreting business and economic productivity as a virtue. Howells’ conversational and somewhat awkward final sentence, “But now, what matter?” simultaneously pushes aside American moral concerns and acts as an introduction to this contrasting Venetian ethos, pronounced with a slight Venetian accent.

U SING T RAVEL TO E XPLORE A LIEN T ERRITORY: N EW Y ORK C ITY The Boston Cosmopolitans’ travels to exotic places were not confined to Europe. The transformations brought about by immigration in America during the late nineteenth century, especially in New York City, were thoroughly fascinating and bewildering for Cosmopolitans such as Henry James and William Dean Howells. Many late–twentieth century American readers of Howells and James have wondered why these Cosmopolitans were so much more comfortable with foreigners abroad than with immigrants at home.67 There is no denying that the Cosmopolitans did not move easily or comfortably among the working and immigrant classes in America— Charles Eliot Norton and Henry Adams often condemned or derided the Irish or the Jews as races—but it appears that some of the most important reasons behind their difficulties in confronting and understanding immigration at home lay not so much in who immigrated to America but in the cultural context into which these immigrants were received. Although they might have felt uncomfortable in places like the lower East Side of Manhattan, many of

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the Cosmopolitans did, nonetheless, manage to visit those places. Their struggles to make sense of the new urban spaces of the late nineteenth century produced some of their most challenging work and also gives us some insight into the reasons why immigration could cause such consternation among some of America’s most educated and urbane men and women.68 During the late nineteenth century, William Dean Howells and Henry James approached the bewildering phenomenon of immigration by situating the sprawling immigrant enclaves in New York in the context of their own travels and travel narratives. For these experienced travelers, the strangeness of New York could possibly be mitigated by approaching it as just one of the many places in the world they sought to explore. Howells entered his analysis of a New York transformed by immigration with the help of his quasi-autobiographical character, Basil March, in his novel of 1890, A Hazard of New Fortunes. Basil and his wife, Isabella, had previously explored parts of Canada and the United States in one of Howells’ most popular novels, Their Wedding Journey (1872). As Howells had remarked early in his novelwriting career, he very much enjoyed the genre of travel writing because its episodic development offered a variety of topics for the author and his readers that were light and entertaining. In a letter written to an old friend in 1871, Howells explained: “there’s nothing like having railroads and steamboats transact your plot for you.”69 It seems logical, then, that Howells returned to this familiar genre as an aid to approach the difficult subject of immigration. In Hazard, Howells explores New York through the eyes of a character who has just moved to the city, whose first impressions would be those of a newcomer who would take many tours of the city in an effort to familiarize himself with his new home. Basil and Isabella March encounter a variety of difficulties in New York. They are wary of abandoning their home in Boston for the intimidating changes yet to come in New York. Although Basil March is moving to pursue his literary interests as an editor of a new magazine, he and his wife are also aware that they are putting their money and social status at risk if the magazine fails. Because the cost of living in New York is much higher than in Boston, and because New York’s poor neighborhoods are much larger than any the Marches had seen before, the worst consequences of downward mobility become starkly real. Above all, the couple feels shaken by

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much of the misery they see in immigrant communities, and they are torn between wanting to do something about the immigrants’ plight and needing to shield themselves from the pathos of empathizing too much with people suffering a fate that they feared could be their own.70 It is while traveling in the public trains across town that the Marches experience both a troubling empathy for the poor immigrants and a reassuring distant aesthetic appreciation of them. After Basil and Isabel retreated from an encounter with a beggar whose effusive thankfulness for a small handout became too dramatic for comfort, the couple entered an elevated train. Unexpectedly, they got a more pleasing view of the same kind of people from atop the rails: [Basil] said it was better than the theatre, of which [the views] reminded him, to see those people through their windows: a family party of work-folk at a late tea, some of the men in their shirt sleeves; a woman sewing by a lamp . . . ; a girl and her lover leaning over the window-sill together. What suggestion! what drama! what infinite interest!71

After the highs and lows of New York’s human dramas have lost their novelty, it is again on a public train where Basil has a unique opportunity to view the lives of New York’s immigrants up close. This time, however, Basil’s observations of immigrant life as “spectacle” have changed, and his close encounters with them spur him to more serious and somber thoughts: Now and then [Basil] had found himself in a car mostly filled with Neapolitans from the constructions far up the line, where he had read how they are worked and fed and housed like beasts; and listening to the jargon of their unintelligible dialect, he had occasion for pensive question within himself as to what notion these poor animals formed of a free republic from their experience of life under its conditions; and whether they found them practically very different from those of the immemorial brigandage and enforced complicity with rapine under which they had been born.72

In these two scenes, Howells placed Basil in the liminal space that travel sometimes creates and demonstrated how it could often offer unique insights to those who enter its space. In the latter instance, Basil’s proximity to immigrants in a cross-town train results in his

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realization that the novelties of New World democracy in no way exempted the United States from creating misery and poverty as depressing and seemingly intractable as that of any Italian slum. Although the Marches’ views on immigrants and their problems in New York City mature as their story progresses, this brings them little satisfaction. To Howells’ credit, he left his main characters in a state of suspended anxiety about some of the country’s most difficult and taxing problems. The Marches’ travels through America’s largest city have left them wiser, yet paradoxically no closer to relieving their anxieties about the future of the immigrants or the future of their own lives. A half-hearted appeal to religion closes the book, as Howells revealed to the reader the he, too, felt overwhelmed by many contemporary problems and does not presume to have all the answers.73 Like Howells, James was bewildered by the vast array of people and the chaotic activity of New York’s immigrant neighborhoods. Further complicating James’ attempts to decipher this alien world were the many versions of English employed by different immigrant groups, which made it increasingly difficult for James to understand them. In a moment of frustration, James called the “East-side cafés,” where many immigrants congregated, the “torture-rooms of the living idiom.”74 All these changes—rooted in the monumental novelty of the immigrants’ American lives—ultimately created a unique obstacle to communication between the upper and the newly arrived lower classes, an obstacle much larger and enigmatic than similar barriers in Europe. During his walk through the lower east side, James takes a moment to reflect on these obstacles and dramatizes his ideas by describing a recent encounter with some Italian immigrants working on the Jersey shore: What lapsed, on the spot, was the element of communication with the workers, as I may call it for want of a better name; that element which, in a European country, would have operated, from side to side, as the play of mutual recognition, founded on old familiarities and heredities [emphasis added], and involving for the moment, some impalpable exchange. . . . It was as if contact were out of the question and the sterility of the passage between us recorded, with due dryness, in our staring silence. This impression was for one of the party [i.e., James] a shock—a member of the party for whom, on the other side of the world, the imagination of the main furniture, as it might be called, of any rural excursion, of the rural in particular, had been, during years,

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the easy sense, of the excursionist, of a social relation with any encountered type, from whichever end of the scale proceeding.75

In America in general and New York in particular, both immigrant and native-born Americans often felt overwhelmed by the changes brought about by large-scale immigration, both were often deeply uncertain of what social roles they should play, and both were unsure of what social customs and traditions they might employ to understand one another. Because of this cultural flux, there was much movement but little continuity in the immigrant communities, and few opportunities for James and those like him to understand the intricacies of immigrant cultures that had ephemeral histories and such meager chances to establish a future. In the passage previously quoted, James drew on his experience as a traveler in Europe to help him understand the new and different worlds that immigration brought into being in America. James’ queries about America’s future echo the sentiments of an elder Cosmopolitan, Charles Eliot Norton, who asked a friend in 1897, “Are we too big territorially, and too various in blood and tradition ever to become a nation? I should like to come back some centuries hence and see.”76 Despite these daunting problems, James recognized that the immigrants’ histories, no matter how fragmented or sibylline, would soon become American history.77 That is why Henry James, William Dean Howells, and others like them came to New York to see for themselves how immigration might affect America’s future. Much of the work of the Cosmopolitans previously discussed shares in the spirit of Henry James’ description of the creative process that opened this chapter: “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.” From reviews of foreign literature in William Dean Howells’ Atlantic to Isabella Stewart Gardner’s transatlantic networking to Lilla Cabot Perry’s impressionistic paintings of Japan, the ability to travel long distances with a considerable degree of safety and speed and the maintenance of the contacts made during those travels became an indispensable element of Cosmopolitan creativity, of the process of “constant exchange and comparison” of ideas over time and space. The significance of making the world smaller, in terms of the reduced time and effort required to travel long distances after the

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Civil War, should not be underestimated. The Cosmopolitans shared a mature view of their country’s place in the world: No matter how unique or exceptional America might be, its culture was seen as just one of the many sources from which the Cosmopolitans might gather ideas and search for insights concerning the problems they faced. Travel not only offered opportunities for diversion and learning but also provided an irreplaceable tool in Cosmopolitan problem-solving in a wide variety of domains—personal, cultural, artistic, political, and intellectual.

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he 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. The works in this chapter are arranged in an order that addresses increasingly complex aspects of cosmopolitanism. Three works by William Dean Howells, A Chance Acquaintance (1874), The Sleeping

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Car (1889), and The Parlor Car (1889), all depict the potential excitement, serendipity, and surprising intimacy shared with fellow passengers that were part of the experience of traveling for long distances in trains and steamships.2 The next step taken by Cosmopolitan travelers, encountering diverse peoples and attempting to understand them, is conveyed in travel narratives by Howells and Henry James. To compare the two authors’ respective methods of representing these encounters to their audience, I have chosen works that focus on the same foreign city—Venice, found in Howells’ Venetian Life (1866) and James’ Italian Hours (1909). The next step taken by the Boston Cosmopolitans in their travels, as foreshadowed in Charles Eliot Norton’s shipboard conversations with Emerson, was to use their experiences abroad as a means to understand and critique life in the United States. This is explored in Henry James’ American Scene, written shortly after James visited the United States in the early 1900s from his home in England. William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience is seen as an innovative work of the Boston Cosmopolitans that attempts to transcend national issues and aims instead to address problems of worldwide, human importance.3

T HE E XPERIENCE OF L IFE ON A S IGHTSEEING S HIP : W ILLIAM D EAN H OWELLS ’ A CHANCE ACQUAINTANCE The romantic adventures of two young American tourists sightseeing in Canada provide the basic plot for this novel about travel. Although A Chance Acquaintance bears some superficial resemblance to travel literature (which had become enormously popular for nineteenth-century American readers) and recalls more erudite works that focused on long-distance travel by novelists such as Washington Irving, Howells’ work charts a middle course between the world of fact and the world of the imagination. Most popular travel literature and guidebooks in the nineteenth century attempted to categorize the most interesting or representative landmarks that helped to distinguish a foreign place as unique.4 Another common goal of this travel literature included reassuring Americans about the future of their young nation by making distinctions between the beautiful but corrupt foreign countries of Europe and the rough, raw, but egalitarian and innocent democratic culture of America.5

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A Chance Acquaintance complicated the trope of discovering America’s virtues through investigating European corruption. Instead of focusing on juxtaposing Europe and America, A Chance Acquaintance contrasts America’s urban and rural cultures through bringing together a cultivated young man from Boston with an intelligent and inexperienced young woman from rural upstate New York. These two characters, Kitty Ellison and Miles Arbuton, represent different aspects of the same national culture and thus help Howells avoid any facile representation of the character of Americans in general. Howells is also careful not to use travel as a convenient jumping-off point to unleash the imagination, as did Irving. Instead, Howells employs conventional narrative techniques in his text as a vehicle to evoke nontextual (or pretextual) experience. Indeed, at times Howells is careful to signal to the reader that any representation of travel cannot and should not take the place of travel itself. Howells uses A Chance Acquaintance to represent some of the experiences of seeing the world through travel and to persuade readers to venture out and experience what cannot be expressed in words.6 The novel opens with the introduction of the main character, Kitty Ellison, as she prepares for a trip into Canada up the St. Lawrence River. Waiting to continue her sightseeing tour, Kitty stares out from an unnamed ship. The sounds of the harbor fascinate “the young girl, whose soul at once went round the world before the ship, and then made haste back again to the promenade of the . . . boat.”7 Soon after the ship gets under way, Kitty Ellison and her adopted family from upstate New York, Dr. Richard Ellison and Mrs. Ellison, advance north up the St. Lawrence River from Montreal toward Quebec in a ship filled with a variety of tourists from England and the United States. At Quebec, Kitty makes her most important finding when the ship takes on a new passenger: the prim and distant Bostonian Miles Arbuton. Howells makes it clear from the beginning that Arbuton does not welcome interactions with strangers. He is certainly polite, but his sense of being from a superior class of people with a proud family name make him cautious: “He had a habit of thus protecting himself from the chances of life, and a conscience against encouraging people whom he might have to drop for reasons of society.” Indeed, in the first half of the novel Arbuton feels “hopelessly superior” to Kitty Ellison.8 But, as Howells points out, the

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power of the liminal space of a ship can break down even the most carefully tended social barriers. The principal “chance acquaintance” of the novel occurs while the passengers of the sightseeing ship witness an “Indian wedding” close to the mouth of the Saguenay River, which joins the St. Lawrence at the small town of Tadoussac. The narrator explains that the wedding ritual includes a procession of couples that follow the bride and groom from the shore on to a waiting steamship. At the rear of the line an ill-matched couple of two tipsy young men stumble precariously on the steamship’s gangway. As Arbuton watches to see if they can make their way to the ship, something unexpected happens: he felt a hand passed carelessly and as if unconsciously through his arm, and at the same moment a voice said, “Those are a pair of disappointed lovers, I suppose.” He looked round and perceived the young lady [Kitty Ellison] of the party he had made up his mind to have nothing to do with, resting one hand on the rail, and sustaining herself with the other passed through his arm, while she was altogether intent upon the scene below. The ex-military gentlemen [Col. Ellison], the head of the party, and apparently her kinsman, had stepped aside without her knowing, and she had unwittingly taken Mr. Arbuton’s arm.9

Arbuton is disconcerted to have been touched by a total stranger and embarrassed to have been privy to Kitty’s private thoughts about “disappointed lovers.” Indeed, the situation is so novel and bewildering for the young man that he cannot decide whether he should apologize for such an indiscretion or ignore his embarrassment concerning a mistake that was not his fault.10 Whether or not tourists like Arbuton welcome meeting the unknown and unexpected, the many destinations of the sightseeing trip soon provide all the travelers with a unique minihistory of their own—a history that creates strong bonds between them. Soon after their initial “chance acquaintance,” Kitty and Mr. Arbuton discover that they have a lot to share with one another despite their different temperaments and cultural backgrounds: they both came to Canada after visiting Niagara Falls, and they both also visited Montreal briefly. “These common experiences,” the narrator explains, “gave them a surprising interest for each other, which was enhanced by the discovery that their experiences differed thereafter” because Kitty

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had spent three days in Quebec and Mr. Arbuton had arrived at the sightseeing ship directly from Montreal.11 These seemingly insignificant coincidences combine with their unexpected encounter to create a budding romance. The measured and often distant Mr. Arbuton is caught off guard by his growing affection for Kitty and her family. Despite his desire to remain aloof from his fellow passengers, chance coerces the Bostonian to become emotionally involved with people he barely knows. Just as the “chance acquaintance” on a ship throws Kitty Ellison and Miles Arbuton into an unpredictable situation, so does the reader finish the novel by encountering an unexpected ending. The reader, perhaps conditioned to expect the happy ending in which love conquers all, approves of Arbuton’s profuse apologies for having judged Kitty negatively on their first meeting. His sincerity moves Kitty, who seriously considers his proposal to marry, but she finally decides to reject him when she realizes that she would not be comfortable in the high-brow Boston society that helped to form Arbuton’s character. Liminal space could bring them together, but it could not guarantee to keep them together. Kitty does not gain a mate during her chance acquaintance; instead, she acquires knowledge of the world and respect for her own rural upbringing. By avoiding the hackneyed ending of marrying two young people who meet in the most romantic of circumstances, Howells makes a final attempt to avoid fulfilling the expectations created by conventional storytelling. Perhaps the novel’s lack of popularity attests to Howells’ success in undercutting convention.

T HE E XPERIENCE OF L IFE ON A M OVING T RAIN : W ILLIAM D EAN H OWELLS ’ THE PARLOR CAR AND THE SLEEPING CAR These theatrical works by William Dean Howells have been largely forgotten by posterity, but they provide further rich examples of the power of travel to bring people together. A lover’s spat provides the main plot of The Parlor Car. The scene is set in a luxurious Pullman car that will be departing from New York City for Schenectady. The car is occupied by only one passenger, a man with a newspaper

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draped over his eyes sleeping next to one of the windows. After the curtain opens, a young woman named Lucy Galbraith enters accompanied by the conductor. While settling in her seat, Miss Galbraith attempts to open a window and catches her skirt in the window frame. She is helped out of this predicament by her fellow passenger, who turns out to be her fiancé, Allen Richards. Lucy is seemingly vexed to find Mr. Richards in the Pullman because she had just left him to protest what she believed was his unwillingness to share his feelings with her. Eventually the audience learns that Lucy’s fears were exaggerated and that Allen was innocent of hiding anything from her. They also learn that their meeting in the car was not a coincidence: Lucy and Allen had spied each other approaching this Schenectady train, and each had hoped to surprise the other. The young lovers have more than each other to thank for this happy ending. In fact, their reconciliation is in no small part a result of their spending time in liminal space, as Howells strives to point out. Traveling in the Pullman car helps them to be alone with each other for an extended period of time, creating an emotionally charged atmosphere. Most important, traveling increases the possibility of serendipitous events that further enhances the chances for the couple to recover their former intimacy. A series of accidents and coincidences related to train travel ensure that the couple remains in close contact with one another. Soon after the young couple has “discovered” each other in the Pullman, the porter informs them that there would be an unexpected delay because of engine trouble. Surveying his surroundings a little more closely after learning that they train is delayed, Allen inquires: “Is the whole train as empty as this car?” Laughing, the porter replies: “’ell, no sah. Fact is, dis cah don’t belong on dis train. It’s a Pullman that we hitched on when you got in, and we’s taking it along for one of de Eastern [rail]roads. We let you in ’cause de Drawing-rooms was all full. Same with de lady.’” Although the Pullman car does not usually make up part of this particular train, its appearance is typical of the serendipitous events that often constitute part of the experience of travel. Forced to talk to one another, the couple begins their discussion about Allen’s apparent reluctance to communicate with Lucy. At first, Lucy is convinced that Allen has hidden too much from her and refuses to believe her fiancé’s protestations to the contrary. Allen responds to Lucy’s obstinacy with a threat: “‘Yes, Miss Galbraith. All

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is over between us. . . . I hope we never meet again.’” Resolutely, he heads out the door toward the occupied train cars. At this crucial point, the hero of the play, the Pullman car, arrests the disintegration of this love affair: Miss Galbraith: “Then what station is this? Have they carried me by?” Observing his embarrassment, “Allen, what is the matter? What has happened? Tell me instantly! Are we off the track? Have we run into another train? Have we broken through a bridge? Shall we be burnt alive? . . . ” Mr. Richards, unsympathetically: “Nothing of the kind has happened. This car has simply come uncoupled, and the rest of the train has gone on ahead, and left us standing on the track, nowhere in particular.” He leans back in his chair, and wheels it round from her.

Lucy Galbraith’s enumeration of possible reasons for the interruption of their journey underlines the fact that travel can expose people to danger as well as discovery. In this instance travel has left them to sort out their problems in liminal space, “nowhere in particular.” The Pullman car then seems to conspire with the train to force the couple to express their true feelings for one another. Not long after Allen and Lucy find themselves stranded, a distant sound of their train’s whistle slowly approaches. Although Allen is convinced that their car is perfectly visible to the outside world (he checks twice to see if the signal lantern is working), the sound of the approaching train throws Lucy into a panic. Fearing that a fatal collision is imminent, Lucy abandons her antagonistic stance: “It’s too late, it’s too late! I’m a wicked girl, and this is all to punish me. . . . There, there! Forgive me, Allen! Let us die together, my own, own love!”12 Happily, the couple survives the return of the train, and Lucy’s uninhibited declaration ensures that this dispute will not end their relationship. The play then ends with a remarkable scene in which the reunited lovers express thanks to the Pullman car for bringing them back together: Both Allen and Lucy express their gratitude verbally and physically, pressing their hands fondly on the car and wishing the train good luck. At the end of this saccharine moment, Lucy and Allen leave with a final benediction:

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T H E B O S T O N C O S M O P O L I TA N S Miss Galbraith: “‘And must I leave thee, Paradise?’” They both kiss their hands to the car again, and, their faces being very close together, they impulsively kiss each other. Then Miss Galbraith throws back her head, and solemnly confronts him. “Only think, Allen! If this car hadn’t broken its engagement, we might never have mended ours.”13

Indeed, the couple is reluctant to leave the Pullman because they realize that the qualities of liminal space cannot be easily reproduced. Lucy’s paraphrase of Paradise Lost alludes to a scene in which Eve laments leaving Paradise and wonders how she will cope in less perfect surroundings.14 Lucy does actually contemplate bringing “Paradise” home by converting the Pullman into a summer home because “‘it’s perfectly lovely, and I should like to live in it always.’” Allen critiques her plan, declaring that it “‘would look just like a traveling photographic saloon.’” Indeed, the liminal space of a train car does not depend very much on the specific design of the Pullman car (although the car should not be positively uncomfortable). The potential transforming power of train travel experienced by Lucy and Allen (and vicariously by their audience) can only be accessed while the Pullman is en route. That is the reasoning Allen uses to dissuade Lucy from acquiring the car: “No, Lucy, we won’t buy it; we will simply keep it as a precious souvenir, a sacred memory, a beautiful dream,—and let it go on fulfilling its destiny all the same.”15 In a similar vein, Howells’ The Sleeping Car shows how travel can bring a group of strangers together. After depicting another series of happy mistakes and misunderstandings occurring during train journey (this time between a married couple from Massachusetts [the Robertses] and a burly gentleman from California [Mr. Sawyer]), Howells ends the story with a chorus of anonymous passengers who offer answers to a rhetorical question posed by Mrs. Roberts’ brother, Mr. Campbell: “I don’t know what we shall do about you, Mr. Sawyer”: The Voice [anonymous passenger]: “Adopt him.” Campbell: “That’s a good idea. We will adopt you. You shall be our adoptive”— The Voice: “Baby boy.” Another Voice: “Wife.”

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A Third Voice: “Brother.” A Fourth Voice: “Early Friend. . . . ” Campbell, laying his hand on The Californian’s shoulder, and breaking into a laugh: “Don’t mind them. They don’t mean anything. It’s just their way. You come home with my sister, and spend Christmas, and let us devote the rest of our lives to making your declining years happy.” Voices: “Good for you, Willis!” “We’ll all come!” “No Ceremony.”16

Although the Robertses do not acknowledge the role the train had to play in the “adoption” of a new family member, Howells makes it perfectly clear that Mr. Sawyer’s appearance in their lives is due entirely to the special liminal conditions created by long-distance travel. In addition to Mr. Sawyer’s good fortune, the anonymous passengers have enjoyed a feeling of friendship and fellowship derived from the excitement caused by Mrs. Roberts. For a moment in time, everybody in the sleeping car became part of one big family.

A FTER THE V OYAGE : W ILLIAM D EAN H OWELLS AND H ENRY J AMES E NCOUNTER THE “OTHER ” IN V ENICE Howells’ works of fiction and theater concerning ships and trains show how long-distance travelers encountered the possibility of becoming intimately acquainted with their fellow passengers. The next step of discovery for travelers began at the end of the journey, when they reached their intended destination. At this point writers who were interested in sharing aspects of cosmopolitan experience shifted their focus from describing the experience of travel to conveying a sense of place. The places that the Cosmopolitans enjoyed exploring the most were those cities, regions, or nations that had something unique to offer. Henry James’ love of difference was conveyed in An International Episode (1878) through one of his English characters, who advises a friend to search out the new on arriving in New York: “I must say I think that when one goes to a foreign country, one ought to enjoy the differences. Of course there are differences; otherwise what did one come abroad for? Look for your pleasure in

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the differences.”17 For the Cosmopolitans, one of the places in Europe that contrasted most with their lives in the United States was Italy. As the literary critic Leonardo Buonomo explains, Italy’s distinctive history made its culture strikingly different from that of the nineteenth-century United States: “Italy was the site of antiquity and Catholicism. It was, furthermore, divided into a number of small states [until 1870] whose governments seemed to be based on the antithesis of democracy. Finally, its life seemed to be characterized by a pervasive devotion to aestheticism.”18 The most distinctive Italian city during the nineteenth century was Venice. By the late 1800s, Venice had spent hundreds of years in decline from its apex as the world’s leading commercial city during the Italian Renaissance. This decay only added to the city’s intriguing qualities that had been dramatized since Shakespeare’s Othello (1605) and The Merchant of Venice (1597). The corruption of the Venetian Republic and its manipulation by powerful oligarchs in the eighteenth century attracted the attention of American writers such as James Fenimore Cooper. Cooper used Venice in his historical novel The Bravo (1831) as an instructive example to Americans, who, as Natalia Wright explains, were expected learn an explicit lesson in comparative political history: “any government in which the power resides in a minority conduces to oppression of the weak and perversion of the good.” Yet Cooper was just as impressed by the qualities that Venice shared with the rest of Italy: beautiful scenery, a stunning artistic history, and “the recognition by Italians that the greatest values were other than pecuniary ones.”19 Although life in Venice was easy to distinguish from life in the United States, providing an accurate description of the Venetian scene posed a particularly difficult challenge for Howells and James. Both writers understood that Venice’s distinct character was hidden underneath hundreds of years of stories and legends that shaped Americans’ opinions of Venice and Italy before they had even visited that part of the world. Indeed, the vast majority of nineteenth-century American novelists and travel writers who chose Italy as a subject simply used its long and complicated history either as an evocative background for their stories or as a convenient way to compare the United States favorably to a foreign culture.20 Although there were a few exceptions to this trend, such as Margaret Fuller’s published letters to the New York Tribune (1847–49), providing eyewitness accounts of “the rise and fall of the short-lived Roman

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Republic (February–July 1849) and . . . the French occupation of the city,” most American writers were generally unconcerned about depicting the realities of daily life there.21 Howells acknowledged the problem of overcoming the years of misinformation about Venice in the first pages of Venetian Life: “Let us mention here at the beginning some of the sentimental errors concerning the place, with which we need not trouble ourselves hereafter, but which no doubt form a large part of every one’s associations with the name of Venice.”22 Most American travel writers in the nineteenth century claimed to allow their readers to appreciate places like Venice as they would have had they been there to see it for themselves,23 but Howells and James possessed unique qualities that truly allowed them to describe life in Venice better than other American writers of their generation.24 As American consul in Venice during the Civil War, Howells enjoyed plenty of free time, which allowed him to acquaint himself with the language and people of Venice as no prominent American writer had done before.25 Although well acquainted with the Italian language, Henry James did not seek out conversations with a wide range of Italians as did Howells. However, James did possess two qualities that allowed him to paint other subtle hues of Venetian life. First, James was a particularly keen observer of the aesthetic qualities of the whole of Venice, from St. Mark’s Cathedral to the flower boxes in modest Venetian alleys. (Howells frankly admitted to James and his readers that he felt unable to interpret the art or aesthetics of Venice very well.26) Second, James revolutionized the travel narrative, abandoning any pretense to thorough acquaintance with history, economic statistics, or honeycombed archives.27 Instead, he soaked up the impressions of life around him and attempted to enter the soul of Venice through a sensitive appraisal and representation of the city’s daily fluctuations.28

TALKING TO THE P EOPLE : W ILLIAM D EAN H OWELLS R EPORTS ON V ENETIAN L IFE After signaling the reader that he would avoid the stereotypical versions of Venice, Howells arranges his travel narrative as a series of reports on the Venetian scene. He states his ultimate goal of assembling these accounts in one book in his chapter on “Housekeeping in Venice”: “I was resolved in writing this book to tell—what I had

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found most books of travel very slow to tell—as much as possible of the every-day life of a people whose habits are so different from our own.” Armed with a thorough understanding of Italian along with an affable personality, Howells explores many aspects of the geography and society of Venice so as to understand Venetians’ distinct habits. He looks at the most obvious points of interest, such as churches, paintings, canals, opera, and the history of Venice, but he also devotes just as much time to describing less obvious or spectacular aspects of the city: housekeeping, beggars, haggling at the market, and the peculiar phenomenon of polite thieves. Howells insists on including the most up-to-date information on the city and spends the first pages describing the plight of Venetians who were living under Austrian rule during the early 1860s. By focusing on a city that was bitterly divided between Venetians and their occupiers (and the Venetians insisted that its foreign visitors choose sides between “Austricanti” and “Italianissimi”), Howells immediately surprises the reader who might have expected to encounter the singing gondoliers or the colorful festivals that were part of legendary Venice. On the contrary, “there is no greater social dullness, on land or sea, than in contemporary Venice.”29 Through including the sad as well as the festive, the grand as well as the pathetic, Howells effectively avoids the trope of trying to capture the “essence” of Venice through relying on hackneyed references to its more famous picturesque sights.30 No one place or event could sum up Venice, which is why Howells’ comprehensive but sometimes rambling Venetian Life is over four hundred pages long. Speaking fluent Italian opened many Venetian doors to Howells that otherwise remained shut to most American visitors, and Howells does his best to share this privileged knowledge with his readers. First of all, Howells reports on places and events that would remain enigmatic to English speakers just passing through Venice for a few days. Howells depicts himself as sitting in the middle of Venice slowly gaining impressions: “While I sit at Florian’s [a café at St. Mark’s Plaza], sharing and studying the idleness about me, the brief winter passes, and the spring of the south . . . descends upon the city and the sea.” He seeks out every opportunity to interact with the local populace and laments his missed chances. Surprisingly, his American habit of paying bills on time estranges him from local merchants: “If we had thought to get in debt to the butcher, the baker, and the grocer, we might have gone far to establish [relations] at

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once; but we imprudently paid our way, and consequently had no ties to bind us to our fellow-creatures.” Patiently, he decodes parts of Venice with his linguistic talents. Howells describes operas, comedies, and the peculiar charm of the marionette shows. A stock character in these puppet shows, Facanapa, was a favorite of Venetians and Howells alike: “To tell the truth, I care little for the plays in which he has no part, and I have learned to think a certain trick of his—lifting his leg rigidly to a horizontal line, by way of emphasis, and saying ‘Capisse la?’ or ‘Sa la?’ (You understand? You know?)—one of the finest things in the world.” This brief but evocative description of Facanapa reveals Howells’ peculiar talents in translating the subtleties of Venetian culture for his English-speaking audience.31 Howells not only learns about the customs and arts of the Venetians, but he also listens to their intimate talk and enters into conversation with them. Howells shares apocryphal Venetian stories with the reader, such as one concerning a man who had recently been stranded in a nearby swamp during the winter and was supposedly saved by the Virgin Mary. He relates the story of a typical public dispute between two men and translates the harsh character of the insults they hurl at one another. The reader also learns about the manner in which Italian grocers advertise their goods in song: “‘Melons with hearts of fire!’ and ‘juicy pears that bathe your beard!’” Howells also reports on the peculiar rituals associated with looking for a room at a boarding house. One must first ring a bell, “which, being sounded, summons a servant to some upper window with the demand, very formidable to strangers, ‘Chi xe?’ (Who is it?) But you do not answer with you name. You reply, ‘Amici!’ (Friends!), on which reassurance the servant draws the latch of the door.”32 The human sounds of Venice ring clearly throughout the pages of Venetian Life. Howells’ conversations with many Italians often feature their responses to him in Italian (with English translations), which permits them to speak for themselves in the text. Returning to Venice after visiting nearby Torcello, Howells’ servant reacts with these thoughts: “Torcello xe beo—no si pol negar; la campagna xe bea, ma benedetta la mia Venezia! (Torcello is beautiful—it can’t be denied; the country is beautiful, but blessed be my Venice.)”And sometimes when quoting Venetians directly does not convey the feeling of a scene well enough, Howells inserts small vignettes in the form of a play.

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Through these repeated interactions with such a wide variety of Venetian life Howells develops a sympathetic affection for these people, which encourages him to speculate on how the Venetians might feel about certain topics, such as the American Civil War. When talk on the street or conversations with servants and passing strangers does not supply Howells with sufficient information about a Venetian subject, he has one last recourse: “In all Latin countries the barber is a source of information, which, skillfully tapped, pours forth in a stream of endless gossip and local intelligence.”33 All these sources of information combine to make Howells an expert on Venetian customs in the 1860s. This expertise allows him to delve into this foreign life with increasing sophistication. The details of day-to-day life become particularly vivid when Howells uses a footnote to dissect the meaning of a word used repeatedly in informal Venetian conversation, Ciò: Literally, that, in Italian, and meaning in Venetian, You! Heigh! To talk in Ciò ciappa is to assume insolent familiarity or unbounded good fellowship with the person addressed. A Venetian says Ciò a thousand times in a day, and hails every one but his superior in that way. I think it is hardly the Italian pronoun, but possibly a contraction of Veccio (vecchio), Old fellow! It is common with all classes of the people: parents use it in speaking to their children, and brothers and sisters call one another Ciò. It is a salutation between friends, who cry out Ciò! as they pass in the street. Acquaintances, men who meet after separation, rush together with “Ah Ciò!” Then they kiss on the right cheek, “Ciò!” on the left, “Ciò!” on the lips, “Ciò! Bon dì, Ciò!”34

Howells, like most of his fellow Cosmopolitans, acquainted himself with the languages spoken in the various European countries he visited. Although Howells’ mastery of Italian was particularly strong, all the Boston Cosmopolitans made efforts to read and speak foreign languages so they could learn about the customs of a country first-hand.35 Howells shows that—over the time of his stay in Venice—his own ideas about the city go through a slow but steady process of change. He begins Venetian Life attempting to accustom his American readers to a different pace of living, but despite his obvious admiration of the city, most of Venetian Life contains negative judgments on the moral character of the Venetians, who seem much too lazy and duplicitous for Howells’ taste: “For such is Venice, and the will must

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be strong and the faith indomitable in him who can long keep, amid the influences of her stagnant quiet, a practical belief in the great moving, anxious, toiling, aspiring world outside.” As the book progresses, however, Howells begins to doubt his own prejudice. “Indeed,” he muses toward the end, “so much occurs to me to qualify with contrary sense what I have written concerning Venice. . . . It is a doubt which must force itself upon every fair and temperate man who attempts to describe another people’s life and character.” Howells was most confused by a peculiar discovery: Even though Venetians did not value hard work and honesty as most Americans did, their daily interactions made life extremely pleasant nonetheless: A Venetian who enters or leaves any place of public resort touches his hat to the company . . . on going out, with a[n impeccable] grace. . . . It is this uncostly gentleness of bearing which gives a winning impression of the whole people, whatever selfishness or real discourtesy lie beneath it. At home [i.e., the United States] it sometimes seems we are in such haste to live and be done with it, that we have no time to be polite. Or is popular politeness merely a vice of servile peoples? And is it altogether better to be rude? I wish it were not.36

Was Venetian vice then somehow rewarded? And could rudeness ever be a virtue? Howells does not supply easy answers to these queries, but his thorough explorations in this foreign city provoke some important questions about American life and its relentless pace, which diminished communication and neighborliness in the United States.

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L AST W ORD : H ENRY J AMES ATTEMPTS TO R ECREATE THE L IVING V ENICE A

In Venetian Life Howells attempts to correct the errors and romantic exaggerations of previous travel writers. In Italian Hours, a collection of several travel essays written over a period of thirty years and published together in 1909, Henry James sets out to undercut the authority of John Ruskin, possibly the world’s most influential art critic of the nineteenth century.37 One of the pillars of Ruskin’s worldwide reputation was built on his The Stones of Venice (1853), a magisterial overview of architectural history achieved through a

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close analysis of Venetian buildings. Despite his resistance to Ruskin’s teaching, the young Henry James read the Englishman’s work closely and was greatly influenced by his criticism.38 Although James may have agreed as much as he disagreed with the substance of works like The Stones of Venice, he was most impatient with the style of Ruskin’s criticism. According to James, Ruskin’s greatest virtue was also his greatest defect: clear and persuasive prose—prose that was perhaps too persuasive. His goal was to discover the unambiguous truths of architecture. He would seek to determine “some law of right, which we may apply to the architecture of all the world and of all time.” His findings on any particular building would be unambiguous—“as, by applying a plumb-line, [determining] whether it be perpendicular.”39 In contrast, Henry James’ Venice is all shade, nuance, and shifting identities. James underlines that Venice’s incomparably rich aesthetic qualities make any of its sights potentially engaging—sights that “share fully in that universal privilege of Venetian objects which consists of being both the picture and the point of view.”40 By underlining the multiple facets of Venetian experience, James attempted to free Venice from the grip of criticism so that he and his readers could explore the city with their own imaginations. The first pages of Italian Hours open with this appeal to the reader to experience Venice for themselves: “One may doubtless be very happy in Venice,” James reminds his Ruskin-influenced public, “without reading at all—without criticism or analyzing or thinking a strenuous thought. . . . Fortunately,” he concludes, “one reacts against the Ruskin-contagion, and one hour of the lagoon is worth a hundred pages of demoralized prose.”41 Drifting around many famous and obscure sites, James’ writing on Venice attempts simultaneously to show and to mimic the infinite number of ways it can be appreciated. One may be justified in saying that James protests too much, that he attacks Ruskin because he is conscious of his own deficiencies as a historian. Yet James does not hide from that charge: “I write these lines with the full consciousness of having no information whatever to offer.” This claim sounds disingenuous, but it makes sense in Italian Hours. James understands that travel literature and the more recent growth in photography supplied descriptions and reproductions of Venetian sites ad nauseam, but for him, life in Venice was too fluid and nuanced to be captured in a conventional travel narrative. Even “Howells’s delightful volume of impressions,” Venetian

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Life, is insufficient, James writes, because any claim to capture Venice’s life, once and for all, is “superficial.” To jar the reader’s expectations concerning this textual treatment of Venice, James periodically includes paradoxical statements that act as a reminder of his novel goals: “A rhapsody on Venice is always in order, but I think the catalogues are finished. I should not attempt to write here the names of all the palaces. . . . There are many I delight in that I don’t know. . . . Then there are the bad reasons for preference that are better than the good, and all the sweet bribery of association and recollection.”42 Although James does not supply a definitive version of Venetian sights, he does try to direct the reader toward how he feels the city might best be appreciated: “Reading Ruskin is good; reading the old records is perhaps better; but the best thing of all is simply staying on. The only way to care for Venice as she deserves it is to give her a chance to touch you often—to linger and remain and return.” Venice will reveal itself to the patient visitor who forgoes the common routine of seeking out specific paintings and buildings for their acclaimed artistic or historical merit. Instead, the reader should “choose your standpoint at random and trust the picture to come to you.”43 In sum, the “good reasons” for loving Venice supplied by conventional guides such as Ruskin do not have the emotional weight or impact of a visitor’s personal and unhurried interactions in that city.44 Although James counsels his readers to linger in Venice rather than to search through its historical archives, he nonetheless treasures the role Venice’s history has had on the city’s character. The sense of history is everywhere, and the people wear it on their faces and display it in their conduct: “One feels that the race is old . . . and that if it hasn’t been blessed by fortune it has at least been polished by time. It hasn’t a genius for stiff morality [as his American readers may have possessed—a trait also noticed by Howells], and indeed makes few pretensions in that direction. . . . But it has an unfailing sense of the amenities of life; the poorest Venetian is a natural man of the world.” James points out that visitors will be touched by the “old softness and mellowness of colour [in Venice]—the work of the quiet centuries and of the mellowness of the salt sea.” Time’s effect on Venice’s brick buildings has had a particularly strong effect, creating a “suffusion of rosiness. . . . It is a faint, shimmering, airy, watery pink; the bright sea-light seems to flush with it and the pale

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whiteish-green of lagoon and canal to drink it in.”45 Here, James shows how Venice’s beauty is greater than the sum of its parts. In particular, a sense of history permeates Venice’s artistic sites as if it were itself part of the city’s wide palette of visual art. Following his own advice, James comes back to describe the sense of history from many different angles, thus permitting these impressions of Venice to “sink into your spirit.”46 Venice’s charm is found not only in the echoes of its past but also in the presence of living human voices in the present. Venice at its best, according to James, can be found at St. Mark’s Square, “which is the centre of Venetian life so far (this is pretty well all the way indeed) as Venetian life is a matter of strolling and chaffering, of gossiping and gaping, of circulating without a purpose.” Unlike Howells, who seems uncomfortable with Venice’s lack of a work ethic, James is quite enthusiastic about following the Venetian example of doing nothing in particular. This tendency to speak and socialize further softens the experience of living in Venice. In contrast to many modern cities that are characterized by a “hum” of machines and economic activity, there “is no noise [in Venice] save distinctly human noise; no rumbling, no vague uproar, nor rattle of wheels and hoofs. It is all articulate and vocal and personal.”47 Next to the sense of Venice’s history, the sense of Venice’s humanity is most profound. Voices in Venice, James notes, “travel far; they enter your windows and mingle even with your dreams.” The social quality of the city’s atmosphere is best appreciated by the visitor who can share his own thoughts and discoveries in a social context—with a small group of friends, or perhaps just one special confidant: “if you are wise you will take your place beside a discriminating companion. Such a companion in Venice should of course be of the sex that discriminates most finely. An intelligent woman who knows her Venice seems doubly intelligent, and it makes no woman’s perceptions less keen to be aware that she can’t help looking graceful as she is borne over the waves.”48 This atmosphere of conviviality encourages the city’s visitors and inhabitants to encounter one another in a spirit of generous curiosity—in a spirit of cosmopolitanism. James recounts one of these cosmopolitan moments that occurred during a visit to the home of three elderly Venetian sisters. Although he frequently exchanged

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greetings with these sisters on the streets, they surprised him one day with new information: their house was once the residence of George Sand, one of James’ favorite authors. This information was accompanied by an invitation extended to James to enter their residence. The sisters, James notes, reached out to offer this foreign writer an inimitable experience—a generous gesture that had also opened the privacy of their domestic lives to him: “What was immediately marked” in their thoughtfulness “was their resigned cosmopolite state, the effacement of old conventional lines by foreign contact and example.” Because Venice draws in people from all over the world, James notes, many homebound Venetians have become as cosmopolitan as their city’s visitors. In addition, natives and visitors alike can grow to respect and trust one another through “a tenderness for Venice. . . . That was the true principle of fusion, the key to communication.” It seems clear that James saw Venice as a microcosm of the emerging cosmopolitan world he had described in his biography of William Wetmore Story. In a moment of unguarded enthusiasm, James heralds the advent of this novel cultural force, which he calls “the cosmopolite habit, the modern sympathy, the intelligent, flexible attitude, the latest fruit of time.”49 James’ ardent “tenderness” for Venice helps him to understand and accept that the city may not always remain as magical as it has been for him. James loves Venice as he has experienced it, and he wishes sometimes that it could remain immune from change. However, the Italians who live in Venice do not necessarily share James’ desires. In fact, they may long to integrate modern ways into their lives as much as James longs to dwell in a city, which constantly reminds visitors of the past. The Venetian vaporetto—steam-powered boats used for public transportation—were not as beautiful as old buildings, but, James admits, the old buildings “probably never ‘met a want’ like the successful vaporetto.” In the penultimate essay on Venice, James contemplates the influence of modernization on Italy as a whole and concludes that preserving the Italian past is none of his business. It is a delicate issue, he writes, to try “to persuade the Italians that they mayn’t do as they like with their own. They so absolutely may that I profess I see no happy issue from the fight [between preservation and modernization].”50 James may be sad to see Venice change, but he also respects the desires of the Italians to direct their own future. This “hands-off” attitude toward the lives of

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others may have been one of the results of the “cosmopolite habit, the modern sympathy.”51

R ETURN OF THE C OSMOPOLITAN : H ENRY J AMES S EARCHES FOR H ISTORY AND H UMANITY IN THE A MERICAN S CENE Henry James used his experiences as a traveler in Europe to help him to investigate the culture of the United States. Specifically, his cosmopolitan outlook surveyed the United States’ East Coast from 1904 to 1905 when he returned home after more than twenty uninterrupted years abroad. In addition to visiting many of his American friends, James had an additional financial incentive to see his native land: a contract with Harper’s to write a series of his impressions derived from his travels from Maine to Florida. The impressions gathered from his prolonged stay would eventually be published as The American Scene. 52 When Henry James traveled to America in 1904, he returned as a self-conscious cosmopolitan.53 As such, he came to America after having seen much of Europe’s great cultural, artistic, and historical variety—the very elements that coalesced so magically in Venice. As we saw in Italian Hours, James particularly enjoyed the sense of history, the convivial atmosphere, and the cosmopolitanism of Venice. These characteristics combined to stir the imagination and fascinate the mind, giving vital support for human beings’ creative and sensuous faculties. To his disappointment, these lively elements of Venetian life were greatly lacking in the American scene.54 This was all the more striking to James because Americans possessed every economic advantage that would make realizing humane goals feasible, but Americans seemed to be working more to gain less. In an aside in Italian Hours James remarked: “It takes a great deal to make a successful American, but to make a happy Venetian takes only a handful of quick sensibility.”55 The force that filled the historical, human, and cosmopolitan void in America was materialism. In The American Scene James is constantly seeking out possibilities of experience that would lead to the feelings of delight and discovery that opened up to him in places like Venice. But in contrast to Venice, where everyone could be “both the picture and the point of view,” both creating and inspiring a variety of

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experiences, American culture forced everyone to be the object of commerce. When he recalls the throng of immigrants piled on top of each other on New York City’s lower East Side in 1904, he concludes that their freedom had been narrowly limited by the overwhelming power of the “trusts” and “monopolies” of “the freedom to grow up to be blighted.”56 Although James attempted to find places where idiosyncratic and individual experiences could occur, he was generally disappointed with what he encountered. Materialism moved American culture in one overwhelming direction in The American Scene—toward repetitious, efficient standardization. In Boston, James argued that the remaining charms of the city lay in its connections to a past quite different from the efficient America of 1905: “Didn’t one remember the day when New Yorkers, when Philadelphians, when pilgrims from the West, sated with their eternal equidistances, with the quadrilateral scheme of life . . . appeared to find in the rear of the [Massachusetts] State House a recall of one of the topographical, the architectural jumbles of Europe or Asia? And did not indeed the small happy accidents of a disappearing Boston exhale in a comparatively sensible manner the warm breath of history, the history of something as against the history of nothing?”57

The monotony of efficiency shaped the American mind as well as its landscape. With American life sculpted by the ubiquitous force of materialism, the world was indeed “made one” (to paraphrase an Emersonian idea) through bleakness. As James perceived it, this uniformity tricked the mind into believing that efficiency was the world of human experience. He objected to the monotony of villages in New Hampshire and Massachusetts that seemed to imitate one another’s architecture and landscaping,58 as well as the relentless display of wealth in the posh new luxury homes spread along the coast of Long Island. With so many Americans imitating each other, and being hyperconscious of each other’s gaze, even the great wide open spaces of the American landscape seemed only to mirror the flatness of much of American culture: “Where was the charm of boundless immensity as overlooked from a [train]car window?—with the general pretension to charm, the general conquest of nature and space, affirmed, immediately round about you, by the general pretension of the Pullman, the great monotonous rumble of which seems forever to say to you: ‘See

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what I’m making of all this—see what I’m making, what I’m making!’”59 But by far the most disturbing and instructive monotony was located in James’ childhood home, New York City, for it was New York that most vividly demonstrated how the popular pursuit of wealth obliterated history and often precluded the pursuit of any other goal. Two characteristics of New York struck James immediately on his arrival: the memories of his childhood past and the frenetic and sometimes intoxicating energy of New York in the present. Although James often found the rate of change in New York quite disturbing, even bewildering—whether that change was brought about by immigration, the demolition and construction of buildings, or simply through the stresses of constant movement in the city—he was nonetheless thrilled by New York’s dynamism. Describing his feeling on approaching New York from the East River, James used some of his most direct language to represent his admiration for this city: “There is a beauty of light and air, the great scale of space, and, seen far away to the west, the open gates of the Hudson, majestic in their degree, even at a distance, and announcing still nobler things. But the real appeal, unmistakably, is in that note of vehemence in the local life of which I have spoken, for it is the appeal of a particular type of dauntless power.”60 After the promise and fascination of the initial approach to his childhood home, James soon discerns the less attractive aspect of New York’s powerful flair: the power was ubiquitous. James is particularly sensitive to the effect of New York’s power on his own past when he returns to Washington Place, the neighborhood where he spent much of his childhood. He finds that his memories of Washington Place no longer match the surroundings. James’ childhood home has disappeared. It was one of the many causalities of New York’s architectural mayhem, which threatened that any building might “be destroyed to make room for the skyscraper” that appeared to be a “huge, continuous fifty-floored conspiracy against the very idea of the ancient graces.”61 Walking down the undeviatingly straight streets that dominated New York, James wondered whether anything graceful could survive the city’s daily grind. This dizzying rate of change was fueled by New Yorkers’ desire for money, a desire so strong that everything else trembled in its presence. The constant threat of change, alteration, and ultimately

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demolition of the city’s built landscape hung over every corner and every shelter that might have provided some variety, some welcoming contrast, some respite from the power of materialism. A park, a café, or a church in New York, James argued, carried much more cultural and aesthetic weight than their European counterparts, not only because they were under constant threat of extermination but simply because they were so few in number. “Such places,” like the little parks that James notices, “the municipally-instituted pleasuregrounds of the greater and smaller cities, abound about the world and everywhere, no doubt, agreeably enough play their part; but is the part anywhere enough heroically played in proportion to the difficulty? The difficulty in New York, that is the point for the restless analyst.”62 Here is a striking example of James’ cosmopolitanism leading him to analyze American culture in the context of world history, which in turn enables him to incisive criticism that landlocked Americans might have formulated in different terms. James’ take on America did not amount to a pretentious expatriate’s rejection of America simply because it was not Europe; rather, his cosmopolitan criticism offers Americans some real options for improving the quality of their cities and gives a refreshing perspective on the limits of a materialistic culture.63 Henry James had no illusion that he was “everyman” or that he was speaking for the majority of Americans. Not only would his defense of subjective and personal experience not admit such pretensions, but James also knew that few Americans shared his sentiments. Materialism—not history, art, or human conversation—ruled in America, so much so that many of the citizens of the United States, in James’ view, did not even notice the general absence of humane spaces in American cities or entertain an appreciation of the aesthetic. Americans had been cut off from their cultural heritage in Europe, where the built environment in cities like London, Florence, and Paris preserved the past and made room for the present.64 The perfectly symmetrical but sterile horizontal and vertical lines of New York’s streets and buildings symbolized efficiency as well as impersonality and set the stage for the triumph of the present over the past and the future. The buildings of New York, James wrote, never begin to speak to you in the manner of the builded majesties of the world as we have heretofore known such—towers or temples or

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fortresses or palaces—with the authority of things of permanence or even things of long duration. One story is good only until another is told, and sky-scrapers are the last word of economic ingenuity only till another word be written.65

With its breathless obsession about money, its disregard for beauty, and its ability to impose the stamp of materialism on the landscape, America seemed unwelcoming to those who might have different goals and different values. The “American air,” James commented, was filled with “every value . . . most subject to multiplication.”66 In America all were certainly free, but only within the narrow parameters of laissez faire capitalism. Although New York’s built environment did not evoke many thoughts of the past, it did speak volumes about the character of the city. Public space took on a particularly important role in The American Scene—so much so that James represented the buildings and monuments he views around the United States by giving them voices and personalities. In New York, for example, the elegant Waldorf-Astoria explains itself to pedestrians who must cross the frantic activity of the street before entering the hotel: “Un bon mouvement, therefore: you must make a dash for it, but you’ll see I’m worth it.”67 James recorded few conversations with people in his book; it seems that the architecture spoke at least as well about New York’s culture: “If quiet interspaces, always half the architectural battle, exist no more in such a structural scheme [i.e., the skyscraper] than quiet tones, blest breathing-spaces, occur, for the most part, in New York conversation, so the reason is, demonstrably, that the building can’t afford them. (It is by the very same law, one supposes, that New York conversation cannot afford stops.)”68 Unlike Venice, where the sound of human voices echoes through the canals and streets, New Yorkers are too driven by economic imperatives to speak much to other human beings. In the American cityscape and landscape, James encountered an avatar of the expression “money talks.” This was not a culture that nurtured what James prized in Venice: “the cosmopolite habit, the modern sympathy, the intelligent, flexible attitude, the latest fruit of time,” but there was one place in the United States that held the memory of such cosmopolitanism, the sense of humane curiosity about the variety of the world and its cultures: Newport, Rhode Island. It is James’ reflections on Newport that inspires him to make

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some of his most pointed appeals to cosmopolitanism, an ethos that resisted the materialistic imperative and instead found beauty in difference and joy in sociability. Newport moved Henry James because he spent many enjoyable days in his youth there during the 1850s and 1860s. It was in Newport that he met his lifelong friend, Thomas Sergeant Perry; it was in Newport that he and his brother William studied painting at the studio of the Paris-trained New England artist William Morris Hunt and were first introduced to another of Hunt’s pupils, John La Farge; it was at Newport where James spent many memorable days with his beloved cousin and friend Minny Temple, a vivacious girl from Boston whose tragic early death at the age of twenty-four in 1870 would always haunt the writer and inspired the creation of some of his most memorable heroines, such as the titular character of Daisy Miller (1878), Isabel Archer in Portrait of a Lady (1881), and Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove (1902).69 Above all, it was Newport where, as a young man, Henry James experienced a way of life that contrasted remarkably with the American atmosphere of 1904–05. In The American Scene, James remembers a Newport peopled by a group of his friends who were an anomaly of their day and who had virtually disappeared by 1905. These were nonconformists who did not try to counter the force of American commercial interests with an antimaterialist zealotry of their own. Instead, James’ friends simply chose their own ideals to live by. They were a collection of the detached, the slightly disenchanted and casually disqualified, and yet of the resigned and contented, of the socially orthodox: a handful of mild, oh delightfully mild cosmopolites, united by three common circumstances, that of their having for the most part more or less lived in Europe, that of their sacrificing openly to the ivory idol whose name is leisure, and that, not least, of a formed critical habit [emphasis added]. These things had been felt as making them excrescences on the American surface, where nobody ever criticized, especially after the grand tour, and where the great black ebony god of business was the only one recognized.

James remembers that the main exchanges between these friends in Newport centered on social and artistic topics—unusual in commercially oriented America. He fondly recalls pleasant interactions “over their winter whist, under their private theatricals, and pending,

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constantly, their loan and their return of the Revue des Deux Mondes, their main conversational note.”70 In this passage, James makes an explicit connection between these cosmopolites’ experiences abroad and their ability to critique the values and habits of their fellow countrymen through a “formed critical habit” that resisted the idolization of business. However, he is careful to note that traveling abroad does not necessarily result in the traveler becoming a “cosmopolite.” Taking “the grand tour” of Europe once—as many Americans did in the late nineteenth century—would not allow for the influence of Europe to sink in as it did for James in his repeated visits to Venice.71 At the end of his reveries about Newport, James reflects on the special difficulties of being an American who has become conscious that his native culture is only one among many cultures and that “the hard American world” offers neither the best nor the only way to live: I find myself in fact tenderly evoking them [i.e., his friends in Newport] as special instances of the great—or perhaps I have a right only to say of the small—American complication; the state of one’s having been so pierced, betimes, by the sharp outland dart as to be able ever afterwards but to move about, vaguely and helplessly, with the shaft still in one’s side.72

The Newport Cosmopolitans inspired Henry James with their enjoyment of leisurely pursuits that had little or nothing to do with business. It is certainly true that only those with a certain amount of money could take advantage of the leisure that Newport had to offer in the mid-1800s, and James would certainly not dispute this contention. He would add, however, that whereas most rich nineteenthcentury Americans seemed to devote their money to the pursuit of more money, James and his friends at Newport used their funds as a means to explore a wider variety of human experience. In sum, James’ American Scene might be viewed as a cosmopolitan artifact—curious, critical, and full of further possibilities of interpretation. Unable to fulfill the goals of cosmopolitan travel in the United States—“to look for . . . pleasure in the differences”—James compensates by trying to inspire his American readers to desire those differences that he finds lacking in their culture.

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T HE A MERICAN AS C OSMOPOLITAN : W ILLIAM J AMES ’ P ROMOTION AND D EFENSE OF THE I NDIVIDUAL In 1876 William James wrote about the goals of higher education in terms that remind one of Henry James’ travel writing. William expressed the hope that American colleges would impart to their students “the habit of always seeing an alternative, of not taking the usual for granted, of making conventionalities fluid again, of imagining foreign states of mind. In a word, it means the possession of mental perspective.”73 Just as his brother Henry cherished the variety he found in Venice and lamented the uniformity he encountered in America, so did William defend the idea of individual and idiosyncratic experience against the forces of conformity. Specifically, William protested against the claims made by many religious, scientific, and philosophical thinkers who aimed to create perfectly coherent systems of thought to explain all of human experience in the world.74 As one critic has pointed out, these systems of thought put the cart before the horse because, in James’ view, “principles are not brought to experience, but grow from it.”75 James’ ideas on education derive from his belief that there are always possible alternatives to widely accepted ideas and that these alternatives support the contention that human beings’ lives are “fluid” and surprising instead of static and predictable.76 James’ call to imagine “foreign states of mind” as a central goal of education reflects his cosmopolitan commitment to encounter, defend, and learn from this variety of human experience. Imagining how foreign peoples think and feel, and acquiring perspective on American culture through that imagining, is exactly what the Boston Cosmopolitans sought in their own travels. Because William James was a popular philosopher who was often in the public eye, his attempts to promote and defend the cosmopolitan love of difference were often more forceful and direct than those of his brother, and even those of William Dean Howells.77 Indeed, toward the last decade of his life, William James linked, either explicitly or implicitly, his identity as a cosmopolitan to his commitment to the individual. Two events around the turn of the twentieth century elicited some of James’ most passionate cosmopolitan pronouncements: the opportunity for him to deliver two series of lectures on religion in Edinburgh, Scotland, and his vocal resistance to the

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American military involvement with the Philippines in the wake of the Spanish-American War. While William James was writing and delivering the Gifford Lectures, the United States entered its first overseas imperialist venture. After defeating Spain in the Spanish-American War (1898–1900), the United States occupied the Philippines and fought the leader of the Filipino independence movement, Emilio Aguinaldo. Although James at first supported the goal of forcing the Spanish out of Cuba, the decision made by the United States to control the Philippines (which had been ceded by the Spanish to the United States after the war) horrified him.78 The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902) was the published version of lectures James gave over summers of 1901 and 1902. James had been asked in 1897 by the committee in charge of the prestigious Gifford Lectures to give a talk on the subject of his choice in Aberdeen, Scotland, between 1898 and 1900. James convinced the committee to delay the appointment and to move the venue of the speech to Scotland’s capital, Edinburgh.79 James’ initial goal was to “set down my last will and testament on religious matters.”80 Although James may not have been satisfied with his final product, The Varieties became very popular during his lifetime.81 More important for the purposes of this study, The Varieties leaves a fascinating record of James’ cosmopolitan appreciation of the great diversity of human experience. James’ belief that “principles are not brought to experience, but grow from it” was central to his approach to analyzing human beings and their ideals. This was especially true in his studies of religion. James argued that the origins of religious beliefs could not be traced to religious institutions. On the contrary, he argues that religion owed its existence to the visions and inspiration felt by extraordinary individuals. James underscores the importance of the experiential element of religious belief in his well-known definition of religion: “the feeling, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider divine.”82 Not only did individual men vary in their emotional response to the divine, but the divine itself, according to this definition, could take on many different forms.83 This pluralistic definition of religion shares the important contention in James’ pragmatism that any philosophical descriptions of “the true” or “the good” that insisted on an abstract “unity” ignored the reality of the

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diverse experiences of human beings that were often incompatible with or contradictory to one another. Unfortunately, from James’ perspective, the theologians who aimed to spread religious belief in the world through appeals to reason ignored the fact that religion sprung from diverse and strong emotional needs. Rationalism, James argues, “has the prestige undoubtedly, for it has the loquacity, it can challenge you for proofs, and chop logic, and put you down with words. But it will fail to convince or convert you all the same, if your dumb intuitions are opposed to its conclusions.” As Henry James maintained that Ruskin should not shape his readers’ experience of Venice, so did William James argue that personal experience in religious matters precedes and is far more meaningful than the rules and dicta that attempt to tell people what they should experience.84 The churches that develop complicated dogma, according to James, “live at second-hand upon tradition; but the founders of every church owed their power originally to the fact of their direct personal communion with the divine.”85 Indeed, The Varieties might be seen as a vast catalogue of evidence demonstrating James’ contention that experience precedes principles. By the end of Varieties, James confesses feeling embarrassment for the myriad testimonies in his book. However, he explains, this inclusiveness was necessary: “Each [religious] attitude being a syllable in human nature’s total message, it takes the whole of us to spell the meaning out completely.”86 Thus, for James, knowledge of religion requires gathering evidence from as many different kinds of religious experience as possible.87 Although reason and philosophy cannot replace the power of emotion in religious experience, it can nonetheless play a positive role in communicating personal religious experience to others. As David Lamberth explains: As James characterizes it [in Varieties] the goal of philosophy is to redeem religion from ‘unwholesome privacy, and to give public status and universal right of way to its deliverances.’ In short, philosophy seeks to . . . [bring] together in an acceptable rational form that which otherwise appears so individual, separate, and at odds in its concrete experiential moment.88

Philosophy would then seek not to universalize religion but, rather, to universalize tolerance of disparate religions by attempting to help

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human beings understand the wide varieties of religious life experiences from all over the world. Like the travel writing of William Dean Howells and Henry James, William James’ Varieties took great pains to make the unique experience of “the other” intelligible to his readers both in America and abroad. James underlines his intention to address the topic of religion to a worldwide audience by depicting himself as a cosmopolitan speaker. The first words of his lectures draw attention to James’ recognition that he was participating in a global philosophical and religious conversation facilitated by easy long-distance travel: “At my own University of Harvard, not a winter passes without its harvest, large or small, of lectures from Scottish, English, French, or German representatives of the science or literature of their respective countries whom we have either induced to cross the ocean to address us, or captured on the wing as they were visiting our land.” Now lecturing in Edinburgh, James hopes that this conversation will also flow in an easterly direction and that “many of my countrymen may be asked to lecture in the Scottish universities, changing places with Scotsmen lecturing in the United States.” Eventually, James hopes that this conversation between Scotland and the United States will promote a way of looking at human experience that “may more and more pervade and influence the world.”89 He says that he is particularly pleased to be in Scotland because of its “peculiar philosophical temperament” shared with “English writers,” which “introduced the ‘critical method’ into philosophy”: “that every difference must make a difference, every theoretical difference somewhere issue in a practical difference, and that the best method of discussing points of theory is to begin by ascertaining what practical difference would result from one alternative or the other being true.” This belief that all ideas can only be tested in experience is one of the guiding principles, James points out, of pragmatism.90 This pragmatic attitude, he asserts, refuses to create “an ideal refuge” from “the muddiness and accidentality of the world of sensible things.”91 This messy world, as David Lamberth has explained, may not be as neat as the “‘block universe’ that various rationalism claim to construe,” but it does open up the possibility for novel experiences.92 Religion, James asserts, could never have begun without the novel experiences of extraordinary individuals, and because each individual’s needs are different, religious experience varies according to the peculiar needs of each religious believer.

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The Varieties of Religious Experience, then, makes an important cosmopolitan point in the study of human nature: The world is too diverse and unpredictable to be understood from one point of view. Just as William James attempted to defend individual experience against the power of all-encompassing theories in the field of religion, he also resisted his own nation’s attempt to mold the political life of other countries. James linked his criticism of U.S. foreign policy at the end of the nineteenth century with his rhetorical membership in the “great international and cosmopolitan liberal party, the party of conscience and intelligence the world over.” One of James’ early biographers, Ralph Barton Perry, noted that William James’ “cosmopolitanism” was a central component of his life. “His many and long visits to Europe,” Perry wrote in 1932, “his command of modern languages, and his conversational powers” were a central part of his education and eventually made him famous among philosophers in the United States and abroad.93 Like the first Greek philosophers who called themselves “citizens of the world,” James appealed to the idea of cosmopolitanism when the conduct of his homeland became provincial, self-centered, or dangerous—as he believed it had become in the Philippines. In his many letters to local newspapers (principally The Boston Evening Transcript), James shares his pragmatically informed criticism of U.S. foreign policy with the general public. The major problem of the United States’ military intervention in the Philippines entailed the United States’ entirely abstract approach to the treatment of the Philippines and the Filipinos. Theodore Roosevelt, who, as Assistant Secretary of the Navy (1897–98), shaped American foreign policy at the onset of the Spanish-American War, received some scathing criticism from James in 1899 for his role in stomping out the Filipino version of democratic government. James also criticized Roosevelt for the abstractions he used to analyze the situation in the Philippines in a letter written to the Boston Evening Transcript on April 15, 1899. 94 The policy of the United States ignored the pragmatic and cosmopolitan contention that the world’s cultures are diverse and therefore overlooked the fact that the Filipinos may have desired a set of goals for their nation that was quite different from the American ideals of good government. James pointed out a close parallel between the American “defense” of democracy in the Philippines and the French Revolution. Although the leaders of the French

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Revolution professed good intentions, their actions led to murder and mayhem because of their blind dedication to abstract ideals. “Good government,” wrote James, “in the concrete means a government that seeks to make some connection with the actual mental condition of the governed.”95 In an earlier letter to the Transcript on March 1, 1899, James wondered why more Americans did “not blush with burning shame at the unspeakable meanness and ignominy” of their government’s violent opposition to Emilio Aguinaldo’s nationalist movement. The continuation of repressive measures against the Filipino nationalist movement crushed “the sacredest thing in this great human world”—a thing that seems to resemble the spirit of the Declaration of Independence: “the attempt of a people long enslaved to attain to the possession of itself, to organize its laws and government, to be free to follow its internal destinies according to its own ideals.” Americans were no longer living up to their ideals during the conflict in the Philippines, and politicians, it seemed to James, suffered from temporary insanity. James also wrote that the “worst of our imperialists [politicians] is that they do not themselves know where sincerity ends and insincerity begins. Their state of consciousness is so new, so mixed of primitively human passions and, in political circles, of calculations that are anything but primitively human; so at variance, moreover, with their former mental habits; and so empty of definite data and contents.”96 James’ lamentation that American politicians pursued a misguided foreign policy based on insufficient information about the lives and aspirations of Filipinos is rooted in his pragmatic belief that the value of theories cannot be assessed unless they are eventually judged by their effect on everyday life. The more than 200,000 civilians and soldiers killed in the Philippines in the name of democracy between 1899 and 1902 provided, in James’ view, sufficient data that American foreign policy had betrayed America’s professed commitment to democracy and self-determination.97 William James once wrote a succinct note to himself expressing his appreciation of the difficulty of describing lived human experience through words: “Philosophers paint pictures.”98 In The Varieties of Religious Experience, James frankly confesses, “philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.”99 Although words certainly were indispensable in describing human beings’ lives, many experiences, especially novel ones like those

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described in The Varieties of Religious Experience, exceeded the capacity of vocabularies that were products of the past. To convey the newness of unique experiences of the present, many Cosmopolitans turned to art to compensate for the inevitable shortcomings of language. Painting, sculptures, and architecture could represent new experiences in a forceful way. In the two chapters that follow we explore how some artists attempted to convey—and sometimes to recreate—the varieties of human experience to a wide audience. In art, the Boston Cosmopolitans found yet another opportunity to share their cosmopolitanism with the public.

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f philosophers paint pictures, as William James once wrote, what did the Cosmopolitan painters and sculptors do? Although paintings and sculptures do not often convey messages as precisely as the written word, their plasticity gives these media more freedom to represent novel ideas and discoveries. This plasticity is derived, in part, from the potential of these images to convey ideas and feelings in nonlinguistic terms. The Cosmopolitan artists, then, drew pictures and sculpted figures that expressed some of the ineffable aspects of novel Cosmopolitan experience.1 Not all of the discoveries of the Boston Cosmopolitan artists were ineffable, of course. The technical skills they learned through their professional training were derived from European artistic traditions handed down and modified over many generations. These somewhat mundane aspects of their artistic education were intertwined with their cosmopolitanism. As one might expect, their cosmopolitan outlook was deeply informed and expanded through the study of artistic traditions from many different countries. In this chapter, we explore some of the foundations and fruits of the art of the Boston Cosmopolitans. After an overview of the artistic education many of the Boston Cosmopolitan artists received in Europe, we focus on works that embody the attempt by artists and writers alike to use the visual arts to convey novel feelings and ideas that were difficult to represent through language. We begin with an examination of the work of an Impressionist painter from Boston,

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Lilla Cabot Perry. Perry’s life and work cross the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and provide a visual record of the layering of various artistic traditions. We then turn to a unique cosmopolitan sculpture: the Adams Memorial, a work of art inspired by the trip John La Farge and Henry Adams took to Japan in 1886. The memorial was the product of collaboration among Adams, La Farge, Augustus Saint Gaudens, and Stanford White, a partner of the architectural firm McKim, Mead, and White. It also embodies an attempt by Adams to combine artistic styles from different cultures to communicate the deep sadness he felt following the death of his wife. Finally, the chapter ends with an investigation of the Shaw Memorial, a grand sculpture by Saint Gaudens honoring the heroism of the Massachusetts 54th, one of the first all-black regiments to fight in the Civil War. Unveiled during the rise of Jim Crow laws in the South, the Shaw Memorial captured a moment of racial cooperation in the past and reminded America not to abandon the idealism that had brought those races together in the first place.2 We also pay some attention to the speech William James gave on the unveiling of the monument. In this speech, James did not attempt to surpass or duplicate the vision of racial harmony that was depicted in Saint Gaudens’ work. Instead, he permitted the statue to speak for itself and used the memorial as a symbolic backdrop for his message encouraging Americans to cultivate their “civic genius.”

T HE S IGNIFICANCE OF A MERICAN A RTISTS ’ E XPERIENCE A BROAD The circle of Boston Cosmopolitans included prolific artists such as Augustus Saint Gaudens, Dennis Miller Bunker, Lilla Cabot Perry, Henry Hobson Richardson, and John La Farge. In contrast to those Americans who chose careers in business, law, industry, or politics in the nineteenth century, aspiring American artists found that their home country was a poor place to begin their professional lives. The son of Augustus Saint Gaudens, Homer Saint Gaudens, explained this in the notes of his father’s autobiography. Homer defended his father’s choice to study abroad by explaining that although there were more than a handful of artists who could have taught their art in America during the midnineteenth century, “as yet no capable men had arrived at that stage where they either cared to teach, or

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were able to do so. Consequently, unless a youth was willing to take his chances at learning hit or miss, which was never the philosophy of my father’s studious mind, Europe alone offered any proper training.”3 For Saint Gaudens, as for most American artists during the nineteenth century, European art schools and training in Italy, England, and especially France were almost a necessary element of becoming an American artist. Even for those few successful artists who did not receive most of their training in Europe, such as John La Farge, their art teachers in America had learned their craft in Europe.4 Many famous American artists of this era were themselves very recent products of American interaction with Europe. Both La Farge and Saint Gaudens grew up in households where French was spoken and maintained strong ties to their French roots.5 Similarly, John Singer Sargent was the son of expatriate American parents and did not set foot in the United States until the age of nineteen in 1876.6 In the very act of leaving for Europe to seek their fortune, American artists went against the grain of some of the dominant myths of American culture. For many Americans, the direction of progress and improvement pointed toward the west; moving east connoted moving back in time and forsaking American innocence for the corruption, decadence, and general stodginess of Europe. One of the most enduring obstacles to appreciating and taking seriously Americans’ experiences and discoveries abroad is the habit of American exceptionalism—an age-old disposition to see America as a new, fresh, democratic, and “reformed” alternative to the entrenched ways of an hierarchical, aristocratic, and corrupt “Old World.” Although many Victorians like Henry James roundly criticized exceptionalism in their private correspondence as well as their published writings, the exceptionalist position certainly gained a second wind after the horrors of World War I, when many Americans grew to resent their elders from the previous generation. Intellectual icons such as Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) sneered at the European interests of elite Victorians, condemning them for abandoning an “organic” American aesthetic—as if creativity could or should respect national boundaries.7 Almost without exception, American artists who studied in Europe during the nineteenth century eventually worked in France, and the majority of them studied at the école des Beaux Arts (School of Fine Arts) in Paris. A student at the école could apply for training

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in one of two sections: the school of architecture or the school of painting and sculpture. Entering the school depended on a student’s ability to pass a rigorous entrance exam called the concours des places. The entering student was expected not only to exhibit talent as an artist but also to be well acquainted with world history. To remain in the school, the student had to pass a new version of the concours des places every six months. American women, who were not allowed to study at the école until 1897, often trained in private studios in Paris, and some lucky ones became members of an artistic circle that was an education in itself. Lilla Cabot Perry studied with and befriended artists such as Claude Monet, Camille Pissaro, and fellow American Mary Cassatt.8 Students from all over the world were willing to endure the rigor of the studies and the often cramped working conditions of the école because classes were free to those who passed the entrance exam, and especially because of France’s growing reputation as the home of some of the best artists. The école itself boosted France’s artistic reputation after reforms undertaken in 1863 professionalized the curriculum and raised the school’s artistic standards, thus “transforming the école into the Western art school par excellence.”9 The success that artists anticipated after completing their studies at the school also steeled many to endure the years of hard work combined with poverty. When the young H. H. Richardson wrote to his fiancé Julia Gorham Hayden of Boston in May 1862, urging her to be patient for his return to America, he reflected the attitude of many other Cosmopolitan artists: My life is monotony itself,—to-day is as yesterday and to-morrow will be as to-day. In fact I live the life of a recluse and attempt that of a philosopher. . . . I can’t say how long I will remain in Europe. It depends on various things . . . and you would prefer to have me remain a few months longer in Europe than return to America a second-rate architect. Our poor country is overrun with them now. I never will practice till I feel I can at least do my art justice.10

Dennis Miller Bunker’s painting and drawing skills blossomed under this rigorous training. His precocious talent opened the door to the studio of one of Paris’ most skilled painters, Jean-Léon Gérôme. He quickly became, according to an American friend living in Paris, “one of the strongest draughtsmen in Gérôme’s atelier.”11 Bunker proclaimed his enthusiasm for the beaux-arts education by inscribing

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his master’s creed on his drawing of a famous figure from the Parthenon: “Ces torses sont la base de l’éducation. Il faut être nourri sur ces choses-là dans la jeunnesse.”12 Significantly, Bunker’s respect of tradition did not stifle his innovative impulses when, in just a few years, he would become one of the first expert American practitioners of Impressionism.13 The life and work of Lilla Cabot Perry (1848–1933), an accomplished Impressionist painter with deep roots in Boston, is itself a vivid illustration of how travel and cosmopolitan experiences seeped into the day-to-day lives of many in Boston’s artistic community. Although better known for her work in the visual arts, Perry also dabbled at poetry, which she published throughout her life. The 1923 collection of Perry’s poems, The Jar of Dreams, includes a poem in which the narrator describes her deep affection for home as well as places abroad, such as Tokyo. Standing next to a plum tree on her balcony, the narrator describes the panorama of roofs below her, gleaming through a sheen of winter snow like “soft finger-paints.” After describing this outdoor scene, the poem turns inward: The sun breaks forth and now my plum tree smiles, Charming its feathery burden into dew, That all its flowers may drink a health to Spring! For February in Japan beguiles Even my homesick heart from thoughts of you, New England, still icebound and blustering.14

In this poem, Japan and New England exist side-by-side in the life and consciousness of this cosmopolitan artist. Similar to her brotherin-law John La Farge, Lilla Cabot Perry seems able to appreciate the distinctive attributes of both places, seeing them as being similarly attractive while maintaining a healthy respect for their differences. Perry only received her first formal art training at the age of thirty-six in 1884. Apparently self-taught up to that point, the work which she completed on her own before 1884 suggests that she had considerable talent.15 During the next three years she painted with a series of Boston-based artists who had trained in France—Alfred Quentin Collins (1884), Robert Vonnoh (1885), and Dennis Miller Bunker (1886)—before leaving with her husband and daughters to France for what would be a two-year stay.

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During this first visit to France, Lilla sufficiently improved her skills at two French painting academies to have two of her works admitted to the Salon de la Societe des Artistes Francais of 1889.16 In the summer of that same year, Lilla was motivated to spend the summer in Giverny, the home of Claude Monet, after seeing an exhibition of his paintings in Paris. In short time, she became a close friend of Monet and eventually published her reminiscences of the French artist. Through Monet, she would also befriend the artists Pisarro and the famous muralist of the Boston Public Library, Pierre Puvis de Chevannes. Her associations with these great artists not only influenced the shape of her art but also boosted her confidence in her own abilities to become a successful female artist in a profession dominated by men. She also enthusiastically promoted what she called the “new truth” of Impressionism in painting to the Boston artistic community through buying, exhibiting, and lecturing on the exciting innovations coming out of France.17 The depth of Lilla Perry’s connections with the French art community, especially Monet, is dramatized in a photograph taken in 1909. This photo does not feature Lilla; instead, it focuses on Perry’s daughter Alice and her infant granddaughter, Anita. In the background observing approvingly from the entrance to his Villa des Pinsons is Claude Monet and his wife. Perry’s transatlantic relationships, it appears, were handed down to two generations.18 Lilla’s favorite subjects were her daughters and landscapes. In Open Air Concert (1890), Perry features all three of her daughters enjoying a pastoral, sunlit late afternoon in the town of Milton, Massachusetts. The artist underlines the tranquility of the mood by focusing not on the eldest daughter, who is playing the violin, but on her two younger siblings, who seem to be in quiet awe of their older sister’s talents. The subtle influence of the Impressionists can be seen in the brilliant flecks of sunlight reflected off the blue background of the violinist’s dress. The main theme of the painting, however, focuses on the more conventional exploration of character. Just a year afterward, Impressionism had seeped much more deeply into Lilla Cabot Perry’s artistic palette. Again using her family and landscape as a conventional starting point for her work, Perry’s Alice in the Lane (1891) demonstrates the integration of some very modern painting techniques. Although Alice’s figure is at the center of the painting, her face is hidden from Giverny’s lateafternoon sun by a broad-brimmed hat. Instead of being drawn to

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studying Alice’s character, the viewer’s attention is drawn to her dress, a sharply rectangular shape colored by vertical streaks of purple, pink, and green—almost a painting within a painting behind which the girl’s figure is practically invisible. Finally, although the lane and cottage to the left of the painting are depicted using conventional perspective, the right side of the painting seems almost two-dimensional, with the subdued vertical purple of Alice’s dress in the foreground evenly balanced by the bright vertical streaks of a sun-drenched wooden-post fence in the background. In 1898, Lilla’s husband, Thomas Sargent Perry, was offered a three-year contract to teach in Keiogijuku University in Tokyo; Lilla and her daughters accompanied Thomas for the entire period. During this time, Lilla Cabot Perry applied her skills in the context of the new geography and aesthetic traditions of Japan. The effect of these travels on Perry’s work is revealed through her increasingly sophisticated blending of multiple cultural traditions. In a Japanese Garden (1898–1901) alludes to Monet’s own Japanese garden in Giverny (begun in 1893) and features a footbridge over a small body of water. Perry trumps Monet by depicting an authentic Japanese garden featuring a real Japanese woman in traditional dress, whereas Monet only had secondhand access to such pastoral scenes through prints and pictures. Intertwining her American, French, and Japanese lives even further, Perry chose to model her daughter Alice in a pink and blue Kimono in a painting that features very distinctly Impressionistic brushstrokes with the background and foreground almost blending together, but in a much smoother manner than seen in Alice in the Lane. Perhaps the most evocative painting of Perry’s Japanese period is The Trio (1898–1900), which mixes almost all of Perry’s longtime interests along with her more recent Japanese and French influences. This realistic painting employing Impressionistic techniques is one of the few that depicts all of Perry’s daughters playing European chamber music together on piano, violin, and cello. This was one of many concerts the Perrys held at their Japanese residence for their friends. These informal musical soirees were introduced to Tokyo by the Perrys and were soon “adopted by other members of Tokyo’s international community.”19 Although the painting records an instance of the Perrys sharing their transatlantic cultural background with Japan, the return of the painting to the United States (it is now stored at Harvard University’s Fogg Museum) marks an instance of

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the Perrys sharing some of their foreign discoveries with their native country. Perry’s three daughters (at this point in their teens) are shown in the long, formal dresses that would have been worn by many of their American peers. They are framed, however, in an elegantly spare Japanese interior design with a sprig of native cherry blossoms blooming in the painting’s upper right corner. This painting provides a quintessential artifact of the cosmopolitan era that would have been impossible without both the infrastructure of travel and tourism available to families of relatively modest means such as the Perrys and the liberal-mindedness of travelers like Lilla Cabot Perry, who were open to integrating new ideas and images that they encountered during their travels. It also depicts the joys of sharing one’s culture with people from other cultures that Henry James lovingly described in Italian Hours as well as in his own personal correspondence with Perry. In a letter written in 1912 from his home in England, James fondly reminisced about the warmth of the Perry household, remembering “such associations of tea & toast & talk . . . in that temple of harmony & sympathy.”20 As for Lilla, she tried to inspire her children and grandchildren to keep up the cosmopolitan example she had made for so many people in America and abroad. In an undated letter to her granddaughter, Lilla counseled: “Remember when you go to a country, try to plunge into the inner life of the country and to really know the people and their point of life, their ambitions, etc. I know the French as if I had made them, and the Japanese far better than [she refers to an unspecified “Mrs. L,”] who lived there 38 years.”21 Lilla Cabot Perry’s work is one of many instances in which careers of these artists built on their understanding of art history from around the world and on integrating it into their lives’ work. The perception that the past flowed into the present remained with them all of their lives.

E XPRESSING THE I NEXPRESSIBLE : C OSMOPOLITAN C OLLABORATION AND THE A DAMS M EMORIAL IN WASHINGTON , D.C. Sometimes the mixing of cultures, such as Henry James and William Dean Howells witnessed in New York City during the late nineteenth century, caused the Boston Cosmopolitans anxiety and

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confusion. Just as often, however, the Boston Cosmopolitans consciously mixed traditions and ideas from a variety of cultures to answer difficult emotional and intellectual questions. Pushing aside Emerson’s example of self-reliance, the Cosmopolitans eagerly sought guidance from any cultural source that might offer ideas and insights that they would have had difficulty finding in America alone. Perhaps the most impressive result of this cultural alchemy is a brooding, mysterious statue that now sits in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D.C. Erected in 1891 at the burial place of Henry Adams’ beloved wife, Marion “Clover” Adams, the statue stands as a monument to Adams’ profound emotional and intellectual searching following his wife’s suicide on December 6, 1885. Now known as the Adams Memorial, this work of art not only combines Eastern and Western aesthetics but also is a product of the collaboration of Adams with a variety of other Cosmopolitans: the artist John La Farge, the architect Stanford White, and the sculptor Augustus Saint Gaudens. During her married life, Clover Adams shared an interest in Asian art and culture with her husband that was first piqued by Henry’s cousin, Ernest Bigelow. Bigelow left Boston from 1882 to 1889 to live in Japan, and during his first years there he sent the Adamses many letters concerning his life abroad. Before Clover’s tragic suicide, the Adamses were planning to take a tour of Japan.22 When Henry Adams suddenly became a widower, he chose to keep his travel plans, partly in memory of his wife and also partly as a way to attempt to understand the meaning, if any, of her death. Henry was profoundly disturbed by the loss of his wife, which signaled the end of his married life and which must have reminded him of the untimely loss of his older sister, who had died at the young age of thirty-nine in 1879.23 (Henry was at his sister’s side as she passed away after a freak carriage accident in Italy.)24 Searching for a travel companion who could help him to endure the pain of his solitude, Adams persuaded his old friend, John La Farge, to accompany him, and Adams threw in the extra enticement of paying all of La Farge’s expenses during the trip. Adams caught La Farge at the right time, for the painter was feeling frustrated in his attempts to portray the ascension of Jesus Christ in a large mural just commissioned by the Church of the Ascension in New York City. Eager for a change of scenery, La Farge rationalized his capricious

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departure by claiming that Japan’s countryside might provide him with a landscape mysterious enough to do justice to the representation of the resurrection.25 The trip John La Farge and Henry Adams took together was facilitated by their connections to two Bostonians then living in Japan: Ernest Bigelow and his fellow Bostonian expatriate Ernest Fenollosa, who had been teaching in Japan at the University of Tokyo since 1878 and who later became Boston’s foremost collector of Asian art in the 1890s. Both of these Harvard men accompanied their newly arrived friends for most of their five-month tour of Japan.26 During their journey, Adams and La Farge were particularly intrigued by the distinctive aesthetics and philosophy of Buddhism, to which La Farge devoted many pages of prose and drawings in his published account of the trip, An Artist’s Letters from Japan (1897). Adams, propelled by his consuming grief from the loss of his wife as well as by intellectual curiosity, was drawn to those aspects of this Eastern religion that could offer him some respite from striving to find a reassuring reason or meaning behind Clover’s death. When he was eventually able to articulate his attraction to the concept of Nirvana, he interpreted it as symbolizing “self-absorption into the universal and the infinite, in anonymity, in the extinction and restlessness of the will.”27 In the concept of Nirvana, Adams found a philosophy that validated his experience of a sadness that exceeded understanding. During the difficult emotional journey from grief to acceptance of the loss of his wife, Adams was inspired to create a monument that represented his own emotional and intellectual discoveries abroad. The idea for the monument more than likely came during conversations with John La Farge, for soon after the two friends returned from their excursion in Japan in late 1886, Adams applied himself to gathering the resources and especially the talent necessary for such a project.28 The monument Adams had in mind was loosely based on the female Buddhist deity, Kwannon.29 In Japanese Buddhist theology, Kwannon is the female version of the male god, Avalokitesvara, “the Lord who looks down with compassion,”30 who “aids all people who call upon him in need, helping them with numerous arms of compassion.”31 Kwannon would be capable not only of consoling those in grief but also could reach out to those whose suffering had prompted them to end their own lives. Although Adams was a great connoisseur of art, he was not himself an accomplished artist. Therefore, to help in the task of translating his

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idea into a physical artifact, Adams sought the assistance of an old friend: Augustus Saint Gaudens, then living in New York. The two men had first been introduced to one another by the architect H. H. Richardson during the construction of Boston’s Trinity Church in the 1870s. (At that time, Adams was a Harvard professor living in the Back Bay not far from the construction site of the church; Saint Gaudens was assisting John La Farge in painting the decorative interior of the church.)32 To create the setting for the statue, Saint Gaudens consulted one of his long-time collaborators, the architect Stanford White.33 After the first discussions between Adams and Saint Gaudens (which probably occurred shortly after Adams’ return from Japan in late 1886), the statue took a full five years to complete. Knowing that his highly critical eye might impede the work on the monument, Adams withdrew from any active role in creating the statue. Nonetheless, Adams grew impatient. He described this process to a friend in 1891, around the time the statue and its setting were approaching completion. At times I begin to doubt whether Saint-Gaudens will ever let the work be finished. I half suspect that my refusal, to take the responsibility of formally approving it in the clay, frightened him. Had I cared less about it, I should have gone to see it, as he wished, and should have admired it as much as he liked, but I had many misgivings that I should not be wholly satisfied with his rendering of the idea; and that I might not be able to conceal my disappointment. So I devolved the duty on La Farge, and I know not what qualifications La Farge may have conveyed to Saint-Gaudens’ mind.34

Although Adams may have been correct to minimize his own input, the lack of direction he was willing to give may have paralyzed Saint Gaudens, whose only surviving written records concerning the themes that the statue should symbolize offer the vaguest of guidelines: “Adams—Buddha—mental repose—Calm reflection in contrast with the violence or force in nature.”35 The give and take between Adams, Saint Gaudens, and their collaborators eventually resulted in the creation of a truly cosmopolitan work of art, as revealed in one of Saint Gaudens’ attempts to receive some more guidance from Adams around 1890. Writing from New York, the sculptor asked, “Do you remember setting aside photographs of Chinese statues, Buddha, etc., for me to take away from

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Washington? I forgot them. I should like to have them now. Is there any book not long that you think might assist me in grasping the situation? If so, please let me know so that I might get it. I propose soon to talk with La Farge on the subject, although I dread it a little.”36 Although the statue (Figure 5.1) conveys an unmistakably “Asian” or “Eastern” aesthetic, the artists actively negotiated to incorporate some more conventionally “Western” touches, such as

Figure 5.1

The Adams Memorial. Photograph by author.

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Stanford White’s successful petition to include a “small classical cornice” that would embellish the marble background for the statue.37 Saint Gaudens described his progress on the statue to Adams as the creative product of the mixing of ideas and aesthetics from a variety of cultural traditions: “If you catch me in [my New York Studio], I will show you the result of Michalangelo, Buddha and Saint Gaudens.”38 The power of the Adams Memorial to express the ineffable grief and confusion Adams felt on the death of his wife might be better understood by seeing the statue as the symbolic representation of the twenty years missing from his famous autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams. Although Adams denigrated his education as having failed to have prepared him for the rapid changes brought about by modernity, Adams did not permit that sense of failure to stop him from expressing his opinions in written form. In fact, The Education could be seen as an extended meditation on the theme of failure. Despite Adams’ gifted prose, there is nothing but a gaping silence where the discussion of his marriage and his wife’s death should be. Adams skips over this period in the space of a few paragraphs and summarizes it in terse sentences: “Education had ended in 1871; life was complete in 1890; the rest mattered so little!”39 On the contrary, the rest mattered very much—perhaps too much for him to express. The time, money, and effort Adams put into honoring the memory of his wife shows how very important she was to him. Her loss was, in fact, too great for him to represent or remember on his own. Adams, therefore, reached out to his fellow Cosmopolitans to help him to create an artistic representation of the incalculable loss he felt as a widower. The combination of Western and Eastern styles was a cooperative venture among the Boston Cosmopolitans, who used all the cultural resources at their disposal in an effort to represent the missing chapters of Adams’ life.

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John La Farge articulated his ideas not only in stained glass and murals but also through the written word. La Farge’s effect on American arts and letters, although now largely overlooked, was considerable in his day. As a boyhood friend of William and Henry James, he took painting lessons alongside William and encouraged

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Henry to devote himself to writing instead of art.40 In later years, he gave Augustus Saint Gaudens one of his first important jobs (at Richardson’s Trinity Church),41 and this began an enduring friendship with the young artist. In his autobiography, Saint Gaudens credited La Farge with being one of his greatest sources of inspiration.42 In addition to being Henry Adams’ companion and foil during a trip to Japan in 1886 and to the South Pacific in 1890–91, La Farge later accompanied Adams to view the stained glass of Chartres during trips to France in 1899.43 Both men seemed thankful for the lively exchanges that took place during the many months they spent together around the world. La Farge’s dedication to his book, An Artist’s Letters from Japan, took the form of an intimate letter of appreciation to his opinionated friend: “If anything worth repeating has been said by me in these letters, it has probably come from you, or has been suggested by being with you—perhaps even in the way of contradiction.”44 Adams confided to a close friend in 1891 that he felt much the same about La Farge: “he is the only man of genius I now know living, and though he had seven devils, I would be his friend for that.”45 Adams and La Farge occupied two extremes of the intellectual spectrum shaped by a fin de siécle understanding that the world had become infinitely more complex in their time than it had been for men and women of previous generations.46 Adams despaired in the face of such complexity and wrestled with the specific complications brought about by the growth of big business, immigration, and the decline of religion as a unifying cultural force—trends that were all being accelerated by the inexorable rise in the cold power of technology. Attempting to allay his fears about these complications, Adams had for a time been lured by the potential unifying powers of aesthetics to balance the increasing disorder of modern civilization— a theme he explored in his work on French medieval culture and architecture, Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres (1904), and subsequently in his autobiography (1907).47 Nonetheless, Adams eventually gave in to the relatively new concept of entropy when he argued for the application of science to the study of history in a 1910 paper, “A Letter to American Teachers of History,” in which he offered “a theory of history based on the Second Law of Thermodynamics,”48 predicting that the universe was doomed to end in disorder.

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In his autobiography, Adams held that the increasing complexity of the modern world could not be understood, and he was highly skeptical that some degree of harmony and understanding could be achieved in modern life. Recalling a day in 1892 when he and La Farge roamed the galleries of the Louvre, Adams recorded his dismay at recent trends in art: At the galleries and exhibitions, he was racked by the effort of art to be original, and when one day, after much reflection, John La Farge asked whether there might not still be room for something simple in art, Adams shook his head. As he saw the world, it was no longer simple and could not express itself simply. It should express what it was; and this was something that neither Adams nor La Farge understood.49

Although Adams represented his own thoughts clearly and articulately, La Farge may have well protested against Adams’ presumption to speak for him. Adams’ despair was balanced by La Farge’s guarded optimism. Both men had peered into the same fluid world around them, often side by side, but each came away with different convictions about how to react to the changes they had witnessed. The reason La Farge and other like-minded Cosmopolitans such as Isabella Stewart Gardner, Henry Hobson Richardson, and William James did not give up on trying to understand and improve the world is that they did not share Adams’ desire to understand everything or to summarize the world by finding some foundational first principle from which life’s intricacies could ultimately be deduced. As James Kloppenberg explains, this was an era during which, at least for a while, the (unchanging) principles by which Adams lived were being challenged by a new philosophical paradigm of uncertainty. The embracing of uncertainty—the belief that truth and human understanding of the world were not permanent but contingent or products of history—opened the door for a more flexible philosophy, one that emphasized adaptation to new truths rather than deduction from old ones. Accepting uncertainty was disquieting, especially when confronting new problems that seemed to demand rapid solutions, but for those who were able to adapt to this new paradigm, uncertainty could be energizing, because it gave humankind more control of its own destiny through the belief that people were major participants

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in the creation of the world in which they lived. In other words, uncertainty opened up philosophical space for human free will. Instead of searching for Adams’ cherished first principles, La Farge sought a tool that could salvage a feeling of unity amidst the flux of the modern world. Great art, in La Farge’s view, provided a tool that could help to construct some kind of common language and experience in the present—much in the way William James hoped philosophy could make varieties of religious experience intelligible to as many people as possible. According to La Farge, art would realize this potential if artists employed traditional techniques and motifs that were familiar to their audience in their effort to represent the unique realities of their own lives in the present. In the beginning of a series of lectures on art given at New York’s Metropolitan Museum in 1893, La Farge claimed that in “all of the greatest artists there is a humble workman who knows his trade and likes it. Art is a language and has a grammar that varies only as languages vary.” Art, then, constituted a kind of speech used “for that form of communication which is best suited to individual capacities.” Although individuals may see the world in many different ways, a successful work of art mediates those differences through the use of a common artistic language and grammar that changes very slowly over time. Thus, “we students, who study together, may see that originality does not consist in looking like no one else, but merely in causing to pass into our own work some personal view of the world and of life.”50 Art and artists did change over time, but neither could hope to communicate without having deep roots in the grammar of art—or, in other words, in art history. Otherwise, the artist’s skills would go to waste on a work that only had private meaning.

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The fruitful results of the friendly disputes between the pessimistic Henry Adams and the more optimistic John La Farge are recorded in one of La Farge’s most interesting written works, An Artist’s Letters from Japan (1897), in which he described the trip that he and Adams took to Japan in 1886. In addition to the illustrations of Japanese art and architecture and the many verbal description of the Japanese culture, An Artist’s Letters features a few pointed discussions between La Farge and an unnamed skeptical companion.

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Although his interlocutor is never identified, La Farge’s foil certainly must have modeled on the character of Henry Adams. In a dialogue with this skeptic who claims that La Farge did not need to “come this distance” to learn about the virtues of art as manifested by the Japanese, La Farge explains the advantages in traveling abroad. His skeptical interlocutor asks him: If there is anything good here, it must resemble some of the good that we have with us [in the United States]. [La Farge answers:] But here at least I am freer, delivered from a world of canting phrases, of perverted thought, which I am obliged to breathe in at home so as to be stained by them. Whatever pedantry may be here, I have not had to live with it, and I bear no responsibility in its existence.51

For all his praise of Japan, La Farge never seems tempted to live there permanently. In fact, it is the temporary quality of his stay there that helps to make it valuable, for in leaving just a few months after he arrives, La Farge avoided being influenced by the “cant” and unquestioned beliefs that every culture, including that of Japan, maintains. In An Artist’s Letters from Japan, La Farge returns to the United States with what he believes is the greatest lesson he learned from his travels in Japan: that (to use Victor Turner’s vocabulary) communitas can be achieved through art. For La Farge, seeing art in Japan convinced him that art and skilled artists alike share the same principles: “the love of certain balanced proportions and relations which the mind likes to discover.” Often, he contends, great art is also a “protest at what is displeasing and mean about us; it is an appeal to what is better.”52 La Farge goes so far as to claim that art functions to unite Japan, that “art here seems to be a common possession, has not been apparently separated from the masses, from the original feeling of mankind.”53 La Farge believed that art could provide a positive influence on culture in the modern age, offering a common vocabulary that could make the varieties of human outlooks on the world intelligible to one another. Like Coleridge before him, La Farge believed that he was made aware of universal artistic principles through its existence in the particular, in this case the particular being the art of Japan. La Farge’s narrative suggests that the particular could only be fully appreciated when its uniqueness was first made clear. In the

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strange culture and landscape of Japan, the particular hit La Farge with its full force. Thus, La Farge celebrates the principles common to all great art while at the same time insisting that these universal principles manifest themselves in distinct ways. The possibility for the common principles of art to create bridges between cultures was, in La Farge’s opinion, a “simple” truth of art that Adams described as illusory in his autobiography. In An Artist’s Letters La Farge contradicts Adams’ skepticism through two strategies: by asserting that the universal can be discovered in the particular and by transforming Adams’ primary expressive tool, language, into visual symbols that can surpass the limitations of language itself.54 In the arrangement of words and illustrations in his text, La Farge succeeds in mixing Japanese and American cultures. He does this by bringing together Japanese writing and English writing on the same page (see Figure 5.2). Specifically, he inserts pictures of artistically rendered inscriptions or signatures of Japanese artists in his written text, moving the margin in to accomodate these pictures. This manipulation of the text brings the reader’s attention to the juxtaposition of two different kinds of writing—one text in English that is read horizontally from left to right and another in Japanese that is read vertically from the top of the page to the bottom. In a passage placed next to an illustration of the signature of his favorite Japanese artist Hokusai, La Farge asserts that if he were to write a history of Japanese painting, it would, in the end, “simply be the history of humanity at a given place.”55 La Farge’s words function literally and symbolically to bridge the distances between Japanese and American cultures. This visual mixing of cultures on the written page seems far from an accidental decision because La Farge’s book contains many illustrations that take up a single page without sharing any space with the text. In addition, La Farge explicitly acknowledges the limits of the written word, asserting that language cannot adequately describe how art works because “words are a poor rendering of sight.” La Farge also draws attention to the artistry in Japanase handwriting. Japan’s culture, he writes, is so attuned to the historical meaning imbedded in its language that its “handwriting may then give full play to art, in a written language in which ideography is the key.”56 In An Artist’s Letters from Japan, La Farge builds on this Japanese tradition by using his own pages as novel ideograms that represent

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A page from An Artist’s Letters from Japan

the blending of two cultures whose geography and history seem at first glance to be very distant from one another. La Farge continues to use letters as symbols to underscore his belief that art can help different cultures communicate to one another in the two dedications that open the book. The first dedication is made to Henry Adams. As previously noted, La Farge thanks Adams for his thorough criticism and loyal friendship. Otherwise, there is nothing too extraordinary or unique about this dedication on its own. The importance of the dedication becomes more obvious when it is compared to what immediately follows. In the second of two opening dedications, La Farge praises Okakura Kakuzu, the

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author of The Art of Tea and an influential interpreter of Japanese culture in the United States generally and Boston in particular, where he was employed at the Museum of Fine Arts in 1904 and had a further effect on the cultural scene through his friendship with Isabella Stewart Gardner.57 In this second dedication (Figure 5.3), La Farge thanks Okakura for having first introduced Japanese culture to him and ends with this vision of what Victor Turner would call communitas: “We are separated by many things besides distance, but you know that the blossoms scattered by the waters of the torrent shall meet at its end.”58 In these dedications, La Farge creates a vision of universal artistic truths that can bridge differences between himself and

Figure 5.3

Dedication page from An Artist’s Letters from Japan

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Okakura. At the same time, La Farge shows that maintaining them depends on efforts that are particular to a certain time and place. As if to ensure that Okakura and the Japanese culture he comes from are not eclipsed by this vision of universal agreement, La Farge’s dedication to Okakura in English is presented as the translation of an original dedication in Japanese.59 Because the vast majority of his readers could not have been expected to read Japanese, the dedication in Okakura’s native language seems to act as a visual reminder that La Farge’s book on Japan is an attempt introduce the ancient culture of Japan to Americans through a contemporary translation, a translation that was as difficult as it was valuable. In other words, the dedication in Japanese functions as an ideogram to an American audience (which includes Adams) to remind them of a complex lesson: Although Japan’s culture can be translated, those translations can never be transparant reproductions of that country’s culture.

B RIDGING THE R ACIAL G AP THROUGH A RT: T HE S HAW M EMORIAL At the same time that John La Farge published An Artist’s Letters, Jim Crow laws in the southern United States had succeeded in segregating blacks from whites. In addition, the Supreme Court ensured that segregation could remain on the law books of the southern states when, in the famous Plessy vs. Ferguson case (1896), it upheld a Louisiana law that required separate railroad facilities for blacks and whites. The Supreme Court held that separate facilites were not inherently unequal and therefore did not violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. In reality, separating blacks from whites stigmatized the former and favored the power of the latter. To be sure, the conflict between the races in the United States posed a much more difficult and emotionally charged problem than the bridging of Japanese and American cultures that La Farge had tried to visualize, but the lessons learned through An Artist’s Letters from Japan and the Adams Memorial could be applied to the problem of racial prejudice in the United States. In Boston the year after Plessy, Augustus Saint Gaudens, William James, and others celebrated the potential of art to contradict the spirit and the letter of Jim Crow racism with the power of images.

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On May 31, 1897, William James gave the keynote address following the unveiling of the Shaw Memorial, a statue commemorating the exploits of the famous fifty-fourth Massachusetts regiment, one of the first black units to fight beside whites in the Civil War. The memorial was named after Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, the young white officer from Boston, Massachusetts, who led the regiment in a courageous Union assault against Fort Wagner on the coast of South Carolina on July 18, 1863. The idea for a statue of Colonel Shaw and his troops had first been suggested by Joshua B. Smith, a leading black businessman in Boston, as early as 1865. It was quickly embraced by elite Bostonians, including Governor John Albion Andrew and Senator Charles Sumner, who helped to form a committee to raise money for the monument. The sudden deaths of Governor Andrew and Senator Sumner temporarily derailed the work of the committee in selecting the artists who would create such a monument. Eventually, in 1883, the committee’s treasurer, Edward Atkinson, asked his Brookline neighbor, Henry Hobson Richardson, if he would take charge of creating the architectural setting for the monument. Richardson accepted the task and immediately suggested that Augustus Saint Gaudens be given the task of creating the statue. Although he first signed a contract to begin work on a statue in February 1884, Saint Gaudens’ early plan to complete the statue in approximately two years proved far too optimistic. When Richardson passed away in 1886, Saint Gaudens sought out his old collaborator Stanford White to complete the architectural setting for the monument. As Saint Gaudens continued to work on the project, the sculptor’s designs became more daring and dramatic. He would eventually present his “labor of love” just a few days before its scheduled unveiling in 1897, more than thirteen years after he had originally agreed to create it (see Figure 5.4).60 On the day of the unveiling, Saint Gaudens and William James shared a carriage that took them in a procession from the Shaw Memorial to the Boston Music Hall, where the ceremonies continued in the afternoon. The two men were accompanied by prominent public figures, including the governor of Massachusetts, the mayor of Boston, Booker T. Washington, and surviving veterans of the 54th regiment. William James described the day’s events to his brother, Henry:

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The Shaw Memorial. Photograph courtesy of Irina Tarsis.

The day was an extraordinary occasion for sentiment. The streets were thronged with people, and I was toted around for two hours in a barouche at the end of the procession. There were seven such carriages in all, and I had the great pleasure of being with St. Gaudens, who is a most charming and modest man. . . . It was very peculiar, and people have been speaking about it ever since—the last wave of the war breaking over Boston, everything softened and made poetic and unreal by distance, poor little Robert Shaw erected into a great symbol of deeper things than he ever realized himself. . . . The monument is really superb, certainly one of the finest things of the century.61

Saint Gaudens recalled the unveiling of the monument somewhat differently: The impressions of those old soldiers [of the 54th], passing the very spot where they left for the war so many years before, thrills me even as I write these words. They faced and saluted the relief, with the music playing “John Brown’s Body,” a recall of what I had heard and seen thirty years before from my cameo-cutter’s window [as a young man in New York City]. They seemed as if returning from the war, the troops of bronze marching in the opposite direction, the direction in which they had left for the front, and the young men there represented

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now showing these veterans the vigor and hope of youth. It was a consecration.62

Of all the day’s events, the appearance of the veterans of the 54th regiment—men whose character and bravery was imagined and contemplated by Saint Gaudens for thirteen years—was particularly moving to the sculptor who had portrayed them. William James’ connections to the monument and what it stood for were perhaps deeper than those of Saint Gaudens. His strongest link to the men of the 54th was quite personal: His younger brother, Garth Wilkinson James (“Wilky”), was one of the white officers who helped to lead the 54th in the attack on Fort Wagner, South Carolina, in July 1863. Garth James managed to survive the battle, but not without incurring serious injuries. He later died at the age of thirty-eight. The memory of Wilky must have been weighing heavily on William James during that overcast May afternoon. Although William and Henry were the eldest of the four James brothers, they were the weakest physically. When the Civil War broke out in the 1860s, the real risks of fighting were faced by Wilky (1845–83) and his little brother, Robertson James (1846–1910). Barely beyond adolescence when they entered the battlefield, the younger James brothers continued their heroic efforts as men when they became part owners of a plantation in Florida in February 1866. The brothers, along with five other Union veterans, hoped to set an example of enlightened capitalism by treating their black laborers well, paying them good wages, and even educating their children in a racially mixed school. Although this venture proved to be a failure, Bob and Wilky showed that they were willing to act on their idealism even after having served as soldiers during the Civil War.63 Although William James was by this time an accomplished public speaker, on this occasion he was quite nervous. In letters written during the first half of 1897 to his brother, Henry, William confided that he had hesitated “to accept the chance to speak at the ceremony.” He also complained that he had found it hard to avoid “the vulgar claptrap of war sentimentalism” and described his final draft of the speech as a “schoolboy composition, in good taste, but academic and conventional.”64 James’ rhetorical strategy to avoid patriotic cant was to use the bronze figure of Colonel Shaw to embody two kinds of heroism: military courage and civic courage. Shaw’s death at Fort Wagner,

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James commented, demonstrated how war could inspire human beings “to sink their selfishness in wider . . . ends”; but military courage, as a means to teach men to be selfless, had been much talked about and, according to William James, overrated by his contemporaries. By making this argument, James’ wisely did not attempt to echo or reiterate the eloquent visual statement made by Saint Gaudens, which would have brought attention to the shortcomings of language to evoke the feelings that could be stirred by the monument. Instead of focusing on Shaw’s heroic death, James dedicated his speach to explaining the significance of Shaw’s decision to leave the Massachusetts 2nd regiment (made up of white soldiers) and enter the 54th in the first place. Before the formation of the 54th, James claimed, the conflict had been “a white man’s war.”65 This changed dramatically when Robert Shaw dared to defy racism in the South as well as the North by treating black men as his equals. “That lonely valor (civic courage as we call it in peace times),” James said, “is the kind of valor to which the monuments of nations should most of all be reared.”66 According to James it was the small, unnoticed, and unforced selflessness of the American people—their “civic genius” as he also called it—that lacked sufficient praise and notice in the United States. Without this genius, there would be little assurance that the messy and desperate measures of the Civil War would simply create the conditions that would precipitate another war in the future. Unlike the dramatic finality of military defeat or surrender, the unsung civic selflessness would have to be repeated ad infinitum.”67 Because most people would notice the military courage symbolized in the Shaw Memorial without difficulty—the kind of courage that Wilky James would also be most remembered for—William James took pains toward the end of his speech to laud the less striking but equally important civic courage of Shaw’s initial decision to lead the 54th. James would apply his own civic courage to the needs of 1897 by describing what he believed were two indispensable civic habits that would extend the gains of the Civil War into the future: “One of them is the habit of trained discipline and good humor towards the opposite party when it fairly wins its innings; and the other, that of fierce and merciless resentment towards every man or set of men who overstep the lawful bounds of fairness or break the public peace.”68 At first glance, these maxims might describe the obviously minimal standards of democratic government, yet the lack

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of civility and a sense of fairness in the national government of the United States certainly were major contributors to the sectional enmities that preceded the Civil War.69 These calls to the American public to practice constant civic vigilance (James referred to it as “mugwumpery”70) in defense of the public good inspired James to end his speech with a vision of universal respect and understanding among citizens in the United States: “O my countrymen, Southern and Northern, brothers hereafter, masters, slaves, and enemies no more, let us see to it that both of those heirlooms [of civic courage] are preserved.”71 James’ final words at the occasion of the unveiling of the Shaw Memorial can be seen as a restatement of John La Farge’s attempts to bridge the differences between the Japanese and American cultures without forgetting the unique qualities of each. In other words, James agrees with La Farge’s view that the universal is not discovered to reside permanently outside of ourselves but is, instead, continually recreated through the humane interactions between diverse people during specific times and at specific places. James’ brief call for blacks and whites to consider each other as brothers was the one time in his speech when he attempted to match the stirring vision of racial cooperation captured in the Shaw Memorial. Although Saint Gaudens’ memorable work possesses an eloquence that was hard for James to capture in words, the sculptor’s first plans for the memorial were less impressive. The story of the evolution of the Shaw Memorial itself parallels William James’ belief that the military valor of the Civil War was useless sacrifice without the corresponding civic courage to put those ideals into practice in society. Very conscious of taking part in a long artistic tradition of equestrian statues, Saint Gaudens looked to European precedent for inspiration. The most directly traceable precedent for the Shaw Memorial can be found in an undated letter that Saint Gaudens wrote to his niece, Eugenie Nichols. He asked her to do something for him while she was in Paris: “Dear Genie—Will you do me a kindness?—Stop in at Soule’s the photographer and get me a photo of Messionier’s picture called 1814 I believe.”72 The exact title of the painting was Compagne de France, 1814, a painting of Napoleon as a military commander in the field of battle, housed in the Louvre. Although Saint Gaudens had long practiced the art of relief sculpture—the style that would eventually be used for the Shaw

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Memorial—the first clay models of Robert Shaw show that the artist had planned a sculpture on much more conventional lines: Colonel Shaw was first depicted as an almost free-standing figure, either standing next to or seated on his horse.73 As art historian Lois Goldreich Marcus has shown, if the Shaw Memorial had been completed according to the original plans the monument would have represented Shaw as a charismatic military leader, such as King Henry IV of France had been depicted by French sculptors Henri Lemaire and Francois Lemot in the first half of the nineteenth century.74 Luckily for Saint Gaudens, the Shaw Memorial was transformed from a celebration of past military prowess to a vision of future civic harmony and cooperation. That transformation came about thanks to the “civic genius,” as William James might have called it, of the Shaw family itself. Aware of the historical figures commonly associated with equestrian statues, they told Saint Gaudens that the original plans for the memorial were too grandiose. Colonel Shaw died at the age of twenty-six, and although his actions had been heroic he had never reached the rank of general; furthermore, he had never proven himself to be a great military leader or strategist.75 Despite the family’s reservations, Saint Gaudens still hoped to depict Shaw on horseback: “accordingly,” Saint Gaudens recalled in his Reminiscences, “in casting about for some manner of reconciling my desire (to do an equestrian) with their ideas, I fell upon a plan of associating [Shaw] directly with his troops in a bas relief, and thereby reducing his importance.”76 With this compromise, Saint Gaudens had found a way to meld military and civic virtue through his art. In so doing, he would also hit on a way to bring together two pieces of American society that had usually been perceived as irreconcilable. On May 31, 1897, William James noted: “we have chosen to take Robert Shaw and his regiment as the subject of the first soldier’s monument to be raised to a particular set of comparatively undistinguished men.” Even more remarkable for the late nineteenth century, the Shaw Memorial distinguished itself by being the first public monument in the United States to depict blacks in a realistic and dignified way. Indeed, once Saint Gaudens had decided to include the foot soldiers in Shaw’s regiment in his work, he steered sharply away from any stereotyped depiction of black men by actively seeking out live models that would mirror the great variety of the faces and ages of the men who fought alongside Colonel Shaw.77

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Saint Gaudens’ repeated pleas to the Shaw Memorial Committee for more time to complete the statue reflects the artist’s desire to create a moving monument based on a difficult combination of idealism and realism.78 Thus, through his realistic and thorough integration of black soldiers with the figure of Colonel Shaw seated on his horse, Saint Gaudens simultaneously recalled and projected into the future the scene of black and white Americans united in the task of overcoming racism. Images depicted in works like the Adams Memorial, the Shaw Memorial, and An Artist’s Letters from Japan conveyed daring thoughts and novel experiences that could not be adequately expressed in words. Yet there were limits to the power of images like these. Sculptures, as well as paintings, are relatively small and are usually seen by an educated public who seek out these objects, which are often displayed in museums and exhibitions. The Adams Memorial in Washington, D.C., for example, is hidden behind a bower of trees in the middle of a very large cemetary. The isolation of the memorial contributes to the mystique of the sculpture, but it also can restrict its aesthetic and cultural effect to the small number of people who know how to find it. These limitations of scale do not pertain to larger structures designed by architects. Unlike paintings and sculptures that are often located within an existing structure or public space, buildings have the potential to shape public space. In fact, some buildings are large and welcoming enough to create new public space. This was true for the important buildings constructed by three of the Boston Cosmopolitans: Trinity Church by Henry Hobson Richardson, the Boston Public Library by Charles Follen McKim, and Fenway Court, better known as the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Because of their size, these buildings could integrate paintings, sculptures, and other objects under one roof, thus reproducing in microcosm the process of discovering foreign cultures and new ideas that the Cosmopolitans encountered during their travels around the world. Through their rich decorative schemes, these buildings also encouraged Americans who walked in or around them to change the busy pace of their lives. To appreciate these buildings’ aethetics qualities required people to slow down and spend time in one place. In an effort to deepen our understanding of cosmopolitanism in architecture, this narrative slows its pace as well, paying special attention to the important details of the history, construction, and urban setting of these three buildings.

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A R C H I T E C T U R E : T H E C O S M O P O L I TA N C O N T R I B U T I O N T O P U B L I C S PA C E Having no architectural type of our own as distinctly American to follow, we have greater latitude of selection than would obtain in any of the countries in the Old World; for, without any national traditions to maintain, we can choose among all styles and all ages. —Henry Hobson Richardson, 18721

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iscovering Boston for the first time, tourists often visit Copley Square for the restaurants, shops, bookstores, parks, cafés, lectures, fashion, concerts, architecture, and the sheer human activity that this concentration of attractions brings. Because Boston is an old city, visitors must often locate themselves by using landmarks rather than a grid of perpendicularly arranged streets. In search of a center of orientation, newcomers cannot help but notice the building that now dominates Copley Square: a structure of glass and steel rising alone and stiletto-like, seven hundred ninety feet in the air: the John Hancock Tower. Unfortunately, the building’s observation tower has been closed since the tragic attacks of September 11, 2001. Before then, guides to Boston often recommended looking at the whole of Boston’s landscape from this view. Aided by the commanding view, tourists felt a bit more confident about finding their way around this urban space. Directly below, one could view two of Boston’s architectural gems: the Boston Public Library and Trinity Church. The library (1887–95), the guide tells us, was finished in the 1890s and housed, at the time, a book collection

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even larger than that of the Library of Congress. Facing the reserved elegance of the Boston Public Library lies a very different building on the eastern edge of the square: Trinity Church (1872–77), designed by Henry Hobson Richardson. (See Figure 6.1.) In contrast to the elegant horizontal lines of the library, the church, made with rough stones of different shades of brown, attempts to defy gravity by pointing its heavy weight toward the sky, culminating in a series of Romanesque towers that surround a pyramid-like roof. Flanked by the east and the south by late-twentieth-century buildings more than twice its height, the church can remain practically invisible to visitors until its existence is somehow brought to their attention—one of the virtues of a useful guidebook. Walking past the arches of the single-story porch and through the vestibule, visitors encounter Trinity Church as Richardson and his contemporaries had planned it in the nineteenth century, the entry being neither altered nor overshadowed by the changes of the twentieth century so visible outside its walls. The first steps inside the church bring visitors into a quiet setting where street noises become faint. Going a little further in, the short nave makes the whole interior visible from one central vantage point. The details of the interior

Figure 6.1

Trinity Church. Photograph courtesy of Allyson Boggess.

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design then catch the viewer’s attention: The interplay of the red, blue, and gold of the paintings and stained glass on the walls; the strength and elegance of the supporting columns; and the intimacy of the compact arrangement of the pews encourage visitors to sit, relax, and reflect. Richardson and his assistants succeeded in creating an urban liminal space—an area that was part of the city, yet at the same time distinct, separated from its pace and noise—and adding a Byzantine flavor far removed from Boston’s architectural heritage. Liminal architectural space made by Cosmopolitan artists and architects was decisively shaped by their travels. In those spaces, modern visitors not only encounter traces of the travels abroad taken by H. H. Richardson and Isabella Stewart Gardner but also enter an area that mimics travel itself. These architectural gems are truly unique public spaces that, thanks to their singularity, permit visitors to be transported from the quotidian routine of the city. In Trinity Church, visitors find themselves simultaneously inside Boston’s city limits and encouraged to dream of places and cultures that are very far away. To appreciate these buildings fully, visitors must follow Henry James’ advice (made in Italian Hours) to take their time and revisit these special places to allow their artistry to “sink in.” One brief “grand tour” of these sites would not suffice.2 Considering the architecture in Boston that was designed by Boston Cosmopolitans during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—Trinity Church, the Boston Public Library, and Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Fenway Court—one is struck by the positive effect of these buildings on the cultural and social life of the city of Boston. All were artistic masterpieces designed to be easily accessible—physically and aesthetically—to the general public. Although these structures certainly used symbols and styles whose origin (be it Byzantine, Classical, Venetian, or Italian Renaissance) and connotations might be apparent only to highly educated Bostonians, these signs and symbols were used principally as inspirational starting points for original nineteenth-century art.3 None of these buildings feature or emphasize abstruse iconography used to exclude less-educated Bostonians from appreciation of these structures. The men and women who designed these eclectic buildings intended to make a positive contribution to the public space, and in so doing they made Boston more interesting, more humane, and more habitable.4 The principles that animate the disparate forms of these buildings were drawn from the Cosmopolitan understanding that human

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beings’ great cultural diversity did not preclude the existence of some transnational human needs and human traits. The first principle that most Cosmopolitans believed in was that beautiful architecture, like any work of art, could enhance the lives and appeal to the senses of most of the people who walked by or through these structures. According to John La Farge, great art was a graphic or physical product of basic human desires, the “first primeval” needs of the artists themselves. Art is, La Farge contended, “the love of certain balanced proportions and relations which the mind likes to discover and to bring out in what it deals with, be it thought, or the actions of men, or the influences of nature.” According to this definition, a work of art emerges only with the conscious participation of human beings through active “discovery” rather than passive observation. This can be seen as a restatement of Henry James’ contention that no one person could dictate strict aesthetic rules for others. The beauty and power of art and architecture had to be discovered by each individual. The second principle of Cosmopolitanism in architecture was that architecture should always honor human beings’ aesthetic needs by subordinating iconography and specific messages to the overall aesthetic wholeness of their work. La Farge recognized that art history pointed to the creation and development of a great variety of artistic styles; nonetheless, La Farge explained in his memoirs of his trip to Japan, “I can see nothing from the earliest art that does not mean living in a like desire for law and order in expression.”5 Cosmopolitanism in architecture, then, is defined by the principles it upholds rather than the specific form it takes. It is also idealistic without being abstract, anchoring its love of aesthetic forms in the lived experience of human beings in a specific time and place. It is inclusive rather than exclusive, not only because it upholds what the Cosmopolitans believed to be aesthetic universals but also because cosmopolitanism in architecture is deliberately complex without being abstruse, and in so doing invites a variety of reactions and interpretations on the part of those who enter its space.6

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I NTRODUCING C OSMOPOLITANISM TO A MERICAN A RCHITECTURE : H OBSON R ICHARDSON AND T RINITY C HURCH

Cosmopolitanism began to shape American architecture decisively on April 21, 1873, the day the first wooden piles that would support the foundation of Trinity Church in Boston’s Back Bay were driven into the ground.7 The original design of the church was by Henry Hobson Richardson, and on its completion the architect achieved international fame for his ability to integrate different styles into one organic work. Yet behind the massive polychromatic stone structure ornamented by elegant Romanesque arches and towers lay a less visible but crucially important element of the Cosmopolitan spirit that made this original architectural possible: the collaboration of many artists in the realization of one building.8 Art critics writing in the 1870s noted the church’s “novelty in American art, its uniqueness in depending upon the efforts of artists rather than artisans, and its place as a forerunner of a new movement in religious decoration in which art and architecture would be fully integrated.”9 The stunning Byzantine-style interior resulted from the collaboration of Richardson and John La Farge, who was hired to embellish the walls of the church. La Farge, in turn, worked with many young artists who would soon make a name for themselves in the history of art: George Willoughby Maynard, Francis Lathrop, Francis Davis Millet, and Augustus Saint Gaudens.10 Other than the shape of the interior, the only thing that Richardson determined was that the dominant color of the walls should be red.11 This spirit of collaboration and the openness to ideas and forms of many cultures were surely not exclusive to the architecture shaped by the Cosmopolitans, although they were more able than many other American architects and artists to create built spaces that possessed these features. Cosmopolitan architects and architectural critics distinguished themselves through their acute interest in the way human beings felt or experienced the built environment in which they lived. Henry Adams, one of the most sensitive of the Cosmopolitans to the interaction between human beings and buildings, devoted much space in his 1904 book on medieval church architecture to the effect of a beautiful cathedral on the people who enter its space. Although cathedrals such as his beloved Chartres were replete with iconography that conveyed biblical, theological, and political meaning,

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Adams maintained that the deep feelings evoked by experiencing the space of architecture resulted from the aesthetic combination of many disparate elements that went far beyond any implicit or explicit meaning: The true significance of Chartres was not easily translated into words. Adams’ description of the sun’s transformation of the beautiful stained glass into a sensuous experience is not so much a representation of that experience as a suggestion from the spectator’s point of view—an enticement for readers to see for themselves. Adams’ words attempt to place the reader in the center of the church, from which “one sees the whole [of the church where] all the great rose windows flash in turn, and the three twelfth-century lancets glow on the western sun. When the eyes of the throng are directed to the north, the Rose of France strikes them almost with a physical shock of color.”12 Cosmopolitans such as Adams learned to appreciate the aesthetic potential of great architecture in its many diverse forms through their travels to places such as France, Italy, Egypt, and Japan. Not surprisingly, most of the Cosmopolitans shared his belief in the importance of creating delight for people who interacted with buildings and monuments. Adams cultivated friendships with people such as H. H. Richardson, who were busy creating buildings and other public edifices that put a priority on the human element in an architectural setting. Adams was particularly pleased with Richardson’s design for his home in Washington, D.C., in 1886. However, nothing probably exceeded the shock and delight that Adams felt on first seeing the vision of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on February 7, 1906—a building that seemed to be shaped by the same love of play and variety that animated the construction of Chartres.13 To understand and appreciate the peculiar qualities of Cosmopolitan architecture, one has only to look at American architectural trends during the forty preceding years. Before the end of the Civil War, many of the colossal and most influential buildings in America were closely associated with the country’s nation-building efforts. The importance of such architectural symbols was best dramatized by the construction of Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. Even while the Northern war effort moved clumsily between defeat and victory, President Lincoln remained determined to allocate scarce resources toward the completion of Capitol Hill—resources that could have been directly applied to the seemingly more pressing needs of troops and generals. In response to a question that pressed

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Lincoln on why construction continued while the result of the war was still uncertain, the president replied that the Capitol’s dome was “a sign we intend the Union to go on.”14 Decades before the Civil War, architecture expressed the nation’s preoccupation with its role in world history as the first large democratic nation in modern times. The most prominent set of symbols that would demonstrate the people’s commitment to the democratic experiment would be found in an architectural movement known as the Greek Revival. After struggling to maintain the nation’s hard-won integrity in the midst of imperial jousting between the English, the Spanish, and the French since the end of the Revolution, Americans emerged from the War of 1812 with an opportunity to rest from the stressful and distracting task of defending themselves from invasion. On one hand, this calm brought forth an explosion of economic energy, for Americans were now not only free to trade overseas without fear of angering the French or the British but could also divert their energies to settling, cultivating, and trading in the interior of the continent. On the other hand, this robust economic energy was accompanied, paradoxically, by inner soul searching. Following the end of perennial conflict with European powers, Americans could no longer define themselves as easily through their efforts against common enemies. As the nineteenth century progressed, the first generation of Americans born in an independent country became the self-conscious, wide-eyed heirs of their revolutionary forefathers, whose personal and political achievements loomed over them like huge, neck-craning monuments. The coincidental deaths of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (July 4, 1826) seemed like a divine confirmation of the importance of the Revolutionary generation. The Greek Revival responded to both the outward and inward energies of a generation of Americans who were charged with steering the nation after it broke free from its political and military subservience to Europe. The role of the Greek Revival in American nation-building was especially visible in the architecture that followed on the heels of western expansion: the buildings made to house the governments of the new states (see Figure 6.2). The state capitals of, for example, Kentucky (1825–27), Tennessee (1845–59), and Ohio (1838–61) featured temple-style buildings with massive columns and bright

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white exteriors, visible for miles in the then–sparsely populated states. In the first decades of their existence, these structures would overpower whatever neighboring structures might sprout up beside them and overshadowed if not dominated the surrounding landscape. Greek Revival was also used in a variety of public edifices, such as Quincy Market in Boston (1825–26) and the Second National Bank in Philadelphia (1818–24).15 The bold and massive forms of the Greek Revival were stunning, but they often overstated their message. That the Greek Revival left little room for doubt or multiple interpretations paradoxically may in itself have been a more subtle sign of Americans’ mixed emotions about their nation’s future during the early national period. Americans’ underlying lack of confidence that they would be able to match the deeds of their ancestors did not allow for architectural forms announcing the nation’s future to show any deviation from or actual doubt in the message that the Greek Revival was meant to convey.16 Because much of the Greek Revival architecture put a priority on creating structures that would function as symbols whose meaning would unambiguously promote the course of democracy for the young republic, there remained room for little else. Sublime strength and size dominated the aesthetics projected by these buildings, and

Figure 6.2 Tennessee State Capitol, 1867. Courtesy of the Tennessee State Library and Archives. Photograph stored in the Tennessee State Library Collection, Drawer 22, Folder 110.

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although it is true that a human being’s encounter with the sublime is thrilling, it can come at a significant cost. As Edmund Burke explained in his classic study on the characteristics of the sublime, when human beings “contemplate so vast an object . . . of almighty power . . . we shrink into the minuteness of our own nature, and are, in a manner, annihilated.”17 In stark contrast, the first priority in the architecture by the Boston Cosmopolitans was not to create symbols that convey some overwhelming message (e.g., representing “democracy” or “God”). Instead, Cosmopolitan architecture began with an acute awareness of the aesthetic and practical needs of human beings and strived to create spaces that tended to those needs. To paraphrase Henry James’ anti-Ruskinian beliefs about art, the Cosmopolitans believed that buildings were made for people, not people for buildings. Because human beings’ needs are complex, Cosmopolitan spaces often feature many styles and shapes that offer a pleasing aesthetic variety to the individual observer while maintaining an artistic coherence on a human(e) scale. In attempting to read Henry Hobson Richardson’s Cosmopolitan aesthetic, one must rely, for the most part, on reading his built structures, for Richardson left few written records to explain the architectural and aesthetic decisions he made. Luckily, Richardson’s architectural education gives us some important clues about the architect’s methods and intentions. Richardson’s desire to become an architect coincided with developments in nineteenth-century artistic pedagogy that were crucial to the development of Cosmopolitan architecture, including the emergence of the école des Beaux Arts in Paris as a worldwide center for professional artistic training in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1863, the école underwent many reforms that brought it into worldwide prominence.18 The influence of the école on the development of young American artists around the time of the Civil War was considerable because, as Henry James noted in his biography of William Wetmore Story, America had no school of fine arts that could even remotely compare with European schools during the mid-nineteenth century. American students who entered the école such as Henry Hobson Richardson, Augustus Saint Gaudens, and Charles Follen McKim were exposed not only to technical and artistic ideas during their professional training but also to the cultural heritage of Paris in particular and Europe in general. For example, in the assignments for architectural

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students at the école, it was common for beginning architects to collaborate and study side by side with other students who specialized in painting and sculpture. Students were also expected to learn outside of their chosen specialization: Architects had to learn about drawing, and painters had to learn about building design.19 In addition, architects were rewarded through grades and especially through entering mandatory competitions sponsored by the école for their ability to sketch quickly the outlines of an architectural project and then to use that sketch for the basis of their final product.20 The sketches (esquisses) that won the most praise displayed the ability to create a building for a specific purpose that used architectural ideas from the past and maintained a geometrically proportional relationship between all the parts of the building. For instance, the architect might choose some segment of the church as a base length to which all other parts of the building were mathematically related. At the école des Beaux Arts, that segment was called the module. Richardson wrote about this in his description of Trinity Church, printed for the consecration services for the church in 1877.21 In a rare explicit statement concerning his preference for the Romanesque style, Richardson revealed some of his reasons behind the design of Trinity Church in a document written for the dedication of the church in 1877. Richardson explained that he was drawn to this style for practical as well as aesthetic reasons. He favored the Romanesque because “its treatment of masses [offered] an inexhaustible source of study,” a variety of forms that were as pleasing to the eye as they were adaptable to a wide range of architectural problems. In the case of Trinity Church’s Copley Square location, the architect would have to adapt to the situation of planning for the placement of church tower for “a building fronting three streets.” Although most church towers rose from a building’s corner, this would not be possible for the site on Copley Square “where, from at least one side, [the tower] would nearly be out of sight.” Richardson found that Romanesque precedents from the Auvergne region of central France gave him potential solutions to this problem: For this dilemma, the Auvergnat solution seem perfectly adapted. Instead of the tower being an inconvenient and unnecessary addition to the Church, it was itself made the main feature. The struggle for precedence, which often takes place between a Church and its spire,

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was disposed of, by at once and completely subordinating nave, transepts and apse, and grouping them about the tower as the central mass.22

In the previous passage, Richardson describes the manner in which he (as well as many Cosmopolitan artists) freely adapted from European art history to create buildings that responded to the context of urban growth in the United States during the late nineteenth century.23 Although forms like the Romanesque were centuries old, for Americans discovering Europe, they presented rich new possibilities. Other important elements of Richardson’s Cosmopolitan aesthetic can be inferred from the writings of one of his closest friends and collaborators, Frederick Law Olmsted, the pioneering landscape architect who designed Central Park and many other urban green spaces around the United States. Olmsted wrote hundreds of pages explaining his aesthetic theories in his attempts to persuade the leaders of growing cities from Boston to Seattle that they should set aside potentially commercially valuable land for the creation of parks and other green spaces for public use. Richardson was very sympathetic to Olmsted’s ideas. These two men, who dominated their respective disciplines during the late nineteenth century, not only worked together in various projects (such as Franklin Park and the Fenway in Boston, as well as several majestic buildings in North Easton, Massachusetts) but were neighbors in Long Island in the 1860s and again in Brookline, Massachusetts, from 1883 until Richardson’s death in 1886.24 Making his case before many city, state, and national officials during the urban boom of the last third of the nineteenth century, Olmsted explained the human issues that were at the center of his aesthetic. He particularly objected to city planning that was largely shaped by commercial interests. Mocking any complacence about the merits of a supposedly superior American civilization, he protested in 1877 that the “most brutal pagans to whom we have sent our missionaries have never shown greater indifference to the sufferings of others than is exhibited in the plans of some of our most promising cities, for which men now living in them are responsible.”25 In contrast to the short-sighted and selfish motives that often held sway in the development of cities, he pointed to public parks as a way to balance narrow commercial interests with broader human needs. The raison d’être of a public park, Olmsted asserted, is

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its “effect on the human organism by an action of what it presents to view, which action, like that of music, is of a kind that goes back of thought, and cannot be fully given the form of words” (emphasis added).26 An arresting example of the humane aesthetics of Cosmopolitan architecture is recorded in the history of Boston’s Trinity Church, which was practically built for and around the personality of its dynamic minister Phillips Brooks. Before moving from Philadelphia to Boston in 1869, Brooks had already developed a reputation for fiery and inspired rhetoric from the church pulpit. At the age of thirty, in 1865, Brooks’ eloquence had opened up a unique opportunity: He delivered a eulogy for Abraham Lincoln as the nationwide funeral procession passed through Philadelphia. A few years after his being hired as the minister at Trinity Church in Boston, his congregation decided to move out of its building, located close to the corner of Washington and Summer streets in downtown Boston—a neighborhood that was quickly being transformed from a residential community into a business district. A few years later, the parish had further motivation to build a new church when the fire of 1872 destroyed its present structure.27 When H. H. Richardson applied himself to the task of designing a new Trinity Church on Copley Square, he used Brooks’ personality and speaking style as a tool to shape the character of the building’s interior. As a result, the architect created a relatively short nave and moved the pulpit into equal prominence with the altar, which elevated the importance of the minister’s sermon during the church’s services and brought the congregation into closer contact with him. In addition, Richardson further complemented Brooks’ personality by specifying his preference for a warm and lively red to be the dominant color of the church’s interior.28 The New York Times commented on this social element of Trinity Church’s architecture: “religion insists upon being heard and is social, and therefore it tends to the art which appeals to the social sense, and presents the life of the past to the life of the present time.”29 From the perspective of New England’s ecclesiastical traditions, this was a radical departure from the neat and reserved white interiors of the Congregational churches that dominated the region’s landscape, but from the perspective of Cosmopolitanism in architecture, it made perfect sense to reflect the personality of Trinity’s minister in the shapes and colors of Trinity Church. Using Brooks’

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personality as the conceptual foundation of the church also facilitated the delegation of ornamenting the church’s interior to a fellow Cosmopolitan, the artist John La Farge. Richardson chose La Farge not only for his artistic talent but also for his Cosmopolitan outlook and training, which included a broad education, a familiarity with French and English aesthetic theory, and a disposition to borrow from a wide range of artistic styles.30 Taking Richardson’s lead, La Farge greatly enhanced the emotional effect of the interior red with a Byzantine-inspired decorative scheme, setting off the dominant color with a subtle mix of gold and deep shades of blue.31 Although the influence of Cosmopolitan artists on Boston’s architecture began on a precise date, many important precedents made it possible. The first of these precedents was rooted in the history of Boston itself. The Romanesque silhouette of Trinity Church took shape in a city that was very comfortable with a past strongly linked to Europe. In contrast to some of the newer cities sprouting up in the American West after 1800, Boston’s architectural and urban heritage stretched back more than a century before the Revolutionary War. In addition to the vestiges of English sixteenth-century and Neoclassical urban design that contributed to its character,32 Boston’s cultural and architectural heritage reminded nineteenth-century Bostonians of a time when Boston was an English colonial city. Although Boston’s residents in the late twentieth century still proudly commemorate the city’s role in breaking away from English rule in the late 1700s, the age and the shapes of the buildings all over New England, the winding streets in Boston, and even the names of the surrounding towns such as “Essex” and “Gloucester” have constantly reminded Bostonians of their English cultural heritage. Indeed, Bostonians were unenthusiastic participants in the War of 1812 between the United States and Great Britain, and after the war Boston became a center for American Anglophilia. The memory of Boston’s English heritage would be revived even just a few years after the Revolution in one of the most prominent buildings in the city: the Massachusetts State House on Beacon Hill by Charles Bulfinch (1795–98). Although it shared the Neoclassicism of most the capitol buildings of the western states, its Neoclassicism was based on an extant English building, Somerset House in London.33 The past, then, was a visible element of Boston’s present in the nineteenth century—an element that was neither shunned, venerated,

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nor idealized in huge abstractions but was accepted as a central component of Boston’s evolving cultural identity. While the école des Beaux Arts was inspiring many American artists of the mid-nineteenth century, Bostonians were revitalizing their city through ambitious urban projects whose inspiration also came from France. The problems arising from the growing population of Boston pressing on the unsanitary borders of the undeveloped Back Bay moved the city to fill in most of the Back Bay and its marshes. Starting in 1857, seven hundred fifty acres of soil would eventually be transported by rail from Needham, nine miles away from Boston, to marshy tracts of land close to the mouth of the Boston side of the Charles River.34 Strongly influenced by the example of Baron Haussmann’s transformations of the Parisian urban landscape that began in 1853 and continued until the Franco-Prussian war of 1870,35 the designers of the Back Bay ornamented this new urban space with long, tree-lined boulevards and judiciously arranged housing lots sufficiently held back from the street to create breathing space and pleasing vistas for pedestrians walking in any direction.36 With the emergence of the Back Bay, Boston demonstrated that its tastes were creative and eclectic. This was just the sort of energy and dynamism that would provide a friendly context for the continued growth of cosmopolitanism in Boston’s architecture.

VARIATIONS ON A T HEME OF C OSMOPOLITANISM : C HARLES F OLLEN M C K IM AND THE B OSTON P UBLIC L IBRARY Soon after Charles Follen McKim achieved world prominence as a master architect for his design of the Boston Public Library (1887–95), he used his reputation and often his own money to found an equally ambitious institution: the American Academy in Rome (1894). The academy would be an architectural think tank of sorts, a place where trained architects, sculptors, and painters would have the opportunity to collaborate with and learn from one another. Rome was the city where the école des Beaux Arts also sent its best young architects to explore the architectural legacy of Rome, a privilege that the école had reserved for its French students. McKim’s academy would offer talented American architects an opportunity that he had coveted during his student days in Paris. By

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living in Rome, the fellows at the American Academy would be surrounded by a city whose buildings added beauty to the urban landscape through their classic—and classical—forms. Although McKim and the architectural firm that bore his name, McKim, Mead, and White, have been remembered for their role in promoting Neoclassical and Renaissance forms in American cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, McKim’s American Academy in Rome did not attempt to transform the firm’s success into scholarly dogma. On the contrary, McKim hoped that working at the academy would offer the fellows insights into what he believed were the general principles of successful architecture that shaped that ancient city.37 Although by the end of World War I the academy in Rome became increasingly conservative in its single-minded advocacy of classicism, the institution began with a much more open agenda.38 Specifically, McKim attempted to extend the pedagogic methods and ideals of the école des Beaux Arts into an American Academy located on Italian soil—a truly cosmopolitan endeavor. Given the fact that McKim envisioned that the American Academy would teach general principles of architecture rather than insist on aping specific architectural forms, it is clear that McKim’s Boston Public Library was built as a logical extension of the principles of Cosmopolitan art that were founded across Copley Square at Richardson’s Trinity Church. Although McKim worked for Richardson from 1871 to 1872,39 and some architectural critics have noted the similarities between Trinity Church and the Boston Public Library—especially in the way both architects employed a variety of artists to embellish and ornament their work40—far more has been made of the differences between the two men and their work.41 In further contrast with Richardson’s work, the Boston Public Library and the wave of Neoclassicism it ushered in (also known as the architectural “American Renaissance”) has been interpreted as a physical sign of the greed and pomposity of the Gilded Age.42 Although the Gilded Age was certainly a time of unparalleled concentration of wealth in the hands of financiers and businessmen, it was also a time when art, beautiful building materials (such as marble), and highly skilled laborers (mainly immigrants from Europe) were both relatively cheap and abundant, thus making the grandest architectural designs increasingly feasible.43 Although it is true that the issue of permanently transporting art from foreign lands to the United States brings up some complicated ethical questions, it is not

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at all clear that the Cosmopolitans saw their artistic acquisitions as an upper-class right and privilege. According to John La Farge, it was unfair to accuse art collectors in the United States of “lavish display or selfish dilettantism.” On the contrary, as he wrote in 1909, although “demagogues have tried to class collectorship with forms of unproductive or wasteful luxury . . . , art property is not measured in terms of proprietorship. The more our collectors get from Europe, the richer we, all of us Americans, are—and the richer also Europe becomes in the influence of her traditions and of her authority upon us.”44 At the same time that the Boston Public Library was being built, McKim and his partners had another chance to increase their fame through their participation in what has been remembered as the “White City” at Chicago’s “Columbian Exhibition” of 1893. Although the huge Neoclassical structures that rose in the White City have appeared to some critics as the emblem of American Renaissance insensitivity and American imperial ambitions,45 art historian Leland Roth points out that the ordered beauty of this temporary city also provided the catalyst for the creation of urban planning departments, “changing the popular notion of urban development from laissez faire to informed and reasoned amelioration.”46 The architectural record belies any description of McKim, Mead, and White’s work as simply serving the interests of the rich; instead, we can see these architects as men who responded both to the building opportunities brought about by the accumulation of capital as well as the social and aesthetic problems that were emerging as a result of urban growth. They did this by building their reputations on the design and construction of beautiful urban (rather than rural or suburban)47 structures, many of them made specifically for public use, such as the Boston Public Library and New York’s Pennsylvania Station (1902–11). McKim and his partners used their unrivaled architectural reputations to direct a good portion of the capital accumulation of the Gilded Age’s “robber barons” to projects whose legacy would be the beautification of urban, public space. For example, the final cost for the Boston Public Library was over budget, by a full $1,030,000;48 nonetheless, the project succeeded because McKim’s reputation and his own political and social skills49 combined with Bostonians’ desire for a world-class library to ensure that the grandeur first envisioned in the architectural plans would eventually be realized. Indeed,

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McKim, Mead, and White’s dedication to completing the library as they had first planned could be measured by the fact that each of the partners made only a few hundred dollars profit for each year of their efforts.50 Although influential critics like Lewis Mumford have cavalierly dismissed McKim, Mead, and White’s Neoclassical style as a symptom of the most avaricious imperialism seen since the days of the Roman Empire—Mumford described New York’s Pennsylvania station as a monument to the un-American legacy of McKim, who “worshipped whole-heartedly at the imperial shrine”—the public’s attachment to these buildings is quite a different story. A gulf separates many negative assessments or dismissals of McKim’s Neoclassical legacy from the public’s enthusiastic reaction to the same structures.51 A closer look at the Boston Public Library itself, the passionate debate surrounding its policies around the time that it was being built, and the way McKim used art to participate subtly in these debates points to an aesthetic that is neither populist nor aristocratic. Instead, McKim’s Cosmopolitan background helped him to create an aesthetic that might be called “democratic luxuriance.” Boston’s newspapers recorded the public’s enthusiasm on the occasion of the opening day (February 1, 1895) of the Boston Public Library (Figure 6.3).52 The trustees had decided to open the library to the public for a week before the library actually began to process and lend its books. The Boston Globe led its story on the library with spirited headlines that hinted at the public’s anticipation of this cultural event: “IT OPENS TODAY.” (The Globe’s readers presumably knew what “it” referred to.) The smaller headlines following indicated that the public believed that the library was both luxurious and democratic: “Public Library at Last is the People’s”; “Will be Inspected Seven Days”; “Description of Grand Tour Through Building”; “Is Finest of Its Character in Whole World.”53 The Boston Herald heaped more praise on the newly opened building in their series of headlines the day after the opening: “LIBRARY DOORS OPEN”; “The Public Walks Into the Great Building”; “No Dedicatory Exercises, No Formality Whatever”; “Many Thousands Feast on the Beauty of the Place.” The lack of formality was especially appreciated by the Herald because it seemed to underline how those who had constructed the library did nothing to imply that the library was an act of noblesse oblige.54 The Boston Traveler summed up the public’s feeling of delight when it

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Figure 6.3 Exterior of the Boston Public Library, 1985. Courtesy of the Boston Public Library, Print Department.

came into possession of this structure: “THE LIBRARY IS OURS.”55 Looking more closely at the articles below the headlines, one can discern how the library functioned as a liminal space that reproduced the feeling of traveling long distances. As the Boston Globe implied in one of its headlines, walking in the public library was akin to taking the Grand Tour of Europe. Many of the illustrations accompanying the articles featured groups of men, women, and children strolling through the library, pointing out special points of artistic or architectural interest to one another. Other illustrations focused on some architectural features of the building’s interior, allowing readers who did not come to the library’s opening a chance to appreciate its character. The Globe also told of the plans for the “New Public Library’s Art Marvels” (both finished and unfinished) noting that works by “St. Gaudens, De Chevannes, Whistler, Abbey, Elliot, Sargent and Others Will be Represented in the Scheme of Decoration.”56 The newspapers underlined the fact that the people who enjoyed touring the library represented a cross-section of Boston’s population: “All were there alike,” reported The Herald: “rich and poor, gentle and simple, mothers and laborers. It was a crowd which gave

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the looker-on a lesson in the bedrock principles of democracy when people assembled for such a purpose before such a building.”57 The Boston Evening Transcript acknowledged that appreciating the aesthetics of the library could be a employed as a sign of what twentieth century critics have called “cultural capital” but asserted that the library’s architecture curbed both intellectual superciliousness and philistine indifference: “It throttles even aesthetic snobbishness, and makes the toryism of taste pause in humility. The veriest [sic] hoodlum, who still disapproves of ‘the looks’ of the library, may come into this palace of the people and drink of its gentle influences and breathe in its sweetness and light as if he were a prince of the blood of the elect.”58 After complimenting the arrangement of books in the library for making patrons feel at home, The Transcript concluded: “Indeed, people declared on the very first day they felt as much at home in the hall [i.e., Bates Hall] as if they had been accustomed to read there all their lives. No higher tribute than this could be paid to the architect.”59 In an 1896 article exhorting New Yorkers to support a first-class library system, the New York Times confirmed that these initial impressions of the Boston Public Library’s broad appeal were successfully realized: “It has attained such a hold upon the people of Boston by ‘coming home to their business and bosoms’ that it has become their most cherished local institution, and that not only has the ground for its building been given by the city, but it is magnificently housed at the public expense.”60 The reported feeling of camaraderie among different classes suggests that the liminal space found in trains and ships could be reproduced in a building like the Boston Public Library. The Herald, in fact, described the main reading room, Bates Hall, in terms that made it resemble the lounge of a steamship docked next to a fascinating port city: “Into this great room the crowd poured [when they first entered]; to it they returned again and again from their voyages of discovery; and there they finally returned to sit and rest, tired with sightseeing, in the comfortable, old-fashioned armchairs which surrounded the long oak tables which were stretched in double rows from one end of the hall to the other.”61 The artistic space created in the Boston Public Library made its visitors feel like they were traveling to a new land. As in the case of Richardson’s Trinity Church across Copley Square, McKim sought to make the messages of the library’s iconography

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much less important than its overall aesthetic coherence.62 The subordination of architectural parts to the whole can be seen not only in the overall impression of the Boston Public Library’s interior and exterior design but also in the skillful way McKim harmonized the work of many artists who contributed to his effort. His orchestration of disparate forms of art in one building soon set the standard for public architecture all over the United States.63 Thus, in attempting to persuade the French artist Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, the most famous muralist of the late nineteenth century, to decorate the Boston Public Library, he sent a model of the main staircase for his perusal. McKim instructed his messenger, John Galen Howard, an American studying architecture in Paris, to call on M. Chavannes and represent to him for the “Trustees and this office our desire to have him undertake the work at his own price. . . . Choice of subjects to be left entirely to him” (emphasis added).64 Although McKim was not sure what theme or message the artist might try to represent through his mural, he certainly knew that Chavannes’ subdued symbolist style would blend in well with his plans for the staircase.65 McKim’s interest in the aesthetic details of the library is particularly vivid in his execution of the main staircase, an area that set the tone for the rest of the building’s interior (Figure 6.4). The staircase was characterized by a grandeur of style and detail constructed on a human scale. It was also the site where the public would be welcomed into the library, placing the visitor in a space whose sensuousness was matched by its artistic skill. In a surprising contrast to the breadth of the horizontal lines of the library’s exterior, the entrance to the library might be called modest. The combined length, width, and height of any segment of the main entrance creates an area that is generous without at all being cavernous, in contrast to the gargantuan proportions of a comparable public building such as the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Unlike the aesthetics that characterized many large public buildings in the United States before the Civil War, the Boston Public Library eschewed the pompous and sometimes clumsy assertiveness of the Greek Revival’s symbolic invocation of democracy and opted instead for a democratic style that would allow those who entered the library the liberty to enjoy a variety of aesthetic, emotional, or intellectual experiences. The subtlety and beauty of McKim’s art quietly emerges, particularly in his use of marble on the main staircase. McKim’s attention to detail on the staircase has often been

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Figure 6.4 Interior of the Boston Public Library, 1985. Courtesy of the Boston Public Library, Print Department.

called painterly, for the color of its rare yellow marble slowly changes from dark to light shades as the visitor ascends to the reading room on the second floor, a transition enhanced by the contribution of natural light that enters most dramatically during the afternoon, halfway up the stairs on the first landing.66 Stopping on the landing, a visitor might notice the interaction of interior and exterior, dark and light, as well as the intellectual and sensuous experiences that combine to make the building an accessible, vital, and multilayered work of public art. McKim’s inclination to make the Boston Public Library a place of discovery for its patrons and his distaste for policing the content of the library’s holdings can be seen in his decision to include Frederick MacMonnies’ sculpture, the Bacchante, as the centerpiece of the library’s courtyard. In 1896, the statue was offered to McKim by MacMonnies in gratitude for financial assistance he had received

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from McKim when the young sculptor was beginning his training at the école des Beaux Arts in 1884 at the age of twenty-one. The Bacchante, a joyful nude female figure, seems to be skipping or dancing while holding a bunch of grapes in one hand and a smiling infant in the other. McKim admired the statue enough to give it to the library in memory of his recently deceased wife (and Boston native) Julia Appleton. Despite McKim’s enthusiasm, and the approval of the statue by the majority of the library’s trustees, the Bacchante aroused opposition from groups such as the Massachusetts Women’s Temperance Union and the Watch and Ward Society, as well as prominent individuals like Charles Eliot Norton and Charles Eliot, the president of Harvard University. For many individuals worried about temperance issues, the bunch of grapes held by the female figure seemed to be an endorsement of public drunkenness, and as Jonathan Leo Fairbanks has pointed out, the realistic statue “was not the idealized, smoothsurfaced, Neoclassical image of female beauty (like the Greek Slave by Hiram Powers or William Wetmore Story’s Venus Anadyomene [1864] in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) to which Bostonians had grown accustomed.”67 The Boston Post asserted that in addition to the immorality of the statue, the Bacchante was just one example of the inappropriate domination of European art in an American building.68 The most important group to disapprove of the statue was the Art Commission of the City of Boston. Although prominent Cosmopolitans such as Augustus Saint Gaudens provided written and verbal testimony supporting the inclusion of the statue, the five members of the Art Commission were uneasy about accepting it.69 Because they were also fearful of taking the decision by themselves, they appointed a “Committee of Experts” to debate the measure. The seven-member group included Charles Eliot Norton, whose opposing voice was sought after in the Boston Post, a newspaper that had long criticized the expense of building the Boston Public Library.70 Although a majority of the committee’s members eventually approved of the statue, Norton remained opposed and permitted his objections to be reported publicly in the Post. He allowed that the statue possessed artistic merit but worried that for “the public, who look not always from an artistic standpoint, more harm is apt to be worked than good.” Norton added that he believed that a museum would be a better place for the piece, no doubt hoping to

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limit the statue’s audience to a the more educated segment of Boston’s society. Finally, Norton threw this critical barb: “I think the Bacchante remarkably clever, but between you and me, isn’t she very ugly?”71 In this casual remark, Norton revealed what Henry James later called an overconfidence in aesthetic matters, which led Norton to make pronouncements on art that were absolute. Although people like Norton encouraged younger Cosmopolitans such as Henry James and Charles Follen McKim to explore the world, Norton expected everyone to draw the same lessons from their encounters with other cultures. Although James and Norton would heartily condemn the excesses of American materialism together, they greatly diverged on the morals that should be derived from works of art. Norton’s unbending and self-appointed guardianship of American morals sometimes made him look ridiculous to the younger Cosmopolitans. This presumptuousness led people like William James to criticize Norton for his lack of imagination.72 For his part, McKim was disgusted at the outrage provoked by the statue and was sure that these views were not held by the majority of Bostonians.73 Bostonians were clearly divided on the issue. Because the resistance to the statue remained vocal and persistent, the trustees and McKim eventually withdrew it on May 28, 1897. McKim then offered it to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.74 The gap separating McKim’s approval of the Bacchante from Norton’s disapproval suggests that cosmopolitanism had gone through some important changes since Norton and Emerson’s conversations onboard the Olympus in 1873. In 1873, Norton was inspired to use European art and cultural history as a counterexample to what he believed was America’s single-minded materialism and narcissistic optimism in the hope of uplifting Americans’ moral goals and public life. By 1896, most of the Boston Cosmopolitans were less concerned with specific moral lessons and more interested in providing increased cultural and intellectual choices, which would add more depth and variety to everyday life in the United States. For Cosmopolitans around the turn of the century, single-minded moralisms could be just as confining as single-minded materialism. The younger generation of Cosmopolitans (one of whom was McKim) would apply themselves to creating intellectual, cultural, and physical space for the world’s diversity.

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T HE C ULMINATION OF C OSMOPOLITANISM : I SABELLA S TEWART G ARDNER ’ S F ENWAY C OURT If there were ever a hub of cosmopolitanism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was located in Isabella Stewart Gardner’s museum and residence, located on the Fens of Boston’s Back Bay. A student of the conservative Cosmopolitan Charles Eliot Norton as well as an enthusiastic admirer of the more adventurous William James, Gardner was simultaneously open-minded and unabashedly opinionated; she freely chose ideas and inspiration from a variety of people and cultures to aid in the creation of her very own art museum, a dream she cultivated from her adolescence. During her early days of collecting, in the 1870s, she was one of the few women to attend Norton’s art history lectures at Harvard University. Soon afterward, she followed Norton’s advice in the field of Renaissance arts and letters and acquired some rare editions of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Later in life, her collecting followed more in the spirit of William James. Although she maintained Norton’s love of early Italian Renaissance art, Gardner—like William and Henry James—resisted those people and ideas that would force the variety of human experience to conform to one abstract notion of truth, beauty, or morality.75 James and Gardner enjoyed each other’s company: She invited James to the opening night celebrations of Fenway Court in 1903, and James returned the compliment by inviting her to a dinner he planned for Samuel Henry Butcher, a professor of Greek at Edinburgh University who lectured at Harvard in 1904.76 In creating her museum, Gardner reached the apex of Cosmopolitan aesthetics: She successfully subordinated the symbolism of the particular parts of her art collection at Fenway Court to the aesthetic integrity of the museum as a whole and integrated artifacts from a wide range of cultures; she further promoted the Cosmopolitan belief that beautiful art had a beneficial effect on the people who came in contact with it. William James took notice of these elements of Gardner’s work when he wrote to her soon after attending her party given to inaugurate Fenway Court: “May I add, dear Madam, that the aesthetic perfection of all things (of which I will not speak, for you must be tired to death of praise thereof) seemed to have a peculiar effect on the company, making them quiet and docile and self-forgetful and kind, as if they had become as children (though children are just the reverse!)”77 In this quasi-public building shaped

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by an aesthetic that was unique and personal but at the same time Cosmopolitan, Gardner, in effect, created a physical representation of her discoveries during her international travels (Figure 6.5).78 Unlike the present-day situation of Trinity Church and the Boston Public Library, the skyline around Fenway Court has not gone through many significant changes since the time when it was built. The building rises four stories from the edge of the Back Bay Fens, and its reflection on the still water is faintly reminiscent of the reflections of Renaissance palazzos on Venetian canals. The outside of the building resembles austere Renaissance villas found near Milan and Florence, cities that Gardner knew well.79 Inside, the lush courtyard is surrounded by the gothic architectural ornamentation from the Venetian Renaissance, tucked safely away from Boston’s harsh winters. Surrounding the courtyard, Gardner arranged art and artifacts from around the world in distinctively personalized galleries. More than McKim at the Boston Public Library or even Richardson at Trinity Church, Gardner exercised almost complete control over Fenway Court. She financed its cost, conceived the design of

Figure 6.5 Exterior of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Photograph courtesy of Allyson Boggess.

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the building, supervised its construction, and arranged the art that filled its rooms. She even bullied Boston’s building inspectors, who objected to some of her construction methods. “I am well aware that you can stop my building,” Gardner proclaimed to a building inspector, “but in view of what that would mean to Boston, I think it would be folly to do so; if Fenway Court is to be built at all . . . it will be built as I wish and not as you wish.”80 The building inspectors wanted the museum to conform to city regulations that required the use of more steel to support the building. When Gardner did employ modern building techniques, she hid them behind or beneath older architectural styles, as was the habit of her Brookline neighbor, H. H. Richardson.81 Her willfulness was the key element that maintained the Cosmopolitan flavor of her museum, as it also kept her vigilant in the face of a culture that was not used to a woman having so much power. In recent years some important critics have explored Gardner’s complex personality and have seen her work as important and unique contributions to art and cultural history in the United States,82 but for decades following the construction of her museum, Gardner’s originality conflicted with many critics’ preconceptions about the positive cultural work that art could perform in the United States and offended their sensibilities as to women’s proper role in American culture. Instead of buckling under the pressure to conform, Gardner playfully snubbed the spoken and unspoken expectations of the male-dominated society around her in an attempt to attract attention to her work before and after her death. While Gardner was completing her museum, and even before it was opened for public viewing, newspapers around the country were anticipating what this Fenway Court would turn out to be.83 Despite their inquiries as to the final form of Fenway Court, Gardner remained mute. In effect, she stuck to the motto in French written on the tile of her fourth-floor bathroom: “Work much, speak little, write nothing.” By keeping silent about her intentions, she aroused increasing interest in the mystery of her work. The mystery grew exponentially when Gardner decided to ornament her silence in some architectural flair—a tall, assertive wall that curved around the contours of the museum’s garden. Relatively innocuous today, the wall caused a great amount of confusion if not consternation for many newspaper reporters. Perhaps her most vocal critics were too accustomed to buildings in America whose construction

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was transparent, whose walls hid nothing from the viewer. Whatever the reason, the Boston Herald of June 1901 unambiguously connected the peculiarities of the building to Gardner’s sex. Not one but five headlines preceded the article with unflattering assessments about this addition to her museum, such as “Weird Wall Shuts Mrs. ‘Jack’ Gardner’s Palace from the World,” and “Imposing Structure of Back Bay Secluded from the World.”84 Since the turn of the twentieth century, criticism of Gardner has continued to focus on her person rather than her work. In the late 1930s Van Wyck Brooks introduced Gardner in his famous and influential New England: Indian Summer as a strange woman who “spent all her mornings in bed, although she was to rise betimes and gather culture in a fashion that astonished even Boston.”85 In the 1980s, sociologist Paul DiMaggio continues this ad feminam criticism by blithely dismissing Gardner as “eccentric.”86 In fact, DiMaggio’s assessment of Gardner does not differ much from the Boston Herald in the early 1900s. His decision to label her as “eccentric” echoes the objections to Gardner’s work made in Boston Herald in the early 1900s, a time when just being a woman with power in the public sphere caused men to worry about how these women might alter the status quo. Gardner and her fellow Cosmopolitans admired particular pieces of art and architecture for their beauty as well as their technical and intellectual prowess, elements of artistic work that Bourdieu and DiMaggio have interpreted as a means to maintain distinctions between classes. Even more important to the Cosmopolitans, however, was the way that many works of art could be arranged in a harmonious ensemble to create an atmosphere filled with emotional power: an aesthetic, contrived, and built context dedicated to the exploration of humanity. Gardner achieved this by exhibiting not only great paintings and sculptures but also furniture, tapestries, utensils, books, letters, and music, as well as flowers and plants. Gardner’s close friend and correspondent in the early 1900s, the artistic theorist and collector Matthew Prichard,87 offers some insight into her motivations. Born in England, educated in Oxford, Prichard met Gardner in Boston after having charmed his way into the good graces of Museum of Fine Arts president Samuel Warren. Within eighteen months after his arrival in 1901, Prichard became Assistant Director of the Museum.88 According to Pritchard, Works of art found their value, their raison-d’être, through their subjective

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effect on an observer and not in their objective appearance in the world. In one of his many letters to Gardner, Prichard explains his view of art as a means (i.e., a conduit for experience) rather than an end (i.e., conforming to a timeless standard of beauty): Tradition seems to teach us that objects are not meant to be looked at but to be used. . . . If art is a means, our furniture, our dresses, our houses are intended less as objects to be regarded than as things which we are to use, which by their constitution will affect us in definite ways while we use them. In other words, art is an arrangement which touches our unconsciousness in the moments of our conscious action.89

Reading Prichard’s letters, one notices immediately what drew him into a close friendship with Gardner. From a great variety of art and ideas that the world and its human cultures had to offer, Gardner fashioned an aesthetic whole in Fenway Court whose goal was to inspire visitors with wonder and delight.90 As was the case in Trinity Church and the Boston Public Library, the entrance to Fenway Court tells us much about its builder’s intentions. Challenging visitors’ expectations, the entrance to the museum is not located at the center of the building but, rather, toward the left corner adjacent to the exterior wall. The next few steps bring visitors to another mystery: a short and somewhat dimly lit passageway. Looking toward the end of that hall, a bright glow becomes visible. After taking eight or ten steps forward, visitors encounter a lush garden to the right. Basking in the light of the sun and protected by a glass roof, this central space rushes to the visitor’s senses. The surprise of encountering verdant beauty in the middle of a building’s interior is enhanced by Gardner’s judicious placement of flowers, trees, and statuary. The courtyard, visible from every room at Fenway Court, is the main source of the building’s warmth and sensuousness (Figure 6.6). The green garden is proof of the emphasis that Gardner placed on providing her visitors with a moving, emotional, and multifaceted experience. The interior of Fenway Court is especially wondrous during the long Boston winters, when the tropical atmosphere of the garden feels like a friendly embrace. Escaping from the bitter chill outside, the visitor is transported to an utterly unique space in the city of Boston, a testament to the restorative potential of art and architecture.91 Following her instincts, and aided by her international education along with the example of great cosmopolitan art and artists around

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Figure 6.6 Courtyard of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Courtesy Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.

Boston, Isabella Stewart Gardner made her most eloquent statements through the famous courtyard of her museum. Gardner’s decision not to make many written or verbal commentaries on her own work leaves the meaning of Fenway Court open-ended, amenable to a variety of aesthetic experiences and interpretations. Architecture provided a promising conduit of Cosmopolitan experience because it permitted American visitors to return to these sites repeatedly, just as the Cosmopolitans were able to make frequent voyages to Europe and the Far East. The details of the art and architecture of these buildings were too rich and varied to be appreciated in one glance.

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To get a feeling for the texture of Cosmopolitanism in Boston’s architecture, one need spend only a few leisurely hours walking around the Back Bay. It is important that those hours be leisurely, not frantic—that the appreciation of John La Farge’s murals in Trinity Church, the Renaissance facade of the Boston Public Library, or the series of galleries at Fenway Court is not jarred by the need to catch a train. If you give yourself the time to find the combination of art and architecture that is most appealing, you will notice that what the Cosmopolitans brought back from their trips to Europe and other distant places was much more than physical artifacts and a heightened appreciation of foreign cultures. More important, the Cosmopolitans brought back an enthusiastic desire to share the sense of wonder and discovery that they had felt on the own journeys abroad. What binds works like Henry Adams’ verbal description of France’s cathedrals, John La Farge’s exploration of Japan, or Richardson’s fascination with the possibilities of Romanesque architecture was the exhilaration these Cosmopolitans felt when their American backgrounds and education mixed frequently with the hundreds if not thousands of years of human history that preceded the founding of the United States. To convey their experiences through architecture, they arranged their art with a minimum of didacticism, permitting those who entered their built spaces to make their own connections as much as possible. Whether you end up sitting in a pew at Trinity Church, the reading room at the Boston Public Library, or on the low ledges bordering the garden at Fenway Court, you may look around and encounter the greatest but least tangible aspect of cosmopolitanism in architecture: you—the tourist, the newcomer, as well as the regular visitor—are the real center of architectural interest, and you can gauge these buildings’ effectiveness by the way you feel. Are your imagination and curiosity being stimulated? Are you drawn to a specific work of art or architectural embellishment that inspires an introspective mood? Or, do the high ceilings pull you away from yourself and toward the people sharing the space with you in a courtyard or reading room? If these spaces indeed allow you to move freely between introspection and curiosity about the outside world, then perhaps the buildings have recreated the pleasure of finding connections between the self and the other. These were the kinds of connections many of the Cosmopolitans had made during their journeys around the world, and their gift to Boston was to share this pleasure through their art.

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orld War I threatened to destroy the rich transnational culture the Boston Cosmopolitans had lived in and cultivated for fifty years. On July 10, 1916, Henry Adams wrote to his dear English friend Charles Milnes Gaskell: “It is a great paralysis. . . . Our old world is dead.”1 However, the war ultimately failed to paralyze many of the Boston Cosmopolitans who managed to live through part or all of “The Great War.” To be sure, witnessing the young men of Europe’s diverse cultures kill each other at a rate that sometimes reached thousands per day was nothing short of horrifying; the scarring trenches in France’s eastern fields would permanently alter world history in frightening ways that would be difficult to predict. It was not only the deaths of others, however, that preoccupied the thoughts and words of Henry Adams, Henry James, and William Dean Howells: each one was faced with his own pending demise. James experienced repeated challenges to his health, from shingles to heart ailments that would eventually end his life. Adams suffered a “cerebral disturbance” that, according to Adams, left him with “only one hand, one foot, one eye, and half a brain.”2 And in the final days of his productive life, Howells attempted to deaden the pain that he confronted daily with the aid of drugs.3 The shock of the war and the killing it produced was bad enough. “I cannot hear a newspaper without feeling shaken for hours,” Adams wrote to his friend Elizabeth Cameron in 1916. “With every care, I lie awake with nightmare for hours. So don’t expect me to

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write news.”4 James’ despair overwhelms his letters with images of a final brutal ending for humankind: “a funeral pall of our murdered civilization.”5 Were these elder statesmen for Western Civilization in the nineteenth century somehow responsible for the demise of their cosmopolitan world in the twentieth? The thought could not have failed to pass through their minds. On August 10, 1914, James expressed his despondency to a British friend: “Black and hideous to me is the tragedy that gathers and I’m sick beyond cure to have on to see it. You and I, the ornaments of our generation, should have been spared this wreck. . . . The tide that bore us along was then all the while moving to this as its grand Niagara—yet what a blessing we didn’t know it. It seems to me to undo everything, everything that was ours, in the most horrible retroactive way.”6 Although Henry James and William Dean Howells echo Henry Adams’ lament about their “paralysis” in their late writings, all of their actions demonstrate an active resistance to readily accepting the destruction of their cosmopolitan world. Even with the daily reports of the massacres on the frontlines, the encroachment of old age, and the ongoing impairment of their health, these three Cosmopolitans become strangely invigorated in the face of “the plunge of civilization into this abyss of blood and darkness.”7 In sight of their own deaths and those of thousands of others younger than themselves, they chose to persevere. Each of them participated in a desperate salvage operation to save their ideals from a war that, according to Howells, would bring “death to all the arts.”8 Before World War I, many of the Boston Cosmopolitans assumed that cosmopolitanism was simply a “given” in the latest version of Western Civilization—an archeological fact that they had been trying to unearth and put on display for a distracted American public— but these “givens” of civilization could be disfigured and potentially destroyed by the violence and brutality of the present. Once it became clear that war had put cosmopolitanism itself at risk, these three surviving Cosmopolitans shifted decisively from artistic creation to political activism, wielding their pens and directing their lives as best they could against the forces of chaos. Indeed, they demonstrated that shock and despair were no excuses for inaction. Henry James explained to a friend the difficulty of being creative during a world war that was utterly painful and disorienting. “I dip my nose, or try to,” he wrote, “into the inkpot as often as I can; but it’s as if there were no ink there, and I take it out

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smelling gunpowder, smelling blood, as hard as I did before.” He would, however, continue to “make a little civilization, the inkpot aiding, even when vast chunks of it, around us, go down into the abyss. . . . [W]herefore, after all, vive the old delusion and fill again the following stylograph.”9 Saving civilization, then, meant not remaining passive even when all seemed lost. James certainly did not give up. He visited soldiers in hospitals and accepted the position of honorary president of the American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps.10 More important, he used his pen to aim at the front lines drawn between the United Kingdom and the neutrality of the United States. Nowhere was this more evident than in 1915, when his fiction writing no longer took front and center; instead, James began to write war propaganda.11 During the final year of his life, he published twelve articles, the majority of which focused on the war. James directed most of his essays toward his American audience, recruiting them to support his cause. Five of these essays were collected in his wartime text, Within the Rim.12 In the summer of 1915, James aided his dear friend Edith Wharton in an effort to raise funds for Belgian Refugees. He solicited his fellow writers to contribute their work to Wharton’s effort to publish a book destined for the American public, titled The Book of the Homeless, a volume that would be introduced by former President Theodore Roosevelt.13 He wrote to Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, John Singer Sargent, Thomas Hardy, Edward Marsh (the executor of Rupert Brooke’s literary estate), W. B. Yeats, and W. D. Howells. All but Kipling joined the effort. In late 1915, when his health had already begun to rapidly decline, James wrote the preface for Letters from America, a text written by soldier and friend Rupert Brooke, who had died in the war.14 Henry James’ most publicized act to rescue his cosmopolitan world occurred on July 28, 1915, when he took the oath of allegiance to King George V and became a British citizen. Appended to this act, he published the reasons he included in his application to become a British citizen: Because of his having lived and worked in England for the best part of forty years; because of his attachment to the country and his sympathy with it and its people; because of the long friendships and associations and interests he has formed here—these last including the acquisition of some property; all of which things have brought to a

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head his desire to throw his moral weight and personal allegiance, for whatever they may be worth, into the scale of the contending Nation’s present and future fortune.15

In abandoning his American citizenship, James attempted to contradict symbolically the American stance of neutrality. Although James was resolute in his reasons for supporting Britain, he also faced the difficult position of being a cosmopolitan in a time of war: How should one feel about the enemy, Germany? Could or should a cosmopolitan feel antipathy toward a whole country or people? He confessed to his lifelong friend Edith Wharton that he felt “a kind of unholy hideous good” when reading reports of British victories and German deaths. War did force one to take sides, but it was an uncomfortable stance for someone who enjoyed the intricate variety of the world’s cultures.16 Similar to his friend Henry James, Henry Adams relied on his pen to enter into the war effort. On July 10, 1916, Adams wrote to Charles Milnes Gaskell: “It is very curious—this living in the ruins of a dissolved world. No one seems to know it; no one has anything to say; no one does anything; no one speculates as to the past or future; no one thinks. It is a great paralysis. All is waiting for something big to break.”17 Yet, Adams did not wait. He contributed his writing, wealth, and hospitality to the cause. He donated to Elizabeth Cameron’s charity, the “Foyer for Refugees” that distributed food to displaced French during the war, and while he was stuck in Washington, too sick to visit Europe, Adams managed to invite Europe to visit him. He entertained European artists, philosophers, envoys, and ambassadors, thereby welcoming Europeans to America and maintaining his connection to a life that had been endangered by war.18 Despite repeated protests to his friends that the “sudden and unexpected attack of some complaint which put me off my head for a month or more, and, I fear, has put an end for all time to any serious study,” he helped to write an essay in support of Britain’s allies. Adams’ writing showed that he was decidedly less ambivalent about Germany than his old friend James. His biographer Ernest Samuels reported that Adams become involved in writing the article “The Genesis of the Super-German” with Reverend Sigourney Fay after frequent discussions that took place over the fall and winter of 1917, regarding the divided loyalties of Irish Catholics during the war. In

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the article, Adams and Fay attempted to inform their Irish readers of the danger of forming an allegiance with a German force. They wrote that “the nations around the Mediterranean and the Celtic races of Northern Europe, have been violently attacked, and each time the intention has been to destroy Mediterranean, or perhaps one should say Celtic-Latin, religion and civilization. . . . Each time the attack has come from the same race, the Teutons.” At a time in his life when he felt the paralysis of age, Adams chose to go beyond his comfort zone and publicly contributed his efforts to the allied cause—not a common act for the often reclusive Adams. The Dublin Review published the essay in April 1918, a month after Adams’ death.19 In far better health than Adams or James during the 1910s, William Dean Howells offered some of the most vigorous defenses of cosmopolitanism. Years before the outbreak of World War I, Howells saw, as did many others, that conflict in Europe was on the horizon. If European war threatened to replace civilization with chaos, Howells worried, would America overcome its habit of isolationism and commit its energies to ending combat as soon as possible? Howells urged his fellow countrymen to cultivate the disposition to see their own culture as just one branch of human culture in general by arguing that their American identity was not at all in conflict with larger cosmopolitan sympathies. Indeed, one could love humanity as much, or more, than national identity: One’s solidarity with humanity was not incompatible with national loyalties, but the former was, in the end, more important than the latter. In the spring of 1912, New York’s superintendent of libraries requested Howells to speak to the children of the public school system. Howells took this opportunity to prepare his young audience to cope with the future realities of the war. The letter he produced not only attempted to teach the children about the need to maintain solidarity with humanity but also anticipated the dire consequences that would arise from the indifference of Americans to the rest of the world. In his appeal, he urged his fellow Americans to reconsider patriotism as both a national and international act. In the greeting that the North American Review published eight years later in 1920, he wrote: While I would wish you to love America most because it is your home, I would have you love the whole world and think of all the people in

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it as your countrymen. You will hear people more foolish than wicked say, “Our country, right or wrong,” but that is a false patriotism and bad Americanism. When our country is wrong she is worse than other countries when they are wrong, for she has more light than other countries, and we somehow ought to make her feel that we are sorry and ashamed for her.20

American patriotism, Howells implied, can be measured by an American’s loyalty to the highest ideals. Later, during the war, Howells did what he could to give material and moral comfort to those who were fighting against Germany’s offensive. In his role as president of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, Howells raised over one hundred thousand dollars from the members of the organization in support of the wartime efforts of the Italians. In addition, through the academy’s ongoing generosity, he presented more than a hundred ambulances to the cause, dedicated in the names of American poets. In 1918, Howells wrote an open letter to the head of the Associated Press in Rome to challenge the circulating German propaganda suggesting that Americans cared little for the Italians. He attempted to reassure all the citizens of Italy that “he has never known any American who does not love Italy with patriotic fervor and is not proud to claim fellow-citizenship with her sons in the ideal Republic. . . . I entreat all Italians to believe in our honor of their name, and our devotion to their cause, which is our cause.”21 In the aftermath of World War I, Howells’ cosmopolitan convictions grew only stronger, mainly because the foot dragging of the United States had caused so much harm. In 1920, with his health failing, Howells made one more attempt at salvaging the cosmopolitan world through an act of repatriating his dear friend Henry James. According to his daughter Mildred Howells, after “Howells had written his last letter, and even after he had to be kept under drugs to deaden his pain, he was still working on two papers about Henry James. . . . One was a short piece intended for Harper’s on The Letters of Henry James, and the other, ‘The American James,’ was an effort to say what Howells had always felt—that James was deeply and entirely American.”22 In the first of these unfinished pieces, Howells’ defense of James included the argument that being a Cosmopolitan did not exclude one from being an American. In short, the two were not competing ideals or identities, even though

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James himself may not have recognized this during a time of extreme crisis. “James,” Howells asserted, was American to his heart’s core to the day of his death. He may have made the English think him English; he may have made himself think so; but he was never anything but American, though by early sojourn and schooling he was French. He renounced us [Americans] because he was rightly ashamed of our official, never our national, neutrality in the world’s self-defence [sic] against Germany, an attitude which we now all feel so grotesque and contemptible, and must remember with loathing. 23

Howells clearly established James as both a Cosmopolitan and American, thereby sending his message once again that these two identities are not mutually exclusive but are compatible and even inclusive. Howells certainly regretted Henry James’ eventual decision to protest his country’s reticence by renouncing his American citizenship. From Howells’ point of view, because cosmopolitan and national allegiances were not mutually exclusive, renouncing one’s national allegiance could amount to a futile gesture. When James became a British citizen, he might have even become slightly less cosmopolitan through a symbolic renunciation of an “Americanness” that, in actuality, James could not choose to reject. However, Howells understood that James’ passionate sympathies with the besieged peoples outside the borders of his home country moved him to make this dramatic gesture. Although the gesture may have been questionable, the motivations behind it, in Howells’ view, were beyond reproach. Howells, ever sensitive to James’ motivations, could also imagine himself possibly doing something just like his old friend. In his own ironic way, he too rejected his own “Americanness.” When Howells discussed James’ defection, so to speak, to Britain in a letter of 1915, he finished his correspondence with a subversive afterthought: Like James, he might himself change sides, as he was “just thinking of becoming a citizen of Maine.”24 As Howells, James, and Adams faced World War I during their old age, they scrambled to find effective responses to the colossal brutality of modern war. Their diversity of opinions reflected not only their fierce independence but also was symptomatic of the consternation caused by the war. Would cosmopolitanism survive into the future?

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Could it survive when the people who nurtured it through the nineteenth century were dying during a war that threatened to transform civilization into barbarism? Many of these questions have resurfaced today. Although the threats to cosmopolitanism posed by World War I moved people like Henry James to emerge into politics and the public sphere, Boston Cosmopolitanism could be accused of doing too little, too late. Preceding World War I, there were many threats to cosmopolitanism—to respecting the differences of other cultures that some of Henry James’ fictional travelers enjoyed so much. A wide range of problems deserved the close attention of the Boston Cosmopolitans’ art and intellect—problems concerning Native Americans, immigration, and racism both within and without the United States. Howells had taken the public stage following the Haymarket Massacre, and William James vocally opposed the United States’ imperial adventures in the Philippines, but these courageous public actions were somewhat exceptional. Edith Wharton, an insightful critic of the American literati of the late nineteenth century, roundly criticized her fellow cosmopolitaneducated elites of the nineteenth century for having abandoned the rough-and-tumble of American politics. In her autobiography A Backward Glance, she lamented that in having abandoned politics, the Boston Cosmopolitans and their ilk helped to contribute, in fact, to American intellectual isolationism. They were needed, Wharton strongly suggests, because they brought a salubrious outside influence into the mix of American politics, the tendencies of which for self-satisfaction and isolationism were all too well known.25 Moreover, as Brodhead has shown, many of the Boston Cosmopolitans cultivated a paradoxical “appreciation” of the lives of foreign peoples. Although many of the Cosmopolitans welcomed meeting, for instance, Italian or Japanese people in their native lands, they were sometimes uncomfortable with the effect of foreign immigrants on the United States—immigrants who may have been accelerating change than the Cosmopolitans would have liked. Simultaneously maintaining a “cosmopolitanism of travel” and a “cosmopolitanism of immigration,” Cosmopolitans such as Henry James attempted to deflect their discomfort with immigrants by appreciating their use as objects of aesthetic work (as exotic characters in a novel or travel literature) instead of as equal members of the American polity.26 They also paid little attention to the role travel

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could play in forcing unwelcome change on the regions where tourists became a real economic power. The Cosmopolitans’ shortcomings certainly were a product of the privileges of a system class and education that created barriers that were perhaps harder for them to overcome than the distances separating nations around the world. Although they may have not been particularly progressive in some social and political domains, their education and experiences helped to make them pioneering in others. Their educations featuring training in foreign languages, literatures, and travel pointed them toward the emerging world of globalization—cultural, political, and economic—that was inaugurated by the steamship. Finally, because they were artists, these individuals often faced some of the more pressing problems of their day in imaginative and visionary ways. It is important, therefore, not to focus solely on the Cosmopolitan literary artists, who only formed a part of the group I have called the Boston Cosmopolitans. As I suggested in Chapters 5 and 6, the Cosmopolitan visual arts often went beyond the prejudices of the very artists who created them, which can be seen in works such as the Shaw Memorial. In creating important visual monuments and public spaces, they set benchmarks for public life (concerning race at the Shaw Memorial and class at the Boston Public Library) that were far ahead of most the official policies of their day. This book has attempted to stress the contributions of the Boston Cosmopolitans because a thorough description of their international or global interests provides us with a timely examination of many of the cultural, social, and political problems that we are facing with such urgency in the post-9/11 world. In short, they were some of the first Americans to think globally in our modern era. Their mistakes and misunderstandings, along with their accomplishments and visionary ideas, are all in the historical record to educate Americans today about how we might deal with the world around us.

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lthough the current interest in cosmopolitanism and especially globalization has created a favorable intellectual climate for the study of the Boston Cosmopolitans, many previous trends in historiography and theory have tended to obscure rather than to illuminate the cosmopolitan character of Boston’s artistic and intellectual life after the Civil War. I will examine and critique the most important of these trends to allow for a better appreciation of the work of the Boston Cosmopolitans. After making some historiographic room for the Boston Cosmopolitans’ accomplishments, I explore the idea of cosmopolitanism in America and compare my definition of the term to two other influential definitions that have been made in the twentieth century. Finally, I return to history through a comparison of the Boston Cosmopolitans to other Americans who have traveled the globe frequently. Through these contextualizations and juxtapositions, I hope to underline some of the qualities that made this group unique and important in American cultural and intellectual history.

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Making a case for the vibrancy of Boston’s cultural life after the Civil War goes against the grain of a long tradition in American historiography. Boston of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

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has long been maligned for its supposedly feeble culture as well as its stifling society. Boston—and New England in general—was by this time suffering from what Gertrude Stein would call a Victorian “soul sickness.”1 Stanley Coben has shown how American intellectuals rejected Victorian culture as repressed, weak, and inauthentic following a wave of disillusionment after World War I.2 Their denunciations were unambiguous. For example, in 1916 Randolph Bourne attacked Victorian culture as it was represented by the typical American architect whose “artistic pedigree is by Rheims out of Boston”: Art, says the architect, is the symbolical expression of otherwise inexpressible ideas. In a sense therefore the architect himself is a work of art. He is the symbolical expression of this torpid old vague culture of ours. He is a symbol of our rootlessness, of that cultural colonialism which has so little left but smug comfort and polite aspiration. This idea is very hard to express.3

Although the recent popularity of the work of Henry James, John Singer Sargent, and H. H. Richardson indicates that Americans’ harsh opinions on Victorian culture have softened, for many people the word “Victorian” is still synonymous with prudish, narrowminded, self-righteous, and often hypocritical behavior. As Casey Blake has explained, the worldview of Bourne and his contemporaries was shaped during the drawn-out death of the Victorian era. They witnessed how the growth of industry in modern America had undermined key elements of Victorian life: Religious ideas no longer corresponded to the dehumanizing work of the modern industrial world, individualism and self-reliance became anachronistic in an increasingly centralized economy run by the few according to the dictates of technical efficiency, and the patriarchal order that had promised to protect women and children from the amoral marketplace could do nothing except to present a veneer of personal autonomy in the face of chaos brought about by accelerating economic and social change.4 This determination to uphold Victorian values in a post-Victorian world convinced Bourne and his contemporaries such as Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford that “Nothing real made sense.”5 The feeling of rootlessness and the search for new intellectual mentors in the post-Victorian era was encapsulated in Lewis Mumford’s The Golden Day (1926).6 In this ambitious interpretation of

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the contours of American thought, Mumford applauded American intellectuals who sought to transform and improve their culture and condemned those who did nothing more than mimic the worst aspects of the status quo. To illustrate his argument, he offered a chronology that constructed a clear trajectory of American intellectual history. 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.”7 Emerson and his heir Walt Whitman gave Mumford an antidote to the moral drift of the 1920s. Unlike the pathetic upholders of Victorian morality detached from the realities of a world characterized by fast-paced change, Emerson’s ideas offered a tradition of “forward leaning” thought that was appropriate for a country whose people had broken away from their European past.8 The “living corpses” of American intellectual life who followed Emerson were represented by William James.9 Although Mumford himself used some of the pragmatism of James and John Dewey in his own work, James appeared in The Golden Day as an abstract symbol of everything that was wrong with American intellectual life after the Civil War.10 Mumford derided pragmatism because of its “acquiescence” to the general rapacious tendencies of American culture: “James’s opposition to a block universe . . . was only warming over in philosophy the hash of everyday experience in the Gilded Age.”11 Although pragmatism may have invigorated the “cut-and-dried universe” of European philosophy that lacked “the pluralism and freemindedness” of American thought, it did not contain moral ends or values for Americans.12 In addition to James, Mumford singled out many of the Boston Cosmopolitans as embodying either the passive acquiescence or the insatiable greed of the era in which they lived.13 Mumford’s healthy tendency to criticize his own ideas led him to qualify his condemnation of the culture of the Gilded Age in The Brown Decades (1931).14 In this work H. H. Richardson emerges as the greatest unsung hero of this era. Unlike William James, Richardson refused the “Victorian compromise” and faced new architectural challenges of the industrial era with novel approaches to public structures such as railroad stations and office buildings. Even this qualification, however, left intact Mumford’s description of American intellectual history in The Golden Day. According to Mumford, the unheroic quality of the Victorian age made Richardson’s

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accomplishments all the more amazing. He was “an architect who almost single-handed created out of a confusion which was actually worse than a mere void the beginnings of a new architecture.”15 Although Richardson foresaw how architecture could answer the needs of modern America, his death, occurring before the widespread use of steel in architecture, fooled his “architectural contemporaries . . . that steel construction nullified his achievements.”16 The truth about Richardson’s creative milieu shows that he was actually a very self-conscious historicist who sought out responses to his work from his historically minded contemporaries. Mumford claims that Richardson’s best work—especially his train stations, libraries, and office buildings—occurred after 1880. This interpretation ignores the fact that Richardson’s famous Trinity Church, completed in 1877, was one of the architect’s favorite accomplishments.17 Mumford also gives himself wide latitude to interpret Richardson’s work because the architect wrote little on architecture.18 Although Richardson’s writings were scant, he communicated well through visual media, which included photography as well as architecture. In fact, Richardson’s public persona included a photograph of himself as a medieval monk. As the architectural historian Thomas C. Hubka explains, the picture “was contrived, yet the image has significant meaning. This image conveys more clearly than words the medieval romanticism that profoundly influenced his generation.”19 Far from being the result of “single-handed” effort, Richardson’s amazing oeuvre resulted from his desire to collaborate closely with his contemporaries. His office was set up in the open and convivial style of a Beaux Arts atelier, which encouraged a great deal of conversation, camaraderie, and mutual criticism among members of his staff.20 The builder with whom he worked throughout his life, Orlando Whitney Norcross from nearby Worcester, was an indispensable collaborator and critic,21 and before Richardson finished Trinity Church in 1877, he was eager to give a personal tour of the building to a man who has largely been remembered as the insufferable aesthetic prig of the post–Civil War era, the Harvard art historian Charles Eliot Norton. All this suggests that Richardson’s mind was deeply rooted in the past as well as the present and that to miss this aspect of Richardson’s genius is to misunderstand his art and the culture of his time.

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Much of the subsequent historical comment on intellectual life in Boston during the Victorian age extended Mumford’s negative interpretation. From Van Wyck Brooks in the 1940s to David Hollinger in the 1970s, and more recently from T. J. Jackson Lears in the 1980s to Robert Crunden and Ann Douglas in the 1990s, the arts and letters of Boston between 1865 and 1915 have been used to draw a story of pathetic failure and pretension. In the titular chapter of his overview of New England life and letters called New England: Indian Summer 1865–1915 (1940), Van Wyck Brooks asserted that the Yankee mind seemed to be losing its “vigor,” strongly implied that there were indications that New Englanders had become a little loopy, and described Isabella Stewart Gardner as a woman with bizarre habits. Brooks’ description of Gardner includes an apocryphal story about Gardner’s supposed power over lions, a dubious story that helps Brooks to emphasize Gardner’s eccentricity and deemphasize if not disregard entirely her contributions to American cultural and art history.22 Since Brooks’ day, many scholars have continued to equate Boston’s literature with Boston’s cultural life as a whole. In Martin Green’s The Problem of Boston: Some Readings in Cultural History (1966), Boston’s artistic and intellectual “decline” was almost exclusively judged by the lives and works of its writers of fiction and essays, despite the presence of many other kinds of artists and cultural institutions. The decisions by famous writers of the late nineteenth century, such as William Dean Howells and Henry James, to leave Boston for, respectively, New York and London, supposedly provided clear evidence of Boston’s intellectual and artistic penury— even though both James and especially Howells came back to Boston numerous times and both remained in contact with their fellow Boston Cosmopolitans. In a chapter on Boston’s cultural life entitled, “What Went Wrong?” Green explains that his choice of focusing on Boston’s writers around the turn of the twentieth century was based on Boston’s own predilection for literature. Bostonians, according to Green, “not only set out to establish a city of ‘culture’, but even accorded literature the highest position within that culture, devoting much time, money, enthusiasm, and indeed imagination, to the encouragement of writers.”23 Yet even if the majority of Boston’s educated and elite preferred literature, this would not justify overlooking other aspects of Boston’s artistic and intellectual life.

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The story of Boston’s decline later received an interesting Gramscian spin in 1981 with Jackson Lears’ No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920, which featured many writers and artists who were from the Boston area—writers and artists to whom Lears refers as “anti-modernists” (a sobriquet that none of these people used to describe themselves). In Lears’ case, Boston’s atrophy was represented as the antimodernists’ helplessness in the face of the advance of modern life and their inadvertent contribution to the hegemony of modern consumer capitalists. Not only were they helpless, but Lears goes so far as to portray their supposed enthusiasm for a “therapeutic” world view (i.e., a self-help, nonpolitical approach to solving the problems of the modern world)24 as having contributed, because of its failure to confront the moral problems of the day, to the rise of the worst aspects of modern industrial America.25 Not only does Lears forget that people like William and Henry James were very much aware of problems brought about by modernization, but his argument also invites the question: Did the “anti-modernists,” as he calls them, have the power to stop the emergence of modern industrial America? Lears must presume that they did; otherwise, he would not have condemned them for their supposed moral evasions and political failings. The image of Boston during this era has remained the favorite target of many contemporary scholars who seek an example of cultural torpidity in the United States around the late 1800s and early 1900s. In a recent and otherwise compelling book on Progressivism, Eldon J. Eisenach echoes the refrain about Boston’s decline: “Characteristically, both the South and genteel Boston were the centers of opposition to ‘imperialism’ [during the Spanish-American War], but their response was inseparable from their backwater status and their fear of being left even further behind in the new America.”26 This image of Boston as backwater of the arts has been recently confirmed in Robert Crunden’s American Salons: Encounters with European Modernism, 1885–1917 (1993), in which Boston is barely mentioned. Crunden ignores the Boston area in his study of modernism even though he pays particular attention to Henry James, whose family lived in the Boston area; William James, who lived in Cambridge all of his adult life; and James Whistler, the expatriate American painter who was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, lived in England, and met often with Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner in Europe.27

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Although there are some exceptions,28 this brief survey of historical writings concerning politics, art, culture, and ideas shows how a negative view of Boston during the late nineteenth century has seeped into the fabric of many different kinds of scholarship. Of all the historians previously mentioned, Van Wyck Brooks best expresses the dominant attitude of critics toward Boston of the late nineteenth century. The city was, in Brooks’ words, “indolent and flaccid, as if the struggle for existence had passed it by.” The image of Boston during this time suffers even more from the comparison to its rival just a few miles south on the Atlantic coast: New York, so the story goes, is where the action was. Nonetheless, historians from the present as well as the past have discovered some potent charms with which turn-of-the-century Boston could beguile even the most homegrown New Yorker. John Jay Chapman, a writer, literary historian, and political activist in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, waxed poetic about New England in general and Boston in particular. Chapman was, in the words of Edmund Wilson, “essentially a New Yorker, who had approached New England culture from the outside,” mainly through his education at Harvard.29 In the 1909 preface to the second edition of his long and influential essay on Ralph Waldo Emerson (first published in 1897), Chapman described some of the drawbacks of living in such an exciting city. The relentless economic and human energy ripping up New York’s landscape every generation moved Chapman to declare that “New York is not a civilization; it is a railway station.” The noise and turmoil of New York, he believed, made serious thought impossible for young people. The great books of the world, according to Chapman, reflected “stability, depth, relaxation, and all those conditions of peace and harmony which make thought possible. The [New York] youth, therefore, discards books as incomprehensible,—foolish, in fact.” Unlike New York City’s history, marked by years of rivalry between national populations such as the Dutch and the English (so much so that even the city’s name was changed from “New Amsterdam” to “New York” in 1664, when New York was transformed from a Dutch to an English possession following the first [1652–54] of three Anglo-Dutch Wars in the seventeenth century), Boston’s relative cultural homogeneity ensured that those generations growing up immediately after the Revolution could look back to a common cultural past, a past that could serve as the basis of cultural

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identity, instead of looking back to a past that, as in New York’s case, would serve as a reminder of intraregional rivalries and dissension. This may well be the source of the differences between the cultures of Boston and New York—the former being a city in which the past is often a visible presence, and the latter a city in which the reminders of the past have often been forsaken for the lure of the future. The calm, we might say “genteel,” character of Massachusetts attracted Chapman precisely because it possessed what New York lacked. Above all, Chapman admired New England because “her links to the past have never been broken.” This would certainly have an effect on a New Yorker whose life did not prepare him for the unique presence of history in Massachusetts architecture, manners, and intellectual life that seemed to shape many successive generations of that area’s inhabitants. Although Chapman might have admitted that Boston commerce floundered in New York’s huge economic wake of the late nineteenth century, he nonetheless treasured what he learned in and around that quiet city: “There is in New England a traceable connection between the whole historic volume and stream of human culture,—that moving treasury of human thought and experience which flows down out of antiquity and involves us, surrounds and supports us and makes us the thing we are, no matter how much we struggle or how little we may understand.” In other words, New England’s culture opened Chapman’s eyes to the presence of history in daily life, a presence, he argued, that New York and its inhabitants ignored at their peril. Because New Yorkers, and Americans in general, lacked a belief in the importance of history, Chapman strongly argued that America’s youth would greatly benefit from higher education in New England: “Every young person in the United States ought to be sent to Massachusetts for some part of his education. The proximity of Harvard College to Boston gives Harvard a natural advantage over other colleges. You cannot go to Harvard or indeed to any New England college without getting into some sort of contact with a logical civilization.”30 Chapman portrayed New York as a city that valued frenetic activity for its own sake. For some New Yorkers, like Chapman, the pace may have been too much to bear. A more recent cultural historian, Ann Douglas, has grudgingly admitted that there was a significant price to pay for participating in New York’s frenetic activity. In her description of New York’s

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artistic and intellectual life in the 1920s, she concedes that the “terrible honesty” New York required of its artists meant confronting life without the help of a past. In Douglas’ reading, the artists drawn to New York were “orphans by definition who originate[d] their own genealogy; they [were] disinherited, but free.” Being thrust into the maelstrom of New York life spurred artists to be more creative, but it also shortened their lives. “New York,” according to Douglas, “had fewer fools, but more casualties than New England.”31 Depending on what an artist or writer was looking for in a city, New York from 1865 to 1915 could be both a wonderful and an awful place to live. Testimony from turn-of-the century New Yorkers like Chapman usefully complicates the black-and-white distinctions that have been drawn between Boston and New York during this era and shows that some creative people could breathe and even prosper in Boston’s atmosphere. So while writers such as Henry Adams, Henry James, and William Dean Howells were moving the center of their professional lives away from Boston in the 1870s and 1880s (all the while maintaining the professional and personal contacts that they had made in Boston), geniuses like the architect Henry Hobson Richardson and the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead moved their professional homes from the New York area to the Boston area in the 1860s and 1880s. The supposed decline of New England in general and Boston in particular has become such an unexamined truism in American history that Ann Douglas felt obliged to describe one of her heroes, William James, as being “in some sense a New Yorker by temperament.” Douglas bases her claim on a comment from 1907 in which James stated that he had “caught the pulse of the machine [i.e., New York], took up the rhythm, and vibrated mit [i.e., “with it”] and found it simply magnificent. The courage, the heaven-scaling audacity of it all, and the lightness withal, as if there was nothing that was not easy.”32 Contemporaries of William James often depicted him using the same terms that James employed to describe New York, for he was indefatigably curious and extremely creative. Although James’ personality may have resonated with New York’s energy, the fact remains that America’s most original philosopher lived and worked in Cambridge for almost his entire adult life. Perhaps James, who never moved to New York or chose to teach at Columbia University, felt that the pace of New York life could have endangered his chronically fragile health.33 In any case, Douglas’ misleading

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interpretation of James’ urban allegiance provides a strong sign that some new interpretations of Boston’s cultural and intellectual history are needed.

G O E AST, Y OUNG M EN

AND

W OMEN

In the eyes of many historians, the Boston Cosmopolitans have suffered not only from their connection to Boston but have been doubly stigmatized by their interest in Europe. Many commentators on American history have criticized American artists and intellectuals of the past for having spent long periods of time in Europe as well as for their interest in Europe (with exceptions made for supposedly “bolder” writers such as Gertrude Stein and Mark Twain). The many years Henry Adams and Henry James, for instance, spent in Europe have often been interpreted as a cowardly abandonment of the difficult, important, dynamic, and interesting “New World” for the easy, peripheral, moribund, and archaic “Old World.” In a preface to a recent edition of Howells’ novel, Indian Summer, John Updike compares Howells’ work to that of his long-time friend, Henry James. Although Updike obviously admires both novelists, he gently chided James for his “easy” choice of portraying Americans abroad: “Howells would not write about Americans abroad again [after Indian Summer], turning to New York and a more muscular, Tolstoyan, socially challenging, economically panoramic style of fiction. James, on the other hand, never wearied of his Americans freed of the clangor and coarseness of America, and refined their scruples and disappointments into fictions so spectacularly finespun as to be modernist.”34 In an article on Henry Adams, William W. Stowe begins with a largely negative appraisal: “Travel has always been a seductive, and a slightly irresponsible activity. In exchange for privileged positions as onlookers, appreciators, and critics, travelers give up their connection with the life around them, becoming passive spectators who can neither claim credit not accept responsibility for the scenes they observe.”35 Contemporary scholarship has often ignored the fact that traveling to foreign countries during Henry James’ lifetime, even if traveling in luxury, required a certain amount of courage. During their supposed “onlooking” from a distance, travelers throughout history also willingly disengaged themselves from familiar habits and

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surroundings. Many people are discouraged from traveling very far from home because most of the lessons they have learned throughout their lives—from the most basic elements of everyday life such as eating and dressing to the more complex codes in facial expressions and spoken language—do not necessarily apply to a foreign situation. In fact, the reluctant tourist chafes against the fact that he is often deprived of something as vital as language and must beg for the indulgence of the inhabitants of the foreign country, who condescend to interpret the feeble and sometimes childlike utterings that the tourist is forced to employ to make himself understood. Of course, many travelers through history have decided to shield themselves from encountering new cultures in much depth by limiting their movements to areas that most resemble the homes they left— such as a hotel lobby—but for the most part, the Cosmopolitans did not suffer from such timidity. The courage and curiosity with which they encountered the unpredictability of foreign travel was also employed in their work, much of which had a significant effect on the history of arts and letters in the United States. Contrary to the dominant historiography, the combination of Boston and Europe proved to be a powerful cross-fertilization between the world’s oldest modern democratic nation and the emerging democracies in Europe, as well as between America’s young culture and Europe’s ancient traditions. While traveling in Europe, these Boston Cosmopolitans were not simply getting away from America; rather, they had decided quite consciously to examine European ideas and culture, and they then integrated the best of their European discoveries in their lives and in their work. Besides, if an American’s interests inclined toward studying and understanding history, Europe was an ideal place to visit. The gap in American historiography that has left these transatlantic connections largely unexamined has been tended to most recently by historians of colonial America and the early republic. This “Atlantic history” offers an important contribution to understanding the early history of the United States, but it is curious that relatively little has been done to extend these observations past the early 1830s. With improvements in the telegraph and in shipping after the Civil War, increased access to the other side of the Atlantic Ocean made Americans’ interactions with Europe much easier than they ever had been.36

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Many American historians have also been too easily persuaded by the “new” and “old” labels that have been attached to the American and European continents, respectively, thus maintaining the early Puritan’s belief that European history culminated in America. In contrast, many of the Boston Cosmopolitans believed that Europe was a legitimate and promising place to ask questions about American history and culture. In short, while it would be impossible to claim that Boston’s Brahmin culture was on the upswing around the turn of the twentieth century, there were many non-Brahmins with strong ties to Boston who opted to participate in an international / cosmopolitan culture without having to abandon the city altogether. There are other reasons why this group of artists and intellectuals from Boston after the Civil War has been overlooked, including the preference of some scholars for “organic” intellectuals over other kinds of intellectuals.37 In general, the greatest obstacle to seeing and appreciating this cosmopolitanism finds its roots in the age-old preoccupation of many scholars in the fields of American history, literature, and cultural criticism to discover, identify, define, or defend what is peculiarly “American” about American history and American culture. This problem might be best approached by looking at the premier “America-first” theory of American national development, the famous Frontier Thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner. Using the “Frontier Thesis” does require a slight detour in this history. It requires traveling to late-nineteenth century Boston by way of Chicago—specifically, the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, otherwise known as the Columbian Exposition. That year, the newly formed American Historical Association received an invitation from the fair’s organizers to hold a meeting in Chicago during the fair. The association agreed, and it was during this meeting on July 12, 1893, that Frederick Jackson Turner first presented his “frontier thesis” to the public. From the outset of his speech, Turner emphasized that his fellow historians had not noticed the elements of American history that made America unique. Turner complained that the “germ theory” of American political development “has been sufficiently emphasized.” It was the American encounter with the frontier that provided the foundation of American character, not, Turner insisted, “simply the development of Germanic germs.” “At first,” Turner maintained, “the frontier was the Atlantic coast. It was the frontier of

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Europe in a very real sense,” but as the frontier moved “westward,” he asserted, “the frontier became more and more American.”38 Because Turner worked on his soon-to-be famous paper up until the last minute, he probably did not have time to see much of the fair itself.39 Had he had sufficient time to look around and analyze some of the fair’s most remarkable elements, he might have noticed some results (or artifacts) of the growing cultural interactions occurring not in a westerly direction but in an easterly direction—between America and Europe, from the New World to the Old World. Specifically, the fair featured the impressive and stately “court of honor,” a lagoon surrounded by buildings that sparked a neoclassical architectural revival—buildings designed by some of the best architects in the United States. One of the most successful and influential of these architects, Charles Follen McKim of the firm McKim, Mead, and White, was in the midst of supervising the construction of the majestic Boston Public Library in 1892, an edifice that would set architectural standards for public buildings, especially other libraries, across the United States. At the fair in Chicago, McKim not only designed several buildings but became the “right hand man” for the World Fair’s chief architect, Daniel Burnham.40 In his work in Boston and Chicago, McKim applied the skills he had learned at the école des Beaux Arts in Paris between 1867 and 1870.41 Among the many lessons McKim learned in Paris, the most important was the virtue of artistic collaboration, not only with other architects but with other artists—a practice almost without precedent in American architecture.42 McKim’s Agricultural Building at the World’s Fair was ornamented by the work of three sculptors, including Augustus Saint Gaudens, who met McKim in the 1870s and who had also attended the école in the late 1860s. Turner may have overlooked the significance of objects like McKim’s architectural designs because of his great desire to find American sources of the development of American culture and politics—a desire to minimize the importance of international influence on the American continent. However, Turner did succeed in alerting us to the significance of the interaction between human beings and their environment. Following Turner’s lead, I also claim that Americans’ encounters with “the environment” weigh heavily on American ideas about personal, ethnic, and national identity. However, in this project, the “environment” on which I have

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focused was mainly (but not exclusively) “the Atlantic Ocean” and “Europe” between 1865 and 1915 instead of Turner’s “frontier,” which was declared closed in 1890. Whereas Turner claimed that Americans’ frontier experience provided or laid the foundation for American “democracy” or the “characteristics” of the American mind such as “practicality” or “individualism,” I have attempted to show that noted Boston intellectuals’ and artists’ encounters with this newly accessible eastern frontier opening after the Civil War— the Atlantic Ocean and the lands beyond (mainly Europe)—resulted in their “cosmopolitanism.”43

N ATIONAL

OR I NTERNATIONAL C OSMOPOLITANISM : M UST W E C HOOSE ?

In twentieth-century America, the concept of “cosmopolitanism” has been most provocatively employed by Randolph Bourne in his “Trans-National America” (1918) and David Hollinger in Postethnic America (1995). Both Bourne and Hollinger used the openness to the “other” contained in the meaning of cosmopolitanism to combat narrow-minded descriptions of the American nation. Bourne dismissed Anglo-Protestant America as culturally stifling and politically illegitimate. Instead, he called for a cosmopolitan openness to a “trans-national America”—a nation that would constantly change and develop with contributions from all the ethnic communities that actually lived within the borders of the United States. If AngloAmericans could actively participate with other ethnic groups in the creation of cultural goals and standards, then the “masses of aliens” would be seen to be “threads of living and potent cultures, blindly striving to weave themselves into a novel international nation, the first the world has seen.”44 Although Bourne mixed his advocacy for a cosmopolitan transnationalism with a pluralistic defense of maintaining boundaries between ethnic groups, the contradictory ideas both served the same purpose: to ensure that no one group could claim America for itself.45 David Hollinger has argued that the differences between the concepts of pluralism and cosmopolitanism have not always been appreciated because both have been used to combat varieties of American nativism,46 but by the early 1990s Hollinger felt compelled to make clear distinctions between the two in the era of multiculturalism.

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Similar to earlier advocates of pluralism such as Horace Kallen in the 1910s and 1920s, contemporary multiculturalists have sought to shield individual ethnic groups from assimilationist pressures.47 In Hollinger’s view multiculturalists of the 1990s went too far because they elevated ethnic identity to a privileged and unchanging standard that precludes the possibility of cooperation between the ethnic communities that live in America. The multiculturalist insistence on maintaining differences between groups in the 1990s is as stifling to Hollinger as the Anglo-Protestant ideal of the 1910s was offensive to Bourne. As an alternative to multiculturalism, Hollinger offers a “postethnic” perspective that would allow for increased cooperation between various ethnic communities. A postethnic America would include ethnicity as only one of many elements of identity from which each American should be free to choose.48 The force that would transform a multicultural America into Hollinger’s vision of a postethnic America is cosmopolitanism. Hollinger explains the virtues of cosmopolitanism by comparing it to multiculturalism’s ancestor, pluralism: Pluralism respects inherited boundaries and locates individuals within one or another of a series of ethno-racial groups to be protected and preserved. Cosmopolitanism is more wary of traditional enclosures and favors voluntary affiliations. Cosmopolitanism promotes multiple identities, emphasizes the dynamic and changing character of many groups, and is responsive to the potential for creating new cultural combinations. Pluralism sees in cosmopolitanism a threat to identity, while cosmopolitanism sees in pluralism a provincial unwillingness to engage the complex dilemmas and opportunities actually presented by contemporary life.49

Hollinger’s cosmopolitanism seems very promising for those who would like to see American identity grow in concert rather than in conflict with the fact of American ethnic diversity. Despite the fact that these two versions of cosmopolitanism share much in common, they are often depicted in opposition to one another. This may be linked to the dim view many scholars have taken of Americans who traveled abroad frequently. Bruce Robbins eloquently describes the discomfort many have felt about those cosmopolitans who have strayed too far from home:

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The most general form of the case against cosmopolitanism on the left is the assumption that to pass outside the borders of one’s nation, whether by physical travel or merely by thoughts and feelings entertained while one stays at home, is to wallow in a privileged and irresponsible detachment.50

The “case against cosmopolitanism,” as described by Robbins, would not be made against Hollinger’s version of cosmopolitanism, which Hollinger describes as “rooted” in the experience of one’s native land.51 Nor would it apply to Bourne’s cosmopolitanism, which favors a ethnically heterogeneous America over the more homogeneous nations of Europe.52 This brings us back to a distinction I made earlier. Bourne and Hollinger advocate what might be called “national” cosmopolitanism, which attempts to bring heterogeneous ethnicities together under a dynamic and evolving definition of “American.” Unfortunately, their emphasis on opening creative possibilities within American culture may sometimes close off our appreciation of international cosmopolitanism and the possibilities of fruitful interactions between Americans and other peoples that are far away. Although Bourne encouraged American exploration of foreign cultures in “Transnational America,” he was nonetheless very uncomfortable with European influence on American cities. In “The Cult of the Best,” Bourne condemned a “generation of architects [that] has filled our cities with sepulchral neo-classicism and imitative débris of all the ages.”53 Bourne’s neoromantic advocacy of national artistic taste ignored the experience of accomplished American artists of the previous generation such as Augustus Saint Gaudens, Charles Follen McKim, Dennis Miller Bunker, Lilla Cabot Perry, and Mary Cassatt. All of these people were drawn to Europe after the Civil War because there was no significant legacy of American art that could be used as a basis for artistic education at that time.54 Although Hollinger’s recent Postethnic America is far more accepting of cosmopolitan travelers such as Henry James,55 some of his earlier pronouncements were less indulgent. In an article published in 1975 called “Ethnic Diversity, Cosmopolitanism and the Emergence of the American Liberal Intelligentsia,” Hollinger described what he called a “genteel [i.e., detached?] cosmopolitanism” of the “literary culture of the nineteenth century”—one

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that included many of the Boston Cosmopolitans.56 Hollinger quickly summarized that this cosmopolitanism “attributed to upperclass Europeans a life more complicated, expansive, and fulfilling than [Henry] James, for example, believed could be generated by purely American experience.”57 Echoing John Updike’s portrayal of James, Hollinger in 1975 depicted James as being removed from American concerns, preferring to concentrate his efforts on understanding a more interesting Europe. However, as early as 1867, the young Henry James wrote a letter to Thomas Sergeant Perry in which he described a very different assessment of the potential contributions of international cosmopolitanism to American cultural life: “We have exquisite qualities as a race, and it seems to me that we are ahead of the European races in the fact that more than either of them we can deal freely with forms of civilization not our own, can pick and choose and assimilate and in short (aesthetically etc.) claim our property wherever we find it.”58 James’ description of American cultural potential strongly suggests that being American can mean being able to combine characteristics of many cultures, especially the European cultures from which most Americans could trace their ancestry.59 Would James himself then believe that there can be any “purely” American experience? Living during an age when global interactions between people and ideas was increasing dramatically, James held that pure national ideas or experiences were becoming a thing of the past. Bourne and Hollinger’s national cosmopolitan resistance to American parochialism on the left and right is inspiring, but their discomfort with international cosmopolitanism is unfortunate. National and international cosmopolitanism are different, and each cosmopolitanism has its peculiar strengths. It is important to remember that international cosmopolitanism does not necessarily preclude the development of strong national commitments. In fact, international cosmopolitanism can be used to engage issues of crucial national importance. When William James spoke out against U.S. imperialism abroad during the Spanish-American War, he invoked international cosmopolitanism as a way to criticize U.S. policy on humanitarian grounds.60

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N INETEENTH -C ENTURY C OSMOPOLITANISM AND I TS I MPLICATIONS T ODAY Twelve years after Hollinger’s visionary Postethnic America was first published, the need for some alternative or humanitarian counterexample to the resurgence in ethnic and religious conflicts all over the world has increased dramatically. Although the racial and ethnic prejudices within the United States that Hollinger addressed have certainly not diminished much since 1995, the limitations of national cosmopolitanism have left Americans with little if any guidance or practice in dealing with what Henry James called the “complicated” world. This book has examined the international lives of the Boston Cosmopolitans in an attempt to begin to tap their reservoir of experience for us to examine and analyze, so that we might be more practiced in seeing Americans deal creatively and often (if not always) humanely with the many cultures with whom we share the planet. Yet the world of the Boston Cosmopolitans is not our world. Because history never really repeats itself, historians almost never dare to extract explicit patterns and ideas from the past to apply simplistically to the problems of the present. History is much better at helping to describe where we are in the present than telling us exactly where we should go in the future. Bearing this caveat in mind, one can still address the questions of What do the Boston Cosmopolitans have to teach us? And what are the implications of those lessons? First, we Americans of the early 2000s have to acknowledge the severe limitations of multiculturalism in the 1980s and 1990s—not only in the way it segregated ethnic groups within the United States but also its role in reinforcing the age-old American tendency toward isolationism. In stark contrast to the work of the Boston Cosmopolitans, unchecked multiculturalism tended to place Americans in intellectual and cultural ghettos. These ghettos were rich and poor and were of many colors, but each of them remained—in the worst of cases—starkly detached from each other. The estrangement of various racial, ethnic, religious, and regional groups was so extreme that some recent attempts to bridge these gaps were attacked or ridiculed.61 In subdividing our national consciousness into intranational subdivisions, Americans just erected another row of walls between themselves and the world outside our nation-state.

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Unfortunately, the tendency to reinforce those walls (with the addition of real walls rising between the United States and Mexico, similar to the walls rising between Palestinians and Jews in the Middle East) has been accelerated as the fear of the foreign moved to hysterical heights in the United States after 9/11. In short, the fear of each other within the nation-state in the 1980s and 1990s has been amplified to include the fear of each other without the nation-state. Lacking a strong counterexample in fruitful transnational interaction and cooperation, the goal of moving from the multicultural shibboleth, “you don’t know me,” to the cosmopolitan ethos, “I would like to understand you,” seems increasingly difficult with each passing year. This tendency gains in poignancy as we learn, fitfully and painfully, that ignorance about the outside world creates real difficulties and tragedies for Americans in the “homeland,” a jingoistic word that has gained currency since the foreignness of other lands seems much more salient than their similarities to us. The navel-gazing of Americans today underlines the fact that conscious effort is required to remain informed about the outside world. Although many Americans today may have many more means at their disposal to encounter and explore the world than did the Boston Cosmopolitans, those tools remain inert, and the potential to develop a cosmopolitan outlook suffers. As Susan J. Douglas has pointed out, most of the potential connections to the world via the Internet and television have only been used to reinscribe our interest in our own lives. In other words, most Americans today are not taking advantage of modern technology to explore the world.62 This resistance to crossing over the multicultural and international gaps would be anathema to the outlook of the Boston Cosmopolitans. In fact, it was their inability to cross these gaps that alarmed them the most—as seen in Howells’ A Hazard of New Fortunes and James’ The American Scene. That is because the Boston Cosmopolitans often lamented barriers to dialogue and conversation between groups or peoples who have had little contact between each other. The disposition to enter into these dialogues was absolutely essential to understanding the complicated and ever-changing world. If the Boston Cosmopolitans were alive today, they would have noticed that many Americans have given up dialogue between groups (a dialogue that is difficult and challenging) in favor of puerile chatter within groups, (which is easy for people within

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groups but dangerous for maintaining contacts between groups). Indeed, the Boston Cosmopolitans often went out of their way to engage with people who disagreed with them or who had different worldviews. Some of these interchanges were frustrating or even failures, but the impulse to encounter “the other” remained a constant. Two conversations between William James and two very different interlocutors indicate how important conversation with those holding different worldviews was to the Boston Cosmopolitans. In the essay “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” James demonstrates how he overcame the great cultural and educational gulf between himself and a mountaineer who was giving James a tour of the mountains of North Carolina. James was dumbfounded by what he took to be ugliness of their surroundings, in which the guide and his fellow farmers carved out rudimentary farmland from the hills by cutting down large numbers of trees. It was only after conversing with his guide that he understood why they did not perceive the area as a barren landscape: I instantly felt that I had been losing the whole inward significance of the situation. Because to me the clearings spoke of naught but denudation, I thought that to those whose sturdy arms and obedient axes had made them they could tell no other story. But, when they looked on the hideous stumps, what they thought of was personal victory. . . . The cabin was a warrant of safety for self and wife and babes. In short, the clearing, which to me was a mere ugly picture on the retina, was to them a symbol redolent with moral memories and sang a very pæan of duty, struggle and success.63

James chose to tell this simple story because of the great significance of its lesson: that “a certain blindness” that separates human beings can be overcome through respectful conversation with those who are different from ourselves. In the summer 1909, William James and Henry Adams were both traveling in Europe: Adams was in Paris and James on his way to a resort in Germany. They maintained their correspondence even though James was suffering from a heart condition that would take his life in a few months time. Adams had just privately published and distributed his Letter to American Teachers of History. James had read this short tract, which in essence asserted that human history was following a pattern described by the Second Law of Thermodynamics and was, therefore, in the midst of decline, running toward chaos

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like the rest of the universe. Even though James had visited Adams in Paris on his way to Bad-Nauheim, the ailing philosopher was sufficiently stimulated by Adams’ theory to continue the conversation through a letter and two postcards, all of which convey his excitement on entering into a philosophic argument with a partisan of “the absolute.” After asserting that there was no telling how human ingenuity might successfully channel the diminishing energy of the universe, James ended his letter by gently mocking his old friend: Though the ultimate state of the universe may be its vital and physical extinction, there is nothing in physics to interfere with the hypothesis that the penultimate state might be the millennium. . . . In short, the last expiring pulsation of the universe’s life might be “I am so happy and perfect that I can stand it no longer. . . . ” There! that’s pretty good for a brain after 18 Nauheim baths—so I won’t write another line, nor ask you to reply to me. . . . It was pleasant at Paris to hear your identically unchanged and “undegraded” voice after so many years of loss of solar energy.

Promises of silence notwithstanding, James was so taken by this discussion with Adams that he quickly followed this letter of June 17 with a postcard dated June 19, with the card taking up their exchange where the previous letter left off.64 These letters demonstrate how James clung to the friends he made in Boston, stayed in touch with them as they traveled around the world, and sought out their opinions until the last months of his life—especially if they might result in an interesting exchange of contrasting opinions. The growth in religious tribalism in the twenty-first century marks the return of an ancient barrier to the exchange of ideas and opinions that made life interesting and vital for the Boston Cosmopolitans. Indeed, William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience posited that one of philosophy’s most ennobling tasks was to create a vocabulary that would make the intensely personal religious inspiration intelligible to people who did not feel that inspiration directly. Another traditional barrier to communication between disparate groups (that has reemerged strongly today) was the very human tendency to desire certainty and finality to difficult moral and social issues. If a group believes that “the truth” has been found once and for all, then there is little opportunity to cultivate the humility that is essential for the real exchange of ideas between people. Educated by history and their observation of a wide variety of cultures, many of

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the Boston Cosmopolitans resisted the tendency to find an endpoint to important debates. Henry Adams was an interesting exception, as he attempted to find order in the chaos of human history through the supposed finality of scientific theories. Yet even Adams could not deny the pulsing multiplicity of the world around him. Eventually he gave in, reluctantly, to the uncertainty and contingency that characterized the world, pronouncing his “education” (i.e., his belief in the ability in the essential orderliness of the universe) to have been a failure. Because the Boston Cosmopolitans knew the world was ever changing, they often tested their ideas and assumptions, which, although useful in one time and place, could require adjustment to another. In short, “getting along” with others requires two things that we are lacking today: the disposition to listen to other points of view and with the willingness to admit the shortcomings in our own point of view. In general, the Boston Cosmopolitans also tried not to privilege their own point of view (despite the difficulties of self-critique). In their writings, Henry James, John La Farge, and William Dean Howells shared their discomfort with challenges to their accustomed ways of seeing or dealing with the world—whether that be La Farge’s initial dislike of Japanese bathhouses or Howells’ reluctant attraction to Venetian indolence. They also did not assume, as we saw in William James’ conversation in the hills of North Carolina, that everyone could or should share their point of view. Being a welltraveled cosmopolitan, especially in the nineteenth century, was not an option for everybody; their brand of cosmopolitanism, fueled by excellent educations and extensive travel, could not be imitated by everyone. Nevertheless, because James did not abandon his cosmopolitan ethos (“I would like to understand you”) in his exchanges with people who were very different from himself, he encouraged “others” to interact with him in a humane and open manner. In short, although being a cosmopolitan is perhaps not possible for everybody, respect for other human beings is (as James felt in the easy give-and-take with his interlocutor in “A Certain Blindness.”) So beyond advocating the habit of respectful conversation with people who seem different from ourselves (which is quite a difficult task given human tendency to tribalism), what other useful legacy did the Cosmopolitans leave for us in the twenty-first century? The efforts of the Boston’s architects, painters, and sculptors from the late nineteenth century showed how a spirit of cosmopolitanism

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inspired artists to create opportunities to mix different people symbolically as well as in the public sphere. From Lilla Cabot Perry’s paintings made during her sojourn in Japan to the instance of many artists who collaborated to create the Adams Memorial, cosmopolitanism created a palate of influences from which these works were created. Richardson’s Trinity Church and Perry’s The Trio demonstrate the effect of a lifetime of travel and international study on art and architecture through their eclecticism. In the Adams Memorial, Asian philosophical and artistic traditions gave Henry Adams access to an aesthetic that could accommodate his profound discomfort and bewilderment with the suicide of his wife far better than those artistic traditions available to him in the Western tradition, and Saint Gaudens’ Shaw Memorial demonstrated how a cosmopolitan education could actually help to create a work of art that brought together American blacks and whites in a visual statement, the progressiveness of which beyond some of the racist opinions of Saint Gaudens himself. In the Gardner Museum and the Boston Public Library, and to a great extent in Trinity Church, the Boston Cosmopolitans attempted something that was the antithesis of the ethnic and racial parsing that multiculturalism sometimes espoused: creating public space through an appeal to the universal aesthetic impulses of human beings. Although the buildings are easily identifiable as being part of the Western artistic tradition, they are first and foremost appeals to the senses, with their rich combinations of light, color, texture, and shape—all arranged on a humane scale. McKim’s Boston Public Library in particular created a space the intent of which was to bring different classes of people together harmoniously—and for the most part, McKim succeeded. From the very first, critics and supporters alike noticed that people from different classes and ethnicities responded very positively to the “democratic luxuriance” that was for the people, if not by the people. Yet in today’s world of increasing violence and bitterness across national, religious, and ethnic lines, it would not be enough for Americans to attend to racism and prejudice only within our borders. Although the nation-state is still a strong and important locus of power, laws, and identity, the world has become increasingly interconnected, making the well-being of this nation more obviously intertwined with the well-being of others. Americans cannot, and should not, feel any sense of complacency about dealing with

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problems only within our borders. People, goods, corporations, diseases, ideologies, and climate change can travel far too easily to be controlled with much success by individual nations. The Boston Cosmopolitans viewed glimpses of this globalized world we not live in far ahead of the time that it became obvious to most people in the late twentieth century. Yet because they were at the cusp of that wave of globalization, moving from the first half of the nineteenth century, when travel technologies were much more primitive than they are today, they were perhaps particularly sensitive to the problems and opportunities posed by globalization. Above all, they were disposed to use the latest technologies available to them at the time to increase the possibilities of interaction and conversation with other people. Although they were not able to overcome all the barriers between them and people who were greatly different than they (remember Howells’ consternation before the growing masses of poor in New York City), their goal was to become better-educated citizens of the world through study and, especially, travel. Their greatest legacy for Americans in the twentieth century is to show us that attaining goal is, indeed, possible.

T HE B OSTON C OSMOPOLITANS AND THEIR A MERICAN C OSMOPOLITAN P REDECESSORS The first European immigrants to live in Boston were English, not American. Thus, from the beginning Boston was culturally linked to Europe, and many of Boston’s most important religious and business leaders worked in transnational endeavors with their European counterparts. Mark Peterson argues that “Early Boston was part of, not separate from, an expanding old world. . . . Even as Bostonians helped to create a new world, that new world was never only ‘American,’ and many of the city’s residents were far less concerned with the future of the North American interior than later historians of the United States might imagine.”65 Although they were physically separated from European civilization by the breadth of the Atlantic Ocean, many early Bostonians felt—rightly or wrongly—that their work was of transnational if not universal importance.66 These world-historical aspirations energized the work of one of Boston’s most influential religious leaders, Cotton Mather (1663– 1728). Mather’s Boston was connected to the rest of the world

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through religious men who envisioned Boston as an important player in a growing Atlantic Protestant International. The city’s religious aspirations and international connections would be sustained by merchants such as Mather’s contemporary Jonathan Belcher, who linked Boston to far-flung trade networks.67 This cosmopolitan vision of Mather and Belcher was shaped and circumscribed by religious rather than national interests. As a young man traveling in Europe in 1704, Belcher’s pious sense of civic duty moved him to learn from Dutch Protestant merchants, whose charitable institutions offered an efficient example of how the commercial elite might alleviate poverty in Boston.68 In contrast, when Belcher visited a monastery on his way from Holland to Berlin, he simply confirmed his anti-Catholic prejudices.69 Although Cotton Mather never traveled to Europe, his capacious mind and steady correspondence contributed to maintaining Boston’s position in an international evangelical Protestant network. Mather’s strategies for spreading the influence of his religion reveal the peculiarities of his cosmopolitanism. Mather distributed and gathered information through this religious network to aid in spreading the influence of Protestantism. Believing that stories of the religious conversion of American Indians would provide useful examples to evangelicals around the world, Mather wrote a biography of the evangelist John Eliot entitled Triumphs of the Reformed Religion in America, which was published in London and Boston in 1691.70 Mather’s hopes were confirmed when he learned that the biography inspired missionary activity in Britain soon after its publication.71 Almost twenty-five years later, Mather received some more encouraging news from his long-time German correspondent Augustus Hermann Francke, who led “the pietist institute at Halle, in Saxony.” The story of John Eliot, Francke reported, “had influenced Halle’s missionary work in India.” Mather quickly responded by sending copies of his biography to Francke with this request: “yea, excuse me, if I say, procure them to be translated into as many Languages as you can.”72 Francke’s news that the story of a missionary in America had influenced missionary work in India motivated Mather to “correspond directly with Halle’s missionaries at Malabar, on the west coast of India . . . with whom he traded ideas and strategies.” Mather then used the information he gathered from his Indian correspondents to

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write India Christiana (1721), a pamphlet that developed tactics for converting the native peoples of the East and West Indies.73 Despite his keen interest in the progress of Protestantism among various cultures in the world, Mather’s ultimate goal was to transcend the differences of language, region, and history to create a Protestant utopia. To combat the gains made for Catholicism by missionaries such as the Jesuits and to counteract the differences between Protestant sects, Mather supported the effort to distill the tenets of Protestantism into a few basic truths that could be easily explained to a variety of people.74 Mather’s cosmopolitanism did not include a broad tolerance of many different religious beliefs. Instead, he envisioned a heaven on Earth that would be achieved by transforming the cacophony of religious traditions around the world into a few harmonious (i.e., Protestant) notes. Although participating in projects with worldwide scope could be exhilarating, some Bostonians found that their local and international interests sometimes came into conflict. In the second half of the eighteenth century, one of America’s most prominent leaders from Boston struggled with his dual cultural identity within the British Empire. While working in London as an agent for Georgia in 1768, Benjamin Franklin described the stresses that could arise from his cosmopolitan situation: “I do not find that I have gained any point, in either country, except that of rendering myself suspected of too much an American, and in America, of being too much an Englishman.”75 Writing during a period of rising tension between Britain and her American colonies following the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), Franklin found that his divided loyalties came under pressure from those who saw his cosmopolitanism as a threat to their more local (i.e., “American” or “British”) interests. Franklin had hoped to resolve these tensions by joining the two sides in an imperial federation.76 Franklin, who was accepted into the social circles of the philosophes during his long sojourn in France (1776–85), shared many of the goals and prejudices of the enlightenment. He hoped to foster a universal language as an efficient vehicle to influence world opinion, as well as a means to communicate clearly with eminent thinkers of future generations.77 Franklin’s commitment to reason did not make him an atheist, but it did help to make him a dispassionate religious practitioner. Although he believed in a supreme being, Franklin did not care to debate on the question of God’s

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existence.78 Instead of looking for direction from divinity, Franklin put more faith in the influence of reason on human conduct. As Thomas J. Schlereth explains, Franklin believed that reason could rationalize religion: “certain basic ‘essentials’ might be extracted from the world’s religions and . . . these universal beliefs could be forged in to a cosmopolitan credo that all men . . . could accept.”79 John Adams shared Franklin’s skepticism about the doctrinal truths held by many established religions, but his findings left him in a much less sanguine mood. Although he had grave personal doubts about religion, Adams thought that piety was one of the few forces that could check human self-interest.80 The assault against organized religion during the French Revolution made Adams very nervous.81 Unlike Franklin, Adams had little faith that the virtues of piety could be replaced by reason. At best, reason could make the best of the poor prospects for human beings and their government. Although reason could not change man, Adams believed that his plans for divided government offered a timeless solution to the permanent flaws of human nature. In 1790 Adams proclaimed: “I am so well satisfied of my own principles, that I think them as eternal and unchangeable as the earth and its inhabitants.”82 Assessing Thomas Jefferson’s style of thinking is difficult because he led a life full of contradictions.83 He was a slaveholder who detested slavery and an apologist for the excesses of the French Revolution who was surprisingly moderate during his tenure as president.84 Despite these contradictions, or perhaps because of them, Jefferson believed in a rational universe that would ultimately eliminate all mysteries and paradoxes.85 Concerning religion, Jefferson sought to distill the impurities and contradictions from Christianity by basing religious faith only on the words of Jesus.86 In politics, Jefferson deduced the necessity of the American Revolution (and revolutions in any other country) from the “self-evident” premise that “all men are created equal.” Unlike John Adams, who used reason to develop a mixed system of government that would maintain social stability, Jefferson’s universal principle gave people everywhere, as he wrote in the Declaration of Independence, the right “to alter or abolish [their government] and to institute new government.” One of Jefferson’s biographers points out that Jefferson hoped that his vision of government dedicated to the “pursuit of happiness” of its citizens would eventually bring about “a liberal international community, comprised of open markets and national cooperation.”87

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Although Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin may have shared in the hope that the world could be ruled in one way or another by universal reason, their attitudes toward foreign cultures were anything but uniform. These divergences in their dealings with the “other” might be best measured by their opinions of France, where Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson acted as American representatives to the French government.88 Franklin and Adams could not have differed more in their reactions to French mores. Whereas Adams was outraged by the sexual permissiveness of the French, Franklin was a willing participant in some complicated intrigues with well-known French women. Franklin’s association with Madame Helvétius, the widow of the infamous free-thinker Claude-Adrian Helvétius (d. 1771), made Adams very uncomfortable. Instead of being shocked by her affairs with many men, Franklin admired Helvétius and wondered how an older woman could attract so many younger admirers.89 Adams had quite a different opinion: “Oh Mores! said I to myself. What Absurdities, Inconsistencies, Distractions and Horrors would these Manners introduce into our Republican Governments in America.”90 In his private life Thomas Jefferson admired much that he encountered in France. Jefferson learned to love the society of French people and was especially fond of French food, wine, and architecture.91 In a hastily written manuscript of 1788 that Jefferson planned to publish one day, he offered detailed advice to Americans during their tours in Europe. Included in this pamphlet was “Objects of Attention for an American,” which listed eight subjects. The first five subjects concentrated on European accomplishments in agriculture, architecture, and “Mechanical arts, so far as they respect things necessary in America, and inconvenient to be transported thither ready made.” The last two subjects, the politics and courts of Europe, provided examples of how not to run a government or maintain a healthy society. Jefferson counseled that the sixth item on the list, painting and statuary, should be looked at as briefly as possible. Although Jefferson loved surrounding himself with beautiful objects in his Virginia home, he warned others that art was too “expensive for the state of wealth among us. It would be useless therefore and preposterous for us to endeavor to make ourselves connoisseurs.”92 The cosmopolitan travels and experiences of Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin did not lead them to advocate that Americans could or

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should borrow from the ideas and traditions of other cultures. Although Jefferson and Franklin believed in some sort of universal truth or truths that might provide the foundations for cooperation between different cultures and nationalities, these truths often remained abstract and lacked cultural specificity. Because their cosmopolitanism remained abstract, their encounters with foreign cultures did not provoke much critical self-examination,93 and if their encounters with foreign cultures provoked some doubts about their own, those doubts often remained private.94 In the early nineteenth century, other Americans who traveled the globe continued to combine a belief in cosmopolitan universalism with a resistance to changing or even challenging their homegrown beliefs and outlooks. Protestant evangelicals such as the famous Baptist Adoniram Judson (1788–1850) sailed abroad in an effort to export the Biblical truths they had discovered in America. Like his predecessor Cotton Mather, Judson, a native of Malden, Massachusetts, saw “heathen” peoples all over the world as proper subjects for conversion. Going one significant step further, Judson spent decades abroad preaching the gospel in Burma (1813–45).95 Although Burmese culture presented many opportunities for Americans to learn about a culture very distinct from their own, most American missionaries during this time rejected foreign beliefs and traditions.”96 Even though Judson made heroic efforts to learn Burmese and spent years translating the Bible into that language, he was not interested in translating Burmese culture for Americans.97 In other words, Judson’s knowledge of Burmese did not encourage him to enter into a cultural dialogue; instead, Judson used Burmese to deliver a religious monologue.98 The Concord native Ralph Waldo Emerson made similar attempts to minimize the influence of foreign cultures on American thought. Although Emerson read countless volumes of literature from all over the world, he felt that the influence of books was far inferior to discoveries made by the individual’s interaction with his immediate surroundings.99 Emerson describes the virtues of individual experience in his influential essay, “Self-Reliance” (1841): To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,—that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense. . . .

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Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events.100

In Emerson’s view universal truth cannot be found through the Bible or through reason. Instead it is discovered slowly in the course of each individual’s personal interactions with nature and his immediate surroundings, preferably those of one’s birth. In “Self-Reliance” Emerson portrayed travel as an impediment to understanding the world. Although Emerson had traveled to Europe before writing this essay (December 25, 1832, to October 9, 1833), the time he spent in places like Italy and England was meant principally for rest and recuperation from the problems of his American life. (His first wife Ellen had died on February 8, 1831, and Emerson’s religious doubts forced him to give up his ministry in Boston soon afterward in June 1832.) During his journey he enjoyed visiting famous places like Rome and conversing with celebrated men such as Thomas Carlyle. Although Emerson returned home refreshed and full of energy, he did not recommend such travel for other Americans: Travelling is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical that I fled from.101

This interpretation of travel is deeply counterintuitive. Indeed, Emerson’s privileging of local experience over broader international or global experience creates a vision of universal truth that is deliberately parochial. Although Emerson’s defense of the individual reminded his readers that majority rule was not the only reliable means of finding the truth in America, it also hid the fact that important ideas and truths might also be found outside of ourselves, even outside of our culture. The Boston Cosmopolitans became adults during the days of the Civil War and Reconstruction. The lofty political goals of the Civil War, contrasted with the disappointments of Reconstruction during the Johnson and Grant administrations, made the Cosmopolitans impatient with government malfeasance. In the fifty years following

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the Civil War, the Cosmopolitans maintained the desire to reform American society, but they lacked the strong belief that political action could accomplish those reforms.102 They also became highly sensitive to the gap separating the humanitarian hopes kindled by the Civil War and the crass materialism of the Gilded Age. The Boston Cosmopolitans generally approved of Matthew Arnold’s contention in his essay “Civilization in the United States” (1888) that Americans’ success at solving “the political problem” through their democratic institutions had made them too complacent to consider “the human problem.” Arnold noted that “the worst of it is, that all this tall talk and self-glorification meets with hardly any rebuke from sane criticism over there.” He contended that political institutions, no matter how well constructed in the United States, could not directly attend to the improvement of man: “Man’s study, says Plato, is to discover the right answer to the question how to live . . . to build up a complete human life.”103 William James agreed with Arnold, remarking in a letter to his brother Henry that “His last paper on America was very sensible and good and artistically composed, in his peculiar way.” Although William lamented the snobbish tone of “Civilization in America,” he believed that Arnold was right to point out that Americans needed to be more consciously self-critical.104 As we saw in Chapter 2, Charles Eliot Norton and other Boston Cosmopolitans rejected Emerson’s self-reliance—although many of them valued his optimism as well as his defense of individualism—as a guide to the future of American civilization. Unconvinced that the American form of democratic government could by itself ensure the development of a healthy cultural life, and dissatisfied with the selfsatisfaction of antebellum America’s most influential intellectual, the Boston Cosmopolitans searched for new ideas to invigorate their culture. Where could the Boston Cosmopolitans turn in their hopes to improve the American mind and the American quality of life? Cultural comparison and experimentation offered a wealth of new ideas. The most important means of experimentation was long-distance travel. Although Benjamin Franklin shuttled across the Atlantic many times throughout his life, his experience was exceptional for his era. As was discussed, the speed, comfort, and availability of travel increased at an unprecedented rate after the Civil War. Traveling long distances allowed the Boston Cosmopolitans to search the

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world for new ideas and traditions that could be used to change and improve American culture. One of their most important discoveries was the power and potential of the visual arts. As I noted earlier, the postwar demand for art in America enabled growing numbers of American artists to live abroad and train in the art schools of Europe. The Boston Cosmopolitans—writers and artists alike—were all enthusiastic about using the visual arts to convey the tentative findings of their cultural travels and experimentation to Americans. Unlike Jefferson, whose utilitarian eye dismissed the value of European arts for his countrymen, the Boston Cosmopolitans believed that art and art history might be used to distract Americans from their obsessions with laissez-faire long enough to lead them to the question of savoir vivre. The products and discoveries made through travel varied widely. Despite the Boston Cosmopolitans’ eclectic interests, one can generalize that they were moving from the idea of finding universal truths to the goal of fostering universal tolerance. The first steps taken toward this goal were made by Charles Eliot Norton, whose moralistic lectures at Harvard University were based on a cultural analysis of European art history. Norton’s work was one of the earliest products of this cultural experimentation to be appreciated by a wide American audience. Norton’s success would contribute to the creation of a favorable cultural atmosphere for the work of all the Boston Cosmopolitans. Soon, the younger Cosmopolitans saw the enjoyment of the world’s variety as an end in itself and did their best to share their findings with the American public. This love of variety did not mean that the Boston Cosmopolitans abandoned the idea of human universals altogether. If there were no such “universals,” then Americans could not hope to learn from the ideas and traditions of other cultures. The Boston Cosmopolitans believed that understanding between cultures—which was the ultimate goal the philosophes had hoped to achieve through reason— could be constructed provisionally through conversation and art, rather than deduced permanently from abstract principles. The Boston Cosmopolitans did their part to participate in this worldwide dialogue by abandoning the age-old desire to create a universal language. Instead, they themselves learned how to speak and write many foreign languages well.105 Through speaking French, Italian, and German, they began to make connections with the outside world without diluting the cultural specificity of the “others” they

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would meet. Because the lessons they learned from foreign cultures could not be translated directly into an immediately recognizable American cultural idiom, the Boston Cosmopolitans employed literature, painting, sculpture, and architecture to represent the discoveries they made during their travels at home and abroad. To encourage this conversation in the United States, most of the Cosmopolitans were careful to avoid elite didacticism and instead often shared many of their findings with the public in ways that permitted Americans to see and judge foreign ideas and images for themselves. Their work, then, can be seen as an opportunity for Americans to join in a dialogue about understanding foreign cultures and improving their own.

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4 NOTES

I NTRODUCTION

1. 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. 2. 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. 3. 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. 4. 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. 5. 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

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6.

7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

NOTES 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. Adams, The Boston Money Tree, 134. Turner, Liberal Education of Charles Eliot Norton, 8. See The Atlantic 47 (1881): 412.

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15. In describing the cultural world in which Charles Eliot Norton grew up, James Turner writes: “For the distinguishing characteristic of Boston’s elite was the melding, achieved to perhaps a unique degree in American history, of the lives of the mind and of the counting house.” See Turner, Liberal Education of Charles Eliot Norton, 6. For an exemplary and concise description of the intellectual life of Boston preceding the Civil War, see ibid., 1–20. 16. 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. 17. Alan Trachtenberg, “Incorporation of America Today,” American Literary History 15 (2003): 760–61. 18. See John Tebbel, Between Covers: The Rise and Transformation of Book Publishing in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). 19. 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). 20. See Sam Bass Warner, Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870–1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962). 21. 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. 22. 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. 23. 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. 24. 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. 25. 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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C HAPTER 1 1. Henry to William James, April 10, 1903, in William James, The Correspondence of William James, 3 vols., ed. Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 3: 231. 2. William to Henry James, May 3, 1903, in ibid., 3: 232–33. 3. Henry to William James, May 13, 1903, in ibid., 3: 234. 4. James traveled to Italy in 1877, 1880, 1881, 1886–87, 1888, 1889, 1892, 1894, 1899, and 1907. Natalia Wright, American Novelists in Italy: The Discoverers—Allston to James (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1965), 205. 5. Henry to William James, May 24, 1903, in The Correspondence of William James, 3: 237–38. 6. David Cressy, “The Vast and Furious Ocean: The Passage to Puritan New England,” New England Quarterly 57 (1984): 511–32. 7. Peter Stanford, “Steam & Speed, Part I: How Steamships Paddled out of the Shallows into the Ocean World,” Sea History 64 (1992–1993): 14. Some of this discussion appeared previously in “Planned Serendipity: American Travelers and the Transatlantic Voyage in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” Journal of Social History 38 (2004): 365–83, which I coauthored with Whitney Walton. Quoted with permission from the Journal of Social History. 8. Ibid. 9. Melvin Maddocks, The Great Liners, Seafarer Series (Alexandria, VA: TimeLife, 1982), 29. 10. Ibid., 19. 11. Stanford, “Steam and Speed, Part I,” 14. 12. Francis E. Hyde, Cunard and the North Atlantic, 1840–1973: A History of Shipping and Financial Management (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1975), 40. 13. Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, 2 vols. (Washington, DC: Bureau of the Census, 1975), 1: 322. 14. Jean L. McKechnie, ed., Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (New York: Publishers Guild, 1967), 1942. 15. Charles Dickens, American Notes (New York: Modern Library, 1996), 3–23. 16. See Maddocks, The Great Liners, 29–31. 17. See Hyde, Cunard and the North Atlantic, 67. 18. See Maddocks, The Great Liners, 59, 95, 98. 19. For fare prices, see Hyde, Cunard and the North Atlantic, 40, 64, 88. For the rates of inflation and their effect on prices, see Scott Derks, ed., The Value of a Dollar, 1860–1989 (Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1994), 2. 20. See Hyde, Cunard and the North Atlantic, 74. 21. Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, or the New Pilgrims Progress (New York: Signet Classic, 1980), 27.

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22. Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River: A Legend of Man’s Hunger in His Youth (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1935), 906. 23. Isabella Gardner to unspecified correspondent, January 7, 1884, in Morris Carter, Isabella Stewart Gardner and Fenway Court (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1925), 80. 24. Dennis Miller Bunker to Isabella Stewart Gardner, March 2, 1888, Archives of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. 25. See Stanford, “Steam and Speed, Part I,” 18. For Henry Adams’s appreciation of these changes, see Ernest Samuels, Henry Adams (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1979), 278. 26. Lynne Withey, Grand Tours and Cook’s Tours: A History of Leisure Travel, 1750–1915 (New York: William Morrow, 1997), 156, 161. 27. Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (New York: Penguin, 1986), 118. 28. Maddocks, The Great Liners, 34. 29. David Cressy’s article parallels my interpretation of the possible transformative effects of ocean travel. But because ocean travel was much safer toward the end of the nineteenth century, my interpretation of the effect of travel differs from Cressy’s. 30. George Santayana, “The Philosophy of Travel,” Virginia Quarterly Review 40 (1964): 1–10. 31. Ibid. 32. Victor and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 20. Isabella Stewart Gardner saw her trip of 1875 to the Holy Land in Palestine as a voyage that copied the spirit of the ancient Christian pilgrimages. See Carter, Fenway Court, 42–45. 33. Turner, Pilgrimage, 3. 34. Turner’s full definition of communitas or social antistructure is as follows: “[Communitas is a] relational quality of full unmediated communication, even communion, between definite and determinate identities, which arises spontaneously in all kinds of groups, situations, and circumstances. . . . It is a liminal phenomenon, which combines the qualities of lowliness, sacredness, homogeneity, and comradeship. . . . It may be regarded by the guardians of structure as dangerous and may be hedged around with taboos, and associated with ideas of purity and pollution. For it is richly charged with affects, mainly pleasurable. It has something magical about it. Those who experience communitas have a feeling of endless power.” Ibid., 250–51. 35. For a discussion of travel in the nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries, please see the historiographic discussion at the end of this book. See also my article (cowritten with Whitney Walton), “Planned Serendipity: American Travelers and the Transatlantic Voyage in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” Journal of Social History 38 (2004): 365–83. 36. Samuels, Henry Adams, 331. 37. Ernest Samuels writes that the “RMS Teutonic bore Adams ‘wobbling’ out to sea on February 3, 1892. He was dismayed to notice the social decline in

220

38. 39.

40.

41.

42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58.

NOTES first class. His two hundred fellow passengers seemed somehow all to be Jews.” Samuels, Henry Adams, 278. James to Perry, September 29, 1867, in Leon Edel, ed., Henry James: Selected Letters (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1987), 15. James’s advocacy of mixing many cultures also sounds reminiscent of Randolph Bourne’s “Transnational America,” Atlantic Monthly 118 (July 1916): 86–97. Howells to Charles Eliot Norton, July 14, 1887, in William Dean Howells, Selected Letters, 6 vols., ed. Robert C. Leitz, et al. (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979–1983), 3: 191. Saint Gaudens, The Reminiscences of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, 2 vols., ed. Homer Saint Gaudens (New York: The Century Company, 1913), 1: 244–46. William Dean Howells, The Lady of the Aroostook (Cambridge, MA: Riverside, 1879), 231. Howells, Aroostook, 64, 66. William James to Charles Eliot Norton, May 4, 1902, in Henry James, ed., The Letters of William James, 2 vols. (Boston: Atlantic Monthly, 1920), 2: 166. Samuels, Henry Adams, 352. Kenneth Lynn, William Dean Howlls: An American Life (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Javanovich, 1970), 129. Thomas Sergeant Perry, Selections from the Letter of Thomas Sergeant Perry, ed. Edward Arlington Robinson (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1929), 50. John La Farge, An Artist’s Letters from Japan (New York: Da Capo, 1970), 9, 35. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 35, 42. Ibid., 3. Henry James, The Ambassadors (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 31. La Farge, An Artist’s Letters, 30–31. Ibid., 220. The biographer of the James family, R. W. B. Lewis, writes that Henry Adams reacted to the piece by calling it “pure autobiography.” Lewis adds that Adams “meant that Story as treated was a paradigm for the generation of prewar Bostonians who embarked on their professions—sculptor, statesman, philosopher—in perfect ignorance of the difficulties to be met. But to a degree William Wetmore Story was literally a first run-through of Henry’s autobiography.” R. W. B. Lewis, The Jameses: A Family Narrative (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), 525. Henry James, William Wetmore Story and His Friends, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1903), 1: 4. Ibid., 1: 12. Ibid., 1: 4.

NOTES

221

59. Ibid., 1: 8. 60. Ibid., 1: 27–33, 98, 114; see also Henry James, Henry James, Selected Letters, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1987), 50–53, 99–101. 61. James described the recent accomplishments of art in America: “And true at large of the American pilgrim of that unadministered age, these things are especially true of those who crossed the Atlantic to follow one or the other of those mysteries, arts, sciences of which at present—so far as the teaching of them and the dealing in them has become a prosperous traffic—we are perhaps, as a nation, the main supporters.” James, Story, 1: 9. 62. Ibid.

C HAPTER 2 1. James Turner, The Liberal Education of Charles Eliot Norton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), xiii. 2. Ibid., 387. 3. Henry James, “An American Art-Scholar: Charles Eliot Norton,” in Notes on Novelists—With Some Other Notes (New York: Biblo and Tannen, 1969), 421. 4. William to Henry James, January 24, 1909, in Henry James, ed., The Letters of William James, 2 vols. (Boston: Atlantic Monthly, 1920), 2: 377. 5. Kermit Vanderbilt, Charles Eliot Norton: Apostle of Culture in a Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1959), 85. 6. For Norton’s involvement with The Nation, see Turner, Norton, 199–200. 7. Norton to Edwin Lawrence Godkin, July 28, 1869, in Edwin Lawrence Godkin Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University; quoted in Turner, Norton, 234. 8. Ibid., 241. 9. Norton, journal entry of November 16, 1872, in Sara Norton and Mark De Wolfe, ed., Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, with Biographical Comment by his Daughter Sara Norton and M.A. De Wolfe Howe, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1913), 1: 429. 10. Norton’s travel journals are stored in the Charles Eliot Norton papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 11. James Turner, “Charles Eliot Norton,” in A Companion to American Thought (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995), 499. 12. For Norton’s relationship with Caryle, see Turner, Norton, 226–27, 249. For Norton’s relationship with Ruskin, see ibid., 90, 126–27, 133–35, 450. 13. Norton and De Wolfe, Letters, 1: 474. 14. Norton, journal entry of May 15, 1873, in Norton and De Wolfe, Letters, 1: 503. 15. Ibid., 1: 510. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid., 1: 507.

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NOTES

18. Ibid., 1: 504. 19. Ibid., 1: 511. 20. Six months later, in a letter to Thomas Carlyle, Norton wrote that Emerson “reflects himself in the world;—and if men were but all Emersons one might share his confidence!” Norton to Thomas Carlyle, December 22, 1873, in Norton and De Wolfe, Letters, 2: 26. 21. Norton, journal entry of May 1873, in ibid., 1: 503. 22. Norton to Thomas Carlyle, May 6, 1875, in ibid., 2: 51. In Norton’s journal of the voyage on the Olympus one can find a list of quotations from Emerson that were grouped together, it seems, so that Norton could record his own shock at hearing them. See ibid., 1: 505. 23. John Ruskin, the English art critic and philosopher, made Emerson’s head spin with indignation: “‘I cannot pardon him for a despondency so deep. It is detestable in a man of such powers, in a poet, a seer such as he has been.’” Ibid., 1: 507. 24. Norton to Thomas Carlyle, May 6, 1875, in ibid., 2: 53. 25. Charles Eliot Norton to G. P. Marsh, August 15 and November 9, 1861, University of Vermont Library; quoted in Turner, Norton, 170. 26. Shortly before the beginning of the Civil War, Norton assumed warrior-like rhetoric by dismissing “timid counsels,” and “compromises & concessions.” Norton to Aubrey de Vere, February 24, 1861, in Charles Eliot Norton papers; quoted in Turner, Norton, 166. 27. Norton to G. P. Marsh, May 9, 1863, University of Vermont Library; quoted in ibid., 181. 28. Charles Eliot Norton, “American Political Ideals,” North American Review, October 1865, 551; quoted in James Turner, The Liberal Education of Charles Eliot Norton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 202. 29. Ibid., 1: 506. 30. Norton to Edwin Lawrence Godkin, July 28, 1869, Edwin Lawrence Godkin papers, Houghton Library; quoted in Turner, Liberal Education, 234. 31. Norton, journal entry of May 1873, in Norton and De Wolfe, Letters, 1: 506–7. 32. Walt Whitman, “Democratic Vistas,” in Floyd Stovall, ed., Walt Whitman: Prose Works, 2 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1966), 2: 371. 33. See Turner, Norton, 242–43. 34. The argument of this chapter parallels Kermit Vanderbilt’s assessment of Norton’s transatlantic voyage of 1873, although the present effort is more detailed and offers a more thorough description of the interweaving of the lives of Norton and Emerson before and after the Civil War. My arguments concerning cosmopolitanism and the important effect of long-distance travel do not figure in Vanderbilt’s biography. See Vanderbilt, Charles Eliot Norton, 114–16. 35. Norton, journal entry of May 1873, in Norton and De Wolfe, Letters, 1: 504. 36. Norton to Thomas Carlyle, November 16, 1873, in ibid., 2: 18.

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37. See Robert Burkholder, “Emerson, Kneeland, and the Divinity School Address,” American Literature 58 (1986), 9. 38. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” in Selected Essays (New York: Penguin Classics, 1985), 102. 39. In a letter written to Thomas Carlyle in 1880, Norton describes his hopes for an “American School at Athens where, before long, our young students may go to drink deeper from the classic fountains than they can at home.” Norton and De Wolfe, Letters, 2: 112–13. 40. Norton, journal entry of May 1873, in ibid., 1: 505. 41. Norton to Edward Lee-Childe, December 20, 1873 in ibid., 2: 25. 42. Charles Eliot Norton, Historical Studies of Church Building in the Middle Ages—Venice, Siena, Florence (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1902). 43. Ibid., 29. 44. According to Norton, beginning around 1350 the love of wealth began to overpower the love of community in Venice. See ibid., 62. 45. Ibid., 29. Later we see that John La Farge also described the history of art as the common vocabulary from which artists could draw. 46. Ibid., 4, 43. 47. Ibid., 43–44. 48. Ibid., 42. 49. Ibid., 39. 50. Matthew Arnold, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” in Walther E. Houghton and G. Robert Stange, eds., Victorian Poetry and Poetics, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), 522, 527.

C HAPTER 3 1. Virginia Harlow, Thomas Sergeant Perry: A Biography (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1950), 284. 2. 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. 3. 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. 4. 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

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5.

6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

NOTES 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. Hofer and Barish, Emerson in Italy, 6. Christina Zwarg, “Margaret Fuller,” in A Companion to American Thought, eds. Richard Wightman Fox and James T. Kloppenberg (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995), 259–60. See 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:

NOTES

15.

16. 17.

18.

19. 20.

21.

22.

23.

24. 25.

26.

225

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. Howells, “Recollections,” 596, 597. 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.

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27. 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. 28. James Turner speculates on the reasons behind Boston’s insularity: “Boston’s elite deliberately elected to cultivate its own backyard. Perhaps the defeat of Federalism and the concomitant triumph of democracy sealed the policy, for they doomed high Boston to national political obsolescence.” Turner, Liberal Education, 8,9. 29. “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. 30. See Henry James, The Bostonians (New York: Penguin Classics, 1986). 31. 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. 32. James to Isabella Stewart Gardner, December 7, 1881, Archives of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. 33. Lynn, William Dean Howells, 136–37. 34. Kenneth Lynn describes how Howells and James were drawn to each other in the late 1860s because they felt relatively isolated from the rest of Boston’s intellectual and social circles. Ibid., 179–80. 35. Lynn reports that as Howells gained confidence as a novelist, his desire to become acquainted with more kinds of novel writing increased: “The unofficial supervisor of [Howells] reading program was the best-read man in Cambridge, Thomas Sergeant Perry. . . . With Perry as his guide, and with James making suggestions, too, Howells read Balzac, Flaubert, Daudet, Björnson, George Eliot, Erckmann-Chatrian, and Auerbach, and went on to Perry’s favorite, Turgenev.” Ibid., 222. 36. Henry James, French Poets and Novelists (London: MacMillan, 1893), 104. 37. [Thomas Sergeant Perry], “Recent Literature: French and German,” Atlantic 44 (1879): 808. 38. Howells quoted in Albert J. Salvan, Zola aux Etats-Unis, Brown University Studies, vol. 8 (Providence, RI: Brown University, 1943), 46. 39. Henry James to Thomas Sergeant Perry, November 2, 1879; quoted in Harlow, Perry, 304. 40. Thomas Sergeant Perry, “Zola’s Last Novel,” Atlantic 45 (1880): 694. 41. William Dean Howells, “Recent Literature,” Atlantic 42 (1878): 118. 42. Henry James to William Dean Howells, May 17, 1890, in Percy Lubbock, The Letters of Henry James (New York: Scribner’s, 1920), 163–64. 43. Harlow, Perry, 61–63.

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44. Henry James, “John S. Sargent,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 75 (1887): 683. 45. 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. 46. Martindale, “Lilla Cabot Perry,” 44. 47. The estimation of the time the Perry family spent in France is based on information from ibid., 20–54. 48. See my discussion of Perry’s published books during the 1880s in Chapter 1. See also Harlow, Perry, 105–106. 49. See ibid., 41–46 and 175. See also Martindale, “Lilla Cabot Perry,” 38, 54, 65. 50. Although Thomas Sargeant Perry and Lilla Cabot came from well-known families, the couple was not very wealthy. They did receive some money following the death of Lilla’s father in 1885, but the money did not sustain them for many years, and the Perrys became increasingly dependent on Lilla’s paintings for their income. See ibid., 19–20. 51. Martindale writes that in 1905, “living expenses abroad were still considerably lower than in Boston, which made travel even more attractive as a means of staying within a limited budget.” Ibid., 54. 52. Lilla Cabot Perry’s art will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 5. 53. 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. 54. 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. 55. 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. 56. 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. 57. Thomas Sergeant Perry to William James, July 11, 1907, in Perry, Letters, 46. 58. Thomas Sergeant Perry to Moorfield Storey, June 6, 1889, in ibid., 34. 59. Thomas Sergeant Perry to Moorfield Storey, April 13, 1889, in ibid., 33.

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60. Henry James, French Poets and Novelists (London: MacMillan, 1893), 78. 61. 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. 62. James, French Poets, 81–82. 63. 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. 64. Henry James, The American (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962), 367–68. 65. William Dean Howells, Venetian Life, 4th ed. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1907). 66. Ibid., 38–39. 67. 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. 68. Racism certainly existed among the Boston Cosmopolitans, as Zwerdling and Lears 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. 69. William Dean Howells to James M. Comly, October 22, 1871, in Howells, Selected Letters, 1: 380. 70. See William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 58–59. 71. Ibid., 63.

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72. Ibid., 162. 73. Ibid., 449. 74. Henry James, The American Scene (New York: Penguin Classics, 1994), 106. 75. Ibid., 91. 76. Charles Eliot Norton to S. G. Ward, July 14, 1897, in Norton, Letters, 2: 254. 77. In The American Scene, James writes: “They”—the new immigrants in New York—“are the stuff of whom brothers and sisters are made.” While he was dealing with the discomfort of seeing the grand scale of change brought about by immigration, James consoled himself by remembering that most Americans are immigrants of some sort and that calling the new immigrants “aliens” is something of a misrepresentation: “Who and what is an alien, when it comes to that, in a country peopled from the first under the jealous eye of history?” See James, American Scene, 92, 95.

C HAPTER 4 1. Henry James, “The Question of Opportunities,” in Literary Criticism: American and English Writers (New York: The Library of America, 1984), 651, 653. 2. 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. 3. Because the literary production of the Boston Cosmopolitans is immense, I have limited my investigations in this chapter to a few works that best illustrate how they attempted to convey the discoveries made during their travels. 4. 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). 5. See Jeffrey Alan Melton, “Touring Decay: Nineteenth-Century American Travel Writers in Europe,” Papers on Language and Literature 35 (1999): 206–208, passim. 6. 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

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7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24.

25.

NOTES 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. Howells, Chance Acquaintance, 24, 51. Ibid., 32–33. See ibid., 57–58 Ibid., 41–42. Ibid., 42. Ibid., 48. 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. See Buonomo, Backward Glances, 18, 27. 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. See Melton, “Touring Decay,” 207. 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

NOTES

26.

27.

28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36.

37.

38. 39.

40. 41. 42.

231

[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). Howells, Venetian Life, 7, 17, 83. See James Buzard’s discussion of the “picturesque” in “A Continent of Pictures,” passim, especially 39–40. Howells, Venetian Life, 52, 68, 93. Ibid., 39, 96, 85, 123–124. Ibid., 173, 155, 276, 330. Ibid., 306. Almost all the Boston Cosmopolitans spoke French, for example, extremely well. Some had studied in France as children, such as Henry and William James and Isabella Stewart Gardner. Some had family ties to France, such as Augustus Saint Gaudens and John La Farge. Some learned French to advance their professional careers, such as the artists Lilla Cabot Perry, Dennis Miller Bunker, and H. H. Richardson. All of these people visited France, interacted with French artistic and intellectual life, and integrated the lessons they learned in France into their work. Ibid., 29, 329, 370. Howells pokes fun at American impatience by relating the story of “how a sharp, bustling, go ahead American rushed in [a monastery] one morning, rubbing his hands, and demanding, ‘Show me all you can in five minutes.’” Ibid., 180. 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. James, Italian Hours, 317. Ibid., 288. See also Tanner, “le Désir de Venise,” 16. James, Italian Hours, 287, 314, 317. James Buzard notices a creative tension in Henry James’ travel writing between lauding the “picturesque” or

232

43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48.

49.

50. 51.

NOTES “pre-modern” qualities of European cultures and noticing the contemporary conditions of life among common people with more prosaic problems such as poverty or modernization. See Buzard, “A Continent of Pictures,” 41–42. Ibid., 287, 291, 327. Henry James’ advice “to linger and remain and return” provides a helpful clue as to how to appreciate the art and architecture of the Boston Cosmopolitans. Ibid., 293, 296–97, 301–302. Ibid., 296, 291. Ibid., 326. 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

NOTES

52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

64.

65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

70.

233

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. As I mentioned in Chapter 1, James had declared himself a cosmopolitan in his biography of William Wetmore Story, published in 1903. 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, Italian Hours, 289. James, American Scene, 104. Ibid., 169. Ibid., 35–37. Ibid., 340. James, American Scene, 58. Ibid., 71. Ibid., 131. Comparing Florence and New York, for instance, James tries to explain how a respect for beauty in Florence helps to shape cityscapes that are quite different from those of the American urban scene; ibid., 61. On this topic, James writes: “But the newness of New York—unlike even that of Boston, I seemed to discern—had this mark of its very own, that it affects one, in every case, as having treated itself as still more provisional, if possible, than any poor dear little interest of antiquity it may have annihilated. . . . The new Paris and the new Rome do at least propose, I think, to be old—one of these days.” Ibid., 84–85. Ibid., 61. Ibid., 103. 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. James, American Scene, 166.

234

NOTES

71. 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. 72. James, The American Scene, 166. 73. 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. 74. 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. 75. 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. 76. See Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory, 40. 77. 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. 78. 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. 79. 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. 80. William James to Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison, February 7, 1897; quoted in ibid., 99. 81. See Levinson, Religious Investigations, 10. 82. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, ed. Martin E. Marty (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 31. 83. See James, Varieties, 34. 84. Ibid., 73. For further elaboration of this point, see James’ discussion of Cardinal John Henry Newman’s contention that “theology . . . is a science in the strictest sense of the word.” See ibid., 433–36. This criticism of rationalism follows one of James’ favorite maxims: “Rules are made for man, not

NOTES

85. 86. 87.

88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94.

95. 96.

97.

98.

99.

235

man for rules.” This echoes Henry James’ contention of 1877 that “art after all is made for us and not we for art.” James, Varieties, 30. Ibid., 487. Henry Samuel Levinson provides us with a useful reminder that James was not completely accepting of all religious traditions. See Levinson, Religious Investigations, 23, 80. Although James was not perfectly tolerant of all human traditions, the tone of most of his writings, especially in Varieties, implies tolerance of other belief systems. See James, Varieties, 402. Lamberth, Metaphysics of Experience, 114, 124. James, The Varieties, 1, 2. Ibid., 2, 443–44. Ibid., 434. Lamberth, Metaphysics of Experience, 42. 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. James Kloppenberg contends that James’ ethical outlook was inimical to the attempt of one culture or nation to make decisions for another. See Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory, 149. 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. James, Varieties, 456.

C HAPTER 5 1. See Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992), 134 2. For the classic history on Jim Crow laws, see C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, rev. and enlarged edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957).

236

NOTES

3. Augustus Saint Gaudens, The Reminiscences of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, ed. Homer Saint Gaudens, 2 vols. (New York: The Century Company, 1913), 2: 59. 4. La Farge’s teacher in Newport, Rhode Island, William Morris Hunt, was trained by Jean-François Millet. See Howard M. Feinstein, Becoming William James (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 117–118. 5. Henry Adams, “The Mind of John La Farge,” in John La Farge: Essays by Henry Adams, Kathleen A. Foster, Henry A. La Farge, H. Barbara Weinberg, Linnea H. Wren, and James L. Yarnal (New York: Abbeville, 1987), 18–19. 6. Stanley Olson, John Singer Sargent: His Portrait (New York: St. Martin’s, 1986), 51. 7. 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. Many art critics of the early part of the twentieth century, as H. Barbara Weinberg points out, followed this exceptionalist trend. See H. Barbara Weinberg, The Lure of Paris: Nineteenth Century American Painters and their French Teachers (New York: Abbeville, 1991), 8–9. 8. 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), 44–45, 131–32. 9. Weinberg, Lure of Paris, 15. 10. Richardson to Hayden, quoted in Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer, Henry Hobson Richardson and His Works: With 97 illustrations and a new introduction by William Morgan (New York: Dover, 1969), 11. 11. Charles Adams Platt to his family, June 5, 1883, in Platt family papers; quoted in Erica E. Hirshler, Dennis Miller Bunker: American Impressionist (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1994), 27. 12. “These torsos are the foundation of instruction. One must be suckled on these things in youth.” See ibid., 27. 13. Ibid., 55–57. 14. Lilla Cabot Perry, “Tokyo,” in The Jar of Dreams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923), 97. 15. A small canvas of 1877 entitled Small Infant, though modest, does succeed in conveying the innocence of an infant without resorting to overly romantic imagery. See Meredith Martindale, Perry, 19. Unless otherwise cited, biographical informaton about Lilla Cabot Perry’s life is derived largely from this source. 16. Martindale, Perry, 21. 17. 1894 was a particularly significant year in Perry’s promotion of Impressionism to Boston. See Martindale, Perry, 82. 18. Ibid., 27. 19. Ibid., 52.

NOTES

237

20. Henry James to Lilla Cabot Perry, January 3, 1912, quoted in Martindale, Perry, 136. 21. Lilla Cabot Perry, undated letter to Elizabeth Sturgis Grew, quoted in Martindale, Perry, 52. 22. Samuels, Henry Adams (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1989), 206. See also J. F. F., “William Sturgis Bigelow,” in Dictionary of American Biography, 21 vols., ed. Allen Johnson (New York: Scribners, 1928–1964), 2: 261. 23. Samuels, Henry Adams, 89, 112. 24. Ibid., 89. 25. Ibid., 206–207. 26. Ibid., 209–213. See also L. W., “Ernest Francisco Fenollosa,” in Dictionary of American Biography, 9: 325–26. 27. Leland M. Roth, McKim, Mead, and White, Architects (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), 131. 28. Ernest Samuels asserts that the “idea for the memorial had taken shape in [Adams’] conversations with La Farge in Japan.” See Samuels, Henry Adams, 226. 29. Samuels, Henry Adams, 226. 30. Edward Conze, Further Buddhist Studies (Oxford: Bruno Cassirer, 1975), 152. 31. Charles S. Prebish, Historical Dictionary of Buddhism (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1993), 60. 32. Ernst Scheyer, “The Adams Memorial by Augustus Saint Gaudens,” Art Quarterly 18 (Summer 1956): 180. Many of the details of the genesis and completion of the Adams Memorial in this chapter come from the information in this article. 33. Leland Roth describes how White helped to get Saint Gaudens some of his most important early work in McKim, Mead, and White, 31. 34. Henry Adams to Theodore F. Dwight, January 25, 1891 in Marion Adams, The Letters of Mrs. Henry Adams, ed. Ward Thoron (Boston: Little, Brown, 1936), 455–56. 35. Saint Gaudens, Reminiscences, 1: 362. 36. Ibid., 185. 37. Samuels, Henry Adams, 227. 38. Saint Gaudens, Reminiscences, 1: 359–61. 39. Henry Brooks Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, ed. Ernest Samuels (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), 316. 40. Both La Farge and William James took lessons in Newport around 1860 from William Morris Hunt. See Feinstein, Becoming William James, 103, 118, 120–22. For Henry James’ relationship with La Farge, see Leon Edel, Henry James: The Untried Years, 1847–1870 (New York: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1953), 159–63. 41. See H. Barbara Weinberg, “John La Farge: Pioneer of the American Mural Movement” in John La Farge: Essays, 165; and Burke Wilkinson, Uncommon Clay: The Life and Works of Augustus Saint Gaudens (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Javanovich, 1985), 79–80.

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NOTES

42. Saint Gaudens, Reminiscences, 1: 161–62. 43. Henry Adams, Novels: The Education, Mont Saint Michel, ed. Ernest Samuels and Jayne N. Samuels (New York: The Literary Classics of America, 1983), 1215. 44. John La Farge, An Artist’s Letters from Japan (New York: Da Capo Press, 1970), vii. 45. Henry Adams to Elizabeth Cameron, November 11, 1891, in Henry Adams: Selected Letters. ed. Ernest Samuels (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1992), 272. 46. Just a few of the works that have explored this topic include Walter Lippmann’s contemporary Drift and Mastery (New York: M. Kennerley, 1914), Henry Adams’ The Education, and Stephen Kern’s The Culture of Time and Space: 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). 47. Adams writes in his Education: “St. Gaudens was a child of Benvenuto Cellini, smothered in an American cradle. Adams was a quintessence of Boston, devoured by curiosity to think like Benvenuto.” Henry Adams, Education, 387. 48. Adams, Novels: The Education, Mont Saint Michel, 1215. 49. Adams, Education, 317. 50. John La Farge, Considerations on Painting: Lectures Given in the year 1893 at the Metropolitan Museum of New York (New York: MacMillan, 1895), 39, 8, 43. 51. La Farge, Artist’s Letters, 109. 52. Ibid., 145, 113. 53. Ibid., 109. 54. Richard Shusterman has commented on the latent visual qualities of poems: “there is aesthetically shaped graphic visuality in the text of printed poems.” See Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics, 15. 55. La Farge, Artist’s Letters, 149. 56. Ibid., 148, 152. 57. For Okakura Kakuzu’s relationship with Isabella Stewart Gardner, see Douglass Shand-Tucci, The Art of Scandal: The Life and Times of Isabella Stewart Gardner (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 251–57, 261–65. 58. La Farge, Artist’s Letters, ix. 59. I would like to thank Akiyo Kondo for her translation of the Japanese passage. She informs me that the English passage is a good translation of the Japanese passage. The passage is written in an old, elaborate script that is not often used in contemporary Japanese writing. 60. For descriptions of the ceremonies surrounding the Shaw memorial, see The Shaw Memorial: A Celebration of an American Masterpiece (Conshohocken, PA: Eastern National, 1997); and The Monument to Robert Gould Shaw: Its Inception, Completion and Unveiling, 1865–1897 (Cambridge, MA: Riverside, 1897). See especially George C. Schwarz, “The Shaw Memorial: A History of the Monument,” in Shaw Memorial, 11–15 and Edward Atkinson, “History of the Shaw Monument,” in Monument to Robert Gould Shaw, 7–14. In his recent work on the depiction of race in

NOTES

61.

62. 63.

64. 65.

66. 67. 68. 69.

239

Civil War monuments, Kirk Savage has found that in the Shaw Memorial Saint Gaudens “accomplished what other sculptors before him . . . had failed to do, which was to make the black body more than a mere foil for whiteness. . . . With Saint-Gaudens’ revisions [of the statue], the soldiers in effect moved forward . . . acquiring a concreteness and individuality that African Americans had never before had in public sculpture.” Savage goes on to argue that Saint Gaudens was not prompted to revise because of any commitment to racial equality; rather, it was the “self-imposed demands of art, not racial ideology, that compelled the sculptor to portray these men as he did.” See Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 202–203. Although I agree that Saint Gaudens did express some patronizing and racist attitudes toward his black subjects, the many years the sculptor devoted to creating statues of a wide variety of black soldiers along with his belief that the approval of the memorial by the surviving members of the 54th amounted to a consecration of his work show that his patronizing attitudes were often tempered by respect for these soldiers. William James to Henry James, June 5, 1897, in Henry James and William James, The Correspondence of William James: William and Henry, 3 vols., ed. Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 3: 9. William James quoted a line from Tennyson’s “To E. L. on His Travels to Greece.” See James, Correspondence of William James, 3: 10. Saint Gaudens, Reminiscences, 2: 94. For accounts of this plantation venture, see R. W. B. Lewis, The Jameses: A Family Narrative (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), 162–67, 259–64; see also Lyndall Gordon, A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 77–78. William James to Henry James, February 7, April 4, and May 9, 1897, in James, Correspondence of William James, 3: 1, 6, 8. William James, “Oration,” in The Monument to Robert Gould Shaw: Its Inception, Completion and Unveiling, 1865–1897 (Cambridge: Riverside, 1897), 77. Ibid., 85. Ibid. Ibid., 87. For a differing interpretation of James’ decision to focus on civic rather than military courage, see Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, 205–207. Savage asserts that James’ underplaying of the military significance of the statue marginalized the black soldiers by not commenting on the fact that in their military roles they were quite “uncommon” soldiers. Savage does not address the fact that one of the few white soldiers of the regiment was William James’ brother. This fact complicated James’ motivations to minimize the military heroism of the fifty-fourth and to focus instead on the idea of civic courage, as I have discussed.

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70. William James to Henry James, June 5, 1897, in James, Correspondence of William James, 3: 9. 71. William James, “Oration,” 87. 72. Saint Gaudens to Eugenie Nichols, undated, archives of the Saint Gaudens National Historic Site, Cornish New Hampshire; quoted in Lois Goldreich Marcus, “The Shaw Memorial by Augustus Saint-Gaudens: A History Painting in Bronze,” Winterthur Portfolio 14 (1979): 17. 73. George C. Schwarz, “The Shaw Memorial,” 13. 74. Marcus, “The Shaw Memorial,” 16–19. 75. Schwarz, “The Shaw Memorial,” 13. 76. Saint Gaudens, Reminiscences, 1: 332. 77. William James, “Oration,” 76; Schwarz, “The Shaw Memorial,” 15–19. 78. Ibid., 20–21.

C HAPTER 6 1. Charles Gambril and H. H. Richardson, Descriptive Report and Schedule for Proposed Capital Building of the State of Connecticut, Department of Legislative Research, Connecticut General Assembly, 1872; quoted in HenryRussell Hitchcock and William Seale, Temples of Democracy: The State Capitols of the USA (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 161. 2. As Ross Posnock has written of the aesthetic leaning of one of William James’ most devoted students, W. E. B. Du Bois, art and aesthetics in Europe and Africa helped to instruct all the Cosmopolitans about the possibility of change in America. See Ross Posnock, “The Distinction of Du Bois: Aesthetics, Pragmatism, Politics,” American Literary History 7 (1995): 502, 512. For scholarship that argues for the increasing collusion between high art and elitism in nineteenth-century American art, see sociologist Paul DiMaggio, “Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston: The Creation of an Organizational Base for High Culture in America,” Media, Culture and Society 4 (1982): 33–50, and “Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston, Part II: The Classification and Framing of American Art,” Media, Culture and Society 4 (1982): 303–22. See historians Kenneth L. Kusmer, “The Social History of Cultural Institutions: The Upper-Class Connection,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 10 (1979): 137–46; and especially Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). 3. James F. O’Gorman has often pointed out that H. H. Richardson’s architecture was no mere aping of European styles. See James F. O’Gormon, “Then and Now: A Note on the Contrasting Architecture of H. H. Richardson and Frank Furness,” in H. H. Richardson: The Architect, His Peers, and Their Era, ed. Maureen Meister (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 84–85. For Mumford’s views, see Lewis Mumford, Sticks and

NOTES

4.

5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15. 16.

241

Stones: A Study of American Architecture and Civilization (New York: Dover, 1955), 46. In his work on nineteenth-century Chicago, Daniel Bluestone makes a similar argument about Chicago. See Daniel Bluestone, Constructing Chicago (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 1–3. See also ibid., 21–22, 207. John La Farge, An Artist’s Letters from Japan (New York: Da Capo Press, 1970), 145–47. This interpretation of the cosmopolitan elements of Boston’s architecture agrees with the assessment of H. H. Richardson’s architecture by critics such as Margaret Henderson Floyd, James F. O’Gorman, and Jeffrey Karl Ochsner. See Margaret Henderson Floyd, Henry Hobson Richardson: A Genius for Architecture (New York: Monacelli, 1997), 293. See also Jeffrey Karl Ochsner, “Seeing Richardson in His Time: The Problem of the Romanesque Revival,” in H. H. Richardson: The Architect, His Peers, and Their Era, ed. Maureen Meister (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 109. 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. James F. O’Gorman points out that “the only other earlier extensive decorative program in the country was to be found in the Capital at Washington.” See James F. O’Gorman, H. H. Richardson: Architectural Forms for an American Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 60. See H. Barbara Weinberg, “John La Farge: Pioneer of the American Mural Movement,” in John La Farge: Essays by Henry Adams, Kathleen A. Foster, Henry A. La Farge, H. Barbara Weinberg, Linnea H. Wren, and James L. Yarnal, ed. Henry Adams, et al., (New York: Abbeville, 1987), 171. See ibid., 165. Ibid. Henry Adams, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (New York: Penguin, 1986), 175. Henry Adams to Isabella Stewart Gardner, February 9, 1906, in Henry Adams and His Friends: A Collection of Unpublished Letters, ed. Harold Dean Cater (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947), 578. Leland Roth, A Concise History of American Architecture (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), 94–95. Washington and Jefferson had shared Lincoln’s hope that the architecture of Washington, DC, would symbolize the type of strong democratic nation that they hoped that the United States of America would become. See Pamela Scott, Temple of Liberty: Building the Capitol for the New Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 4, 5, 19. See Roth, Concise History, 85–94; and Hitchcock and Seale, Temples of Democracy, 83–90, 118–19. See Roth, Concise History, 86. See also Marvin Meyers, The Jacksonian Persuasion: Politics and Belief (New York: Random House, 1960).

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17. 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. 18. For a description of these reforms, see Donald Drew Egbert, The BeauxArts Tradition in French Architecture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 63–65. 19. Burke Wilkinson, Uncommon Clay: The Life and Works of Augustus Saint Gaudens (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Javanovich, 1985), 24. 20. See Annie Jacques, “The Programmes of the Architectural section of the école des Beaux Arts, 1819–1914,” in The Beaux-Arts and NineteenthCentury French Architecture, ed. Robin Middleton (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), 58. 21. Richardson, “Description of the Church,” 158–165. For an exploration of how the French method of architectural training directly influenced Richardson, see Ann Jensen Adams, “The Birth of a Style: Henry Hobson Richardson and the Competition Drawings for Trinity Church, Boston,” Art Bulletin 62 (1980): 409–33. 22. H. H. Richardson, “Description of the Church,” 165. Newly printed copies of this document are also available for purchase at the Trinity Church bookstore. 23. One important Richardson scholar underlines the architect’s contributions to the design of buildings for growing cities and emerging suburbs in the late nineteenth century; specifically, Richardson made important urban commercial buildings, such as the Marshal Fields Wholesale Store in Chicago (1885–87); many elegant railroad stations, such as the Old Colony Railroad Station, (1881–84); as well as small public libraries, such as the Ames Memorial Library in North Easton, Massachusetts (1877–79). See James F. O’Gorman, Three American Architects: Richardson, Sullivan, and Wright, 1865–1915 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991), chapter 2. Also see O’Gorman, H. H. Richardson: Architectural Forms, passim. 24. See O’Gorman, Three American Architects, 45. For further information on the relationship between Richardson and Olmstead, see Francis R. Kousky, “The Veil of Nature: H. H. Richardson and Frederick Law Olmsted,” in H. H. Richardson: The Architect, 71–73. Olmsted to H. H. Richardson, February 6, 1883, Frederick Law Olmsted papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC; quoted in Kousky, “The Veil of Nature,” 73. 25. Frederick Law Olmsted and James R. Croes, “Preliminary Report of the Landscape Architect and the Civil and Topographical Engineer, upon the Laying Out of the Twenty-Third and Twenty-Fourth Wards,” City of New York, Document 72 of Board of the Department of Public Parks, 1877; quoted in Frederick Law Olmsted, Civilizing American Cities: Writings on City Landscapes, ed. S. B. Sutton (New York: Da Capo, 1997), 67. 26. Frederick Law Olmsted, “Seventh Annual Report of the Board of Commissioners of the Department of Parks for the City of Boston for the year 1881,” City Document 16, 1882; quoted in Olmsted, Civilizing, 259–61.

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27. Raymond W. Albright, Focus on Infinity: A Life of Phillips Brooks (New York: Macmillan, 1961), 107, 139, 146–47. 28. See Ann Jensen Adams, “The Birth of a Style,” 422; see also Weinberg, “John La Farge: Pioneer,” 164–65. 29. “Our Religious Art,” New York Times, June 22, 1879. 30. See Weinberg, “John La Farge: Pioneer,” 164. 31. Helene Barbara Weinberg, “John La Farge and the Decoration of Trinity Church, Boston,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 33 (1974): 334–36. 32. Douglass Shand-Tucci, Built in Boston: City and Suburb, 1800–1950 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 6. 33. Ibid., 6; Walter Muir Whitehill, Boston: A Topographical History, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1968), 8. 34. See Walter Muir Whitehill, Boston: A Topographical History, 152–54. See also Bainbridge Bunting, The Houses of Boston’s Back Bay: An Architectural History, 1840–1917 (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1967), 33–37. 35. See Bernard Marchand, Paris: histoire d’une ville (xix–xx siécle), (Paris: editions du Seuil, 1993), 75–92. 36. Walter Muir Whitehill attributes Arthur Gilman with coming up with the Back Bay’s “imposing plan, with its long vistas and suggestion of French boulevards.” See Walter Muir Whitehill, Topographical History, 151. See also Bunting, Boston’s Back Bay, 15, 68–69. 37. Charles Follen McKim, Memorandum, February 1895, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; quoted in Fikret K. Yegül, Gentlemen of Instinct and Breeding: Architecture at the American Academy in Rome, 1894–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 221, emphasis mine. 38. Yegül notes that this liberal vision that McKim had set forth in the memorandum of 1895 “was not maintained in later years when the Academy strictly controlled the styles allowable for study.” See ibid., 221. 39. See Charles Moore, The Life and Times of Charles Follen McKim (New York: Da Capo, 1970), 38–41. 40. Richard Guy Wilson, American Renaissance, 1876–1917 (Brooklyn: Brooklyn Museum Division of Publications, 1979), 71. Wilson touches on many of the themes that I use, especially “cosmopolitanism”; however, Wilson bases his understanding of cosmopolitanism on the reading given by Howard Mumford Jones’ in The Age of Energy (1971), a reading that I criticize in Chapter 8. 41. Richardson’s style is seen as being so unique that art historians have generally assigned his name to the short-lived architectural movement with which he is associated, the Richardsonian Romanesque. See, for example, John C. Poppeliers et al., What Style Is It? A Guide to American Architecture (New York: Wiley and Sons, 1983). 42. Most critics’ negative interpretations of this movement feature a quotation from McKim’s partner, Stanford White, who said in response to criticism that the homes he helped to build were filled with art that was taken from

244

43.

44. 45.

46. 47.

48.

49.

50. 51.

52.

NOTES foreign lands that “In the past, dominant nations had always plundered works of art from their predecessors; . . . America was taking a leading place among nations and had, therefore, the right to obtain art wherever she could.” White, quoted in Richard Guy Wilson, American Renaissance, 15. Both McKim and Gardner relied heavily on the labor of skilled immigrants for completing their buildings. See Leland M. Roth, McKim, Mead and White (New York: Harper and Row, 1983), 124; and Douglass ShandTucci, The Art of Scandal: The Life and Times of Isabella Stewart Gardner (New York: Harper Collins, 1997), 206–207. John La Farge, Concerning Noteworthy Paintings in American Private Collections (New York: August F. Jaccaci, 1909), 21. A few recent publications on the Exposition of 1893 concentrate their interpretations on the imperial aspirations and insensitivity of the “White City.” See Wilson, American Renaissance, 16. See also Robert W. Rydell, “A Cultural Frankenstein? The Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893,” in Neil Harris et al., Grand Illusions: Chicago’s World’s Fair of 1893 (Chicago: Chicago Historical Society, 1993), 141–70. Neil Harris directs us to a more sober reading of the fair in ibid., 29. Roth, McKim, Mead and White, 179. Leland Roth asserts that by 1886, the firm of McKim, Mead, and White deliberately dedicated itself to urban architecture “prompted by a concern for buildings as part of the larger urban context.” Roth, McKim, Mead and White, 113. The budget for the library was revised upward at least twice. See Roth, McKim, Mead and White, 122–24. See also William H. Wilson, The City Beautiful Movement (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 61–65, 70–71, 90–91. Douglas Shand-Tucci writes that “McKim was a master of the dinner of persuasion, and he cajoled trustees, politicians, private donors, and artists into rising repeatedly to his costly enthusiasms.” Shand-Tucci, Built in Boston, 137. Roth, McKim, Mead and White, 388. The recent reaction to the demolition of Pennsylvania Station that started in 1963 and traumatized many New Yorkers shows that even in New York, McKim’s work had a deep effect on the emotional and civic lives of Americans. See Nathan Silver, Lost New York (New York: American Legacy Press, 1967), xii. Although it is difficult to conclude with complete assurance that the popular interest in the library reported by most local newspapers was nothing more than boilerplate journalism celebrating Boston’s democratic culture, the cumulative evidence provided by a variety of newspapers does lend credence to the library’s popularity among both the lower and upper classes. Indeed, local criticism focused much more on the library’s cost rather than its status as an elite institution. The petulant Lowell Weekly Journal did point out that the “people pay the taxes, and then alleged servants expend the cash and have their names engraved on column or panel to show the value

NOTES

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

69.

70. 71. 72. 73.

74.

245

on their services.” See untitled, Lowell Weekly Journal, February 1, 1895 and “Our Boston Letter,” Lowell Weekly Journal, February 15, 1895. “It Opens Today,” Boston Globe, February 1, 1895. “Library Doors Open,” Boston Herald, February 2, 1895. “The Library is Ours,” Boston Traveler, February 1, 1895. “New Public Library’s Art Marvels,” Boston Globe, February 2, 1895. “Library Doors Open.” “In the New Library,” Boston Evening Transcript, March 11, 1895. “Untitled,” Boston Evening Transcript, March 13, 1895. “The Library and the Reservoir,” New York Times, March 26, 1896. See also “A Great Public Library,” New York Times, March 3, 1895. “Wide Open to the People,” Boston Herald, February 1, 1895. By minimizing the library’s didacticism, McKim moved away from the tendency to use art to promote an unambiguous message. Leland Roth writes: “To McKim, with his Ecole training, such close association not only was natural but brought out the best of each artist.” Roth, McKim, Mead and White, 124. Charles Follen McKim to John Galen Howard, April 13, 1892; quoted in Moore, Charles Follen McKim, 81. For a recent book on Puvis de Chavannes, see Brian Petrie, Puvis de Chavannes (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1997). Royal Cortissoz, “Some Critical Reflections on the Architectural Genius of Charles F. McKim,” Brickbuilder 19 (1910): 23–24. Jonathan Leo Fairbanks, “MacMonnies’ Bacchante: Its Trial, Condemnation and Restoration,” Sculpture Review 42 (1993): 29. For the accusation that the Bacchante was dangerous for public morals, see “Honors Immorality,” Boston Post, November 13, 1896. For an indictment of the library as un-American, see “The Bacchante is not Wanted,” Boston Post, November 15, 1896. Unfortunately, Saint Gaudens’ letter to the commission could not be found at the archives of the Art Commission of the City of Boston. Reports of the letter were found in Walter Muir Whitehead, “The Vicissitudes of Bacchante in Boston,” New England Quarterly 27 (1954): 438; and Fairbanks, “MacMonnies’ Bacchante,” 29. See “The Reigning Fad,” Boston Post, February 2, 1895. “A Conversation with Charles Eliot Norton,” Boston Post, November 16, 1896. For Henry and William James’ remarks on Norton, see my discussion in the opening of Chapter 3. See Mary Smart, A Flight with Fame: The Life and Art of Frederick MacMonnies, 1863–1937 (Madison, CT: Sound View, 1996), 171–72; and Fairbanks, “MacMonnies’ Bacchante,” 29–31. In his 1954 article on the Bacchante controversy, Whitehill echoes Henry James’ impatience with Norton’s moralizing by describing him as “the supposedly infallible Charles Eliot Norton.” See Whitehill, “Vicissitudes of Bacchante,” 438. See ibid., 453.

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75. Gardner attended Norton’s classes at Harvard University around 1878; she also helped to fund some of Norton’s scholarly projects on Dante. See Shand-Tucci, Art of Scandal, 58, 49, 116–17. 76. William James mentions the invitation in a letter of April 1, 1904 to his brother, Henry. See Correspondence of William James, 3: 267. For a record of William James’ attendance at Gardner’s opening night party on New Year’s night, 1903, see Morris Carter, Isabella Stewart Gardner and Fenway Court (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1925), 199–201. 77. Ibid., 201. 78. Although Gardner did want the public to see her museum, she worried about the physical wear and tear her building and its contents might suffer from large crowds. 79. Karen Haas reports that Gardner’s Fenway Court is very similar to Villa Mirabella (from the fifteenth century) outside Milan and Villa Settignano (from the sixteenth century) close to Florence. Karen Haas, “Isabella Stewart Gardner, Willard T. Sears and the Building of Fenway Court,” (Master’s thesis for degree in Art History, Boston University, 1989), 45. 80. Carter, Fenway Court, 183–85. See also Shand-Tucci, Scandal, 207. 81. For Gardner’s resistance to steel construction, see ibid., 207. For Richardson’s camouflaging of steel in his own buildings, read all of O’Gormon’s “Then and Now,” in H. H. Richardson: The Architect, especially 91–93. 82. In addition to Douglas Shand-Tucci’s book on Gardner, Art of Scandal, art historian Anne Higonnet writes an eloquent plea to maintain Fenway Court as Gardner specified in her will in “Where There’s a Will . . . ,” Art in America 79 (1989), 65–75. Kathleen D. McCarthy has written a piece that places Gardner in the context of United States’ women’s history at the turn of the century as well as the history of American cultural institutions such as the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. See Kathleen D. McCarthy, Women’s Culture: American Philanthropy and Art, 1830–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 149–76. Shand-Tucci’s book on Gardner is written in an engaging style and offers many important details concerning Gardner’s life. 83. Although Gardner may not have responded publicly to questions asked by the press, she kept a file of many of the articles that were written about her Fenway Court, which implies that she was happy to receive their attention. Clippings stored at the Archives of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. 84. “Weird Wall Shuts Mrs. ‘Jack’ Gardner’s Palace in from the World,” Boston Herald, June 19, 1901. 85. Van Wyck Brooks, New England: Indian Summer 1865–1915 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1940), 22. 86. Although Gardner was a major player in Boston’s cultural history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, DiMaggio’s two articles on this subject do not take any of her work seriously, probably because her work strongly challenges his (and Bourdieu’s) view that art was used as “cultural capital.” DiMaggio only manages to mention her once. See DiMaggio, “Cultural Entrepreneurship [part I],” 35.

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87. Andrew Grey, who edited Prichard’s Papers, writes that in Matthew Prichard, “she [Gardner] encountered [in 1902] for the first time a person able to give articulation to her own implicit doctrines.” Andrew Gray, “Sailing to Byzantium or Rejecting the Renaissance,” an afterward to Matthew Stewart Prichard, “Selected Writings of Matthew Stewart Prichard,” unpublished and undated manuscript, 5, Archives of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. 88. For some treatments of Prichard’s life, see Gray, “Afterward,” and ShandTucci, Art of Scandal, 238–40. 89. Matthew Prichard to Isabella Stewart Gardner, February 9, 1914, Archives of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. 90. Gardner’s museum embodies Henry James’ belief that “art after all is made for us and not we for art.” In the museum, as in Henry James’ depiction of Venice, every spot can be either a beautiful scene or the vantage point for another beautiful vista. 91. See, for example, “The in Places: Favorite Spots for Hiding Out from Winter,” The Boston Globe, January 27, 2000, Calendar Section, 10. Douglass Shand-Tucci has recently argued that the example of McKim’s courtyard at the Boston Public Library provided inspiration for the creation of a green space in Fenway Court. See Shand-Tucci, Art of Scandal, 217.

C HAPTER 7 1. Henry Adams to Charles Milnes Gaskell, July 10, 1916, in Henry Adams, The Letters of Henry Adams, 6 vols., ed. J. C. Levinson et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1988), 6: 734. 2. Henry Adams, The Letters of Henry Adams, 6 vols. (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1982–1988), 6: 626 and Edward Chalfant, Improvement of the World: A Biography of Henry Adams—His Last Life, 1891–1918 (North Haven, CT: Archon, 2001), 422. The location is correct. 3. This was reported by Howell’s daughter Mildred in William Dean Howells, Life in Letters of William Dean Howells, 2 vols., ed. Mildred Howells (New York: Russell and Russell, 1968), 2: 394. 4. Henry Adams to Elizabeth Cameron, February 6, 1916, in Letters of Henry Adams, 6: 721. 5. Henry James to Alfred Sutro, August 8, 1914, in Henry James, The Letters of Henry James, ed. Percy Lubbock, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920), 2: 388. 6. Henry James to Rhoda Broughton, August 10, 1914, in Letters of Henry James, 2: 389. 7. Henry James to Howard Sturgis, August 4, 1914, in Letters of Henry James, 2: 384. 8. William Dean Howells, “‘War Stops Literature,’ Says W. D. Howells,” New York Times, November 29, 1914; reprinted in William Dean Howells,

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9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

NOTES “Interviews with William Dean Howells,” American Literary Realism 6 (Fall 1973): 392–96. Henry James to Mrs. Alfred Sutro, August 8, 1914, in Letters of Henry James, 2: 388. See Philip Horne, ed., Henry James: A Life in Letters, (New York: Penguin Press, 1999), 546. Adeline Tintner, The Twentieth-Century World of Henry James: Changes in His Work after 1900 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000), 229. Henry James, Within The Rim, and Other Essays (London: W. Collins and Sons, 1917). Wharton collected essays, poems, illustrations, letters, musical scores, and stories in support of her cause. In the first pages of the book, former president Theodore Roosevelt challenges Americans to attempt to put themselves in other people’s shoes, much as the Boston Cosmopolitans had often strived to do. See Edith Wharton, ed., The Book of the Homeless (Le Livre des Sans-Foyer) (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1916), ix–x. Rupert Brooke, Letters to America. With a Preface by Henry James (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1916). See Life in Letters, 556. Henry James to Edith Wharton in Life in Letters, 546. Henry James to Charles Milnes Gaskell, July 10, 1916, in Letters of Henry Adams, 6: 734. Ernest Samuels, Henry Adams (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1989), 446–57. Ernest Samuels, Henry Adams: The Major Phase (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 580–81. “William Dean Howells,” North American Review 212 (July 1920): 5. Howells to Signor Cortesi, May 1, 1918, in William Dean Howells, Life in Letters, 2: 380. Mildred Howell, editorial comment, in William Dean Howells, Life in Letters of William Dean Howells, ed. Mildred Howells, 2: 394. William Dean Howells, “Editor’s Easy Chair,” in Life in Letters of William Dean Howells, 2 vols., ed. Mildred Howells (New York: Russell and Russell, 1968), 2: 395. William Dean Howells to Brander Matthews, August 7, 1915, in William Dean Howells, Life in Letters of William Dean Howells, 2: 352. Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance: An Autobiography (New York: Scribner, 1998). Richard H. Brodhead, “Strangers on a Train: The Double Dream of Italy in the American Gilded Age,” Modernism/Modernity 1 (1994): 1–19.

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A FTERWORD 1. Gertrude Stein, “Cultivated Motor Automatism: A Study of Character in Its Relation to Attention,” Psychological Review (1899): 304; quoted in Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 118, 121. 2. See Stanley Coben, “The Assault on Victorianism in the Twentieth Century,” in Victorian America, ed. Daniel Walker Howe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976), 161–81. 3. Randolph Bourne, “The Architect,” in The Radical Will: Selected Writings 1911–1918, ed. Olaf Hansen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 281. 4. See 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), 1–20. 5. Waldo Frank, Memoirs of Waldo Frank, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1973), 44; quoted in Blake, Beloved Community, 13. 6. See Blake’s discussion of The Golden Day in ibid., 220–28. 7. Lewis Mumford, The Golden Day: A Study in American Literature and Culture (New York: W. W. Norton, 1926), 91. 8. Ibid., 93, 105–6. 9. The term “living corpses” comes from Mumford, Golden Day, 153. 10. Mumford writes that pragmatism was “deeply if unconsciously entangled [in] the spirit of a whole age.” See ibid., 182. 11. Ibid., 186–88. 12. Ibid., 86–90, 192. 13. The pathetic compromiser was represented by William Dean Howells. See ibid., 167–68. The acquisitive villain was played by Isabella Stewart Gardner. See ibid., 211–12. The Jameses, Norton, and Henry Adams were summarily dismissed as fawning admirers of Gardner’s Europaphilia. See ibid., 215. 14. See Lewis Mumford, The Brown Decades: A Study of the Arts in America, 1865–1895 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931; reprint, New York: Dover Publications, 1971), v. 15. Ibid., 51. 16. Ibid., 59. 17. For Mumford’s chronology of Richardson’s work, see ibid., 51, 53. 18. See Mumford, Brown Decades, 52. 19. Thomas C. Hubka, “The Picturesque in the Design Method of H. H. Richardson,” in H. H. Richardson: The Architect, 27–28. 20. James F. O’Gormon, H. H. Richardson and His Office: A Centennial of his Move to Boston, (Cambridge, MA: President and Fellows of Harvard College, 1974), passim.

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21. See James F. O’Gormon, Living Architecture: A Biography of H. H. Richardson (New York: Simon and Schuster Editions, 1997), 103–5. 22. Van Wyck Brooks, New England: Indian Summer 1865–1915 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1940), 331. 23. See Martin Green, The Problem of Boston: Some Readings in Cultural History (London: Longmans, Green, 1966), 165. 24. Lears describes some of the problems with this therapeutic outlook in T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1820 (New York: Pantheon, 1981), 55. 25. Ibid., 22. 26. Eldon J. Eisenach, The Lost Promise of Progressivism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994), 234. 27. Robert M. Crunden, American Salons: Encounters with European Modernism, 1885–1917 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 28. In 1986, William L. Vance passionately denounced those scholars who have resigned Boston to the dustbin of history: “Eventually a critic [Martin Green] would worry over the ‘problem’ of Boston, a ‘problem’ arising from exclusions necessitated by the critic’s own arbitrary definition of culture. . . . To characterize this city and its culture as in decline, and these people as feeble filopietists and desiccated aesthetes cut off from their nourishing rural New England roots, is an absurdity from any point of view but that of agrarian, antiurban, ‘literary’ values.” See William L. Vance, “Redefining ‘Bostonian,’” in The Bostonians: Painters of an Elegant Age, 1870–1930, ed. Trevor J. Fairbrother (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1986), 10. Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001) marked a recent paradigm shift, locating Boston as the originating city of pragmatism. 29. Edmund Wilson, “John Jay Chapman,” in The Shock of Recognition: The Development of Literature in the United States Recorded by the Men Who Made It, ed. Edmund Wilson (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Cudahy, 1953), 596. 30. John Jay Chapman, Preface to “Emerson,” in The Shock of Recognition, 597–98. See also Richard B. Hovey, John Jay Chapman—An American Mind (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), 16–33, 118–41. 31. Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1995), 22–27. 32. William to Henry James, February 14, 1907; quoted in ibid., 118. 33. See William to Henry James, February 14, 1907, in The Correspondence of William James: William and Henry, 3 vols., ed. Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 3: 332–33. 34. John Updike, introduction to Indian Summer, by William Dean Howells (New York: Vintage Books/The Library of America, 1990), xvii. 35. William W. Stowe, “Henry Adams, Traveler,” New England Quarterly 64 (1991): 179.

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36. Lynne Withey, Grand Tours and Cook’s Tours: A History of Leisure Travel, 1750–1915 (New York: William Morrow, 1997), 156. 37. The life of William Dean Howells shows some problems in favoring the “organic intellectual” over other kinds of intellectuals. If the definition of an “organic intellectual” is, as I take it, a person who writes or theorizes about science, culture, or society during much of his or her life, and who remains close and faithful to some underprivileged segment of society he or she came from, that would mean overlooking one important reason why some people try to be intellectuals: to disassociate themselves from a provincial viewpoint to get some critical distance on their lives and their culture. Howells, who grew up in a very modest household in various parts of rural and urban Ohio, started to learn foreign languages from a very early age and also long dreamed of moving to the nation’s literary capital, Boston. The term “organic intellectual” originated with Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. See Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks, in University of Chicago Readings in Western Civilization: Volume Nine—Twentieth-Century Europe, ed. John W. Boyer and Jan Goldstein (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 326–27. 38. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Holt, 1953), 2–4. 39. Ray Allen Billington, Frederick Jackson Turner: Historian, Scholar, Teacher (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 124. 40. Leland M. Roth, McKim, Mead, and White, Architects (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), 174. 41. One commentator on the école des Beaux Arts wrote that in the competition in the annual Prix de Rome for architecture, “the esquisse [a quick rough draft of an architectural design] was customarily required to be executed within a single day to demonstrate the competitor’s ability to grasp promptly the essentials of a large and complicated problem.” Donald Drew Egbert, The Beaux-Arts Tradition in French Architecture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 13. McKim, Mead, and White’s reputation for quick and consistently good architectural designs swayed Burnham to choose McKim’s firm to construct the New York Pavilion, which had received its funding only a little more than a year before the opening of the fair. See Roth, McKim, Mead, and White, 178. 42. See Leland Roth, A Consise History of American Architecture (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), 124. 43. About thirty years ago, Robert O. Mead also compared the Atlantic and Europe to the American West in his book, The Atlantic Legacy: Essays in American-European Cultural History (New York: New York University Press, 1969). Unfortunately, this idea was buried within a rambling and sometimes incoherent book that was dismissed by critics when it first appeared and has been largely overlooked since. 44. See Randolph Bourne, “Trans-national America,” in The Radical Will, 261. 45. Bourne’s mixing of pluralism and cosmopolitanism is discussed in David Hollinger, Postethnic America (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 94.

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46. See ibid., 94. 47. See ibid., 11–12, 92–94. 48. Instead of rigid ethnic catagories determining individual identity in America, Hollinger argues for a “principle of affiliation by revocable consent.” See ibid., 12–13. 49. See ibid., 3–4. 50. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, eds., Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, Cultural Politics, vol. 14 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 4. 51. Hollinger, Postethnic America, 5. 52. Hollinger writes that “Bourne celebrated the deprovincializing effect of immigrants on the native-born population and hailed a new, ‘cosmopolitan’ America as superior to the more homogeneous societies left behind by the immigrants.” See Hollinger, Postethnic America, 93. 53. See Randolph Bourne, “The Cult of the Best,” in The Radical Will, 194–95. 54. There were other important American artists and architects, such as Louis Sullivan and Winslow Homer, who trained abroad in Europe but came back determined to develop a more “American” aesthetic through consciously limiting the influence of Europe and European training on their work. In principle, their aesthetic choice is perfectly legitimate from a cosmopolitan perspective. It is only when an advocacy for “American” art becomes dogmatic that it conflicts with the spirit of cosmopolitanism. For some recent work on Sullivan, see Mario Manieri Elia, Louis Henry Sullivan (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996). For a recent work on Winslow Homer see Marilyn Kushner, ed., Winslow Homer: Illustrating America (Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Museum of Art, 2000). 55. Hollinger uses Henry James’ American Scene to help him write the penultimate paragraph of Postethnic America. According to Hollinger, James insisted “that Anglo-Protestants of long American lineage see their own future as indissolubly bound up with the children of these immigrants, who ‘are the stuff of which brothers and sisters are made.’” See Hollinger, Postethnic America, 172. 56. David Hollinger, “Ethnic Diversity, Cosmopolitanism and the Emergence of the American Liberal Intelligentsia,” American Quarterly 27 (1975): 133–51. 57. Hollinger cites Howard Mumford Jones, Age of Energy: Varieties of American Experience, 1865–1915 (1971) as the source of his interpretation of this genteel cosmopolitanism. Jones’ book suffers from the attempt to describe America and the experience of Americans as generally as possible—and this attempt places him in the position of focusing on some elements of cosmopolitanism that may have been generally true but certainly do not apply to the more insightful or interesting writers and artists of the time. For example, in speaking about American assessments of France and Paris around the turn of the century, Jones writes that one “can put aside Henry James as sui generis” and take Richard Harding Davis’ About Paris (New

NOTES

58. 59. 60.

61.

62. 63.

64. 65.

66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

71.

253

York: Harper and Brothers, 1903) as representative of American interpretation. “Americans go to Paris to enjoy themselves. If there are dangerous classes there, the Parisian criminal has no special environment, the Halles are lively, the tourists mildly stupid, and the dynamic life of France is the life of art.” Jones’ thumbnail sketch of cosmopolitan experience leaves no room for the surprises, discoveries, and changes in American art and thought that occurred when Americans explored Paris and the rest of Europe during the late nineteenth century. See Howard Mumford Jones, The Age of Energy: Varieties of American Experience, 1865–1915 (New York: Viking Press, 1971), 270. James to Perry, September 29, 1867, in Henry James: Selected Letters, ed. Leon Edel, (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1987), 15. James’ advocacy of mixing many cultures also sounds reminiscent of Randolph Bourne’s “Transnational America.” William James, “Address to the New England Anti-Imperialist League,” in The Works of William James: Essays, Comments, and Reviews, ed. Frederick H. Burkhardt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 86. For example Paul Simon’s path-breaking collaboration with South African musicians in his album Graceland 1986 was attacked by some in the American black community as having expropriated black music from those musicians, and Rodney King’s plea against the racial violence that was spurred by his beating at the hand of white police officers in 1992—“can’t we all just get along?”—was often the butt of jokes that mocked his humanitarian outlook as naïve. Susan J. Douglas, “The Turn Within: The Irony of Technology in a Globalized World,” American Quarterly 58 (2006): 619–38. 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), 151–52. William James to Henry Adams, June 17, 1910, in Letters of William James, 2: 346–47. Mark Peterson, “Boston’s ‘Dutch’ Moment: A Passage in the Shaping of Atlantic Aspirations, 1688–1733” (a paper presented at “Sometimes an Art”: A Symposium in Celebration of Bernard Bailyn—Fifty Years of Teaching and Beyond, Harvard University, May 13, 2000), 2–3. Quoted with permission of the author. I have depended on the information in Peterson’s article for my interpretation of Mather’s cosmopolitan aspirations. Peterson argues that Bostonians’ sense of self-importance remained a historical constant for at least two hundred years. See ibid, 2. See ibid., 4, 6, 9. See ibid., 14. See ibid., 18. Cotton Mather, Triumphs of the Reformed Religion in America: The Life of the Renowned John Eliot (London: John Dutton, 1691); quoted in Peterson, “Boston’s ‘Dutch’ Moment,” 25. See ibid., 25–26.

254 72. 73. 74. 75.

76. 77.

78. 79.

80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

85.

86. 87.

88.

NOTES Ibid., 28. Ibid., 23–29. See Peterson, “Boston’s ‘Dutch’ Moment,” 32–33. Franklin to unspecified correspondent, 1768; quoted in Verner W. Crane, Benjamin Franklin: Englishman and American, The Culver Lectures in Brown University, vol. 19 (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1936), 3. See ibid., 135. Franklin saw that French in the eighteenth century was becoming the equivalent to Latin during the days of the Roman Empire. Franklin also attempted to make his English as universal as possible by attempting to eliminate “Americanisms” from his prose. See Thomas Schlereth, The Cosmopolitan Ideal in Enlightenment Thought: Its Form and Function in the Ideas of Franklin, Hume, and Voltaire, 1694–1790 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), 4, 19. The attempt to support the development of a universal language was not unique to the philosophes. See Peterson, “Boston’s ‘Dutch’ Moment,” 33; see also Derek Heater, World Citizenship and World Government: Cosmopolitan Ideas in the History of Western Political Thought (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 61–63. See Henry May, The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 128–29. Franklin wrote out his scheme for summarizing the universal trunths of all religions in his Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion. See Schlereth, Cosmopolitan Ideal, 81–82. Henry May calls Adams an “agnostic Christian.” See May, Enlightenment in America, 279, 281, 284. John Adams to Richard Price, April 19, 1790; quoted in ibid., 285. John Adams to Alexander Jardine, June 11, 1790; quoted in ibid., 282. Henry F. May traces Jefferson’s contradictory character to his transatlantic education. See ibid., 294. On Jefferson’s rationalization of the violence of the French Revolution, see May, Enlightenment in America, 289; and Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 125–27, 308. On the topic of Jefferson and slavery, see May, Enlightenment in America, 300–302; and Ellis, Amercan Sphinx, 60–61, 101–106, 171–80. May writes that “To doubt this [in Jefferson’s view] means to doubt the beneficence, even the consistency of the universe. Inconsistency . . . was something like sin. Jefferson could not tolerate it for long, either in the universe or in himself.” See May, Enlightenment in America, 302. See ibid., 295; and Ellis, American Sphinx, 256, 309–10. Thomas Jefferson, “The Declaration of Independence,” in The Constitution of the United States and Related Documents, ed. Martin Shapiro (Northbrook, IL: AHM, 1973), 78–79; Ellis, American Sphinx, 96. John Adams acted as Commissioner to France in 1778 and participated— along with Benjamin Franklin and John Jay—in the Paris peace treaty negotiations with Great Britain in 1783. Benjamin Franklin was in France for

NOTES

255

almost ten years (1776–85) as a commissioner to the court of Louis XVI. As noted above, Thomas Jefferson acted as Minister to France from 1785 to 1789. 89. Ben Franklin to Mme. Helvétius, undated; quoted in Claude-Anne Lopez, Mon Cher Papa: Franklin and the Ladies of Paris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), 251. 90. John Adams, diary entry of April 1778; quoted in ibid., 254. 91. See Ellis, American Sphinx, 88, 99–100. See also May, Enlightenment in America, 298–300. 92. Thomas Jefferson, “Hints to Americans Travelling in Europe,” in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 25 vols., ed. Julian P. Boyd et al. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950), 13: 269–270. 93. May explains that Jefferson expected the nations of Europe to follow America’s example and not the other way around. See May, Enlightenment in America, 291. 94. See Peter Shaw, The Character of John Adams (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1976), 11 95. See Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Mission for Life: The Story of the Family of Adoniram Judson, the Dramatic Events of the First American Foreign Mission, and the Course of Evangelical Religion in the Nineteenth Century (New York: The Free Press, 1980), 38–46. 96. See ibid., 39–40. For the ethnocentrism of the American evangelicals in Burma, see ibid., 40, 88–89, 90. 97. For Judson’s translation of the Bible, see ibid., 44, 50–51, 59, 113. Judson flirted with the idea of presenting Burmese traditions to the American public but quickly abandoned that idea. See ibid., 52–53. 98. Ann Judson to Judson family, 1824; quoted in ibid., 50. 99. In “The American Scholar” (1837), Emerson used books for moral uplift, but not for information about the cultures they come from. Indeed, Emerson enjoyed great books for what they had in common with his own thinking” “It is remarkable, the character of the pleasure we derive from the best books. They impress us with the conviction that one nature wrote and the same reads.” See Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” in Selected Essays, ed. Larzer Ziff (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 88–90. All subsequent references to works by Emerson will be taken from this collection of essays. 100. Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” 175, 177. 101. Ibid., 197–98. For a thorough discussion of Emerson’s life during the early 1830s, see Robert D. Richardson Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 108–56. See especially pages 132–35 for Emerson’s efforts not to be too impressed by Europe and its history during his journey. 102. For example, Henry Adams’ anonymous novel Democracy (1880), which reflected Adams’ strong desire to critique the selfishness of American politicians, ends with a very pessimistic view of politics in the Gilded Age. In 1871, Charles Eliot Norton revealed that he had faith in few institutions in

256

NOTES

the United States, but all those institutions that he did have faith in were dedicated to some form of teaching. See Turner, The Liberal Education of Charles Eliot Norton, 242–43. 103. Matthew Arnold, “Civilization in the United States,” in Matthew Arnold: The Last Word, The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, 11 vols. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1971), 11: 364–65. 104. William to Henry James, April 19, 1888, in The Correspondence of William James, 2: 86. 105. I emphasize that the Boston Cosmopolitans learned how to speak and write well because even francophiles like Jefferson and Franklin had difficulty expressing themselves in French. Concerning Jefferson, Joseph Ellis writes: “Even after five years in France his spoken French never reached a sufficient level of fluency to permit comfortable conversation, and he never trusted his written French sufficiently to dispense with a translator for his formal correspondence.” See Ellis, American Sphinx, 82. Not surprisingly, Franklin wisely used his difficulties with spoken French to his advantage by feigning ignorance. See Lopez, Mon Cher Papa, 26.

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INDEX abolitionism, 53, 223–24 Adams, Henry, 3, 9, 24, 27–28, 33, 60–61, 73, 114, 121–31, 133, 145–46, 170–72, 174, 177, 189–90, 200–202, 219–20, 226, 228, 238, 249, 255. See also Adams Memorial; Education of Henry Adams, The; entropy; Letter to American Teachers of History; Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres Adams, John, 207–8 Adams, Marion “Clover,” 121–22, 125 Adams Memorial (1891), 3, 114, 121, 124–25, 133, 140, 203, 237 aesthetics, 10–11, 41, 47–48, 88–89, 102, 126, 140, 144–46, 150–51, 153, 157, 159–60, 163–65, 168, 203, 240 Aguinaldo, Emilio, 105–6, 110 Alice in the Lane (1891), 118–19 Alighieri, Dante, 8, 61, 164, 230. See also Divine Comedy, The Ambassadors, The, (1903), 4, 29 American, The, (1876), 4, 70–72 American Academy in Rome, 154–55 American Anti-Slavery Society (1833), 53 American culture, 4, 13, 15, 24–25, 30–32, 43–44, 46–47, 49, 63, 78, 90, 93, 95, 98–105, 115, 130–31, 137–39, 151, 166, 170, 175–76, 182–83, 185, 188, 192, 197, 211–13, 228, 231, 252–53. See also American exceptionalism; “Frontier Thesis”; the individual; materialism American exceptionalism, 11–12, 24–25, 115, 175–76. See also American culture American Notes, (1844), 18 American Renaissance, 155–56 American Revolution, 147, 153, 187, 207 American Scene, The, (1907), 10, 80, 98–99, 103–4, 199, 233, 252 American West, 26, 56–57, 115, 153, 224–25, 235, 251 antebellum period, 7, 18, 33, 54–56, 211, 217, 220, 222

architecture, 2–3, 7–8, 10, 35, 47, 94, 99, 102, 110, 115–16, 126, 128, 134, 140–60, 166–70, 182, 196, 203, 241, 252. See also American Renaissance; Boston Public Library; Fenway Court; Greek Revival; McKim, Charles Follen; neoclassicism; Richardson, Henry Hobson; Trinity Church Arnold, Matthew, 10–11, 49, 54, 211 art, 25, 30–31, 33, 35–36, 47, 49, 54, 59, 63, 110, 113–18, 122–25, 127–29, 138–40, 143–45, 149–50, 153–58, 160–64, 167–68, 182, 203, 208, 221, 234–35, 240, 243–45, 252 art history, 4, 35, 47, 139, 144, 151, 164, 184, 243 Artist’s Letters from Japan, An (1897), 28–29, 122, 126, 128–33, 140 Atlantic Monthly, The, 1, 4, 7, 11, 53, 56–57, 59, 61–63, 77, 223–25, 227 Bacchante, 54, 161–63, 245 Back Bay, Boston, 8, 145, 154, 164–65, 170, 243 Balzac, Honoré de, 33, 61–62, 67–69, 226 beauty. See aesthetics Belcher, Jonathan, 205 Bigelow, Ernest, 121–22 Blake, Casey, 182 Boston, Massachusetts, 6–8, 53–61, 63–66, 117, 122, 141–43, 151–54, 181–91, 202–4, 224–27, 233, 250; “The Athens of America,” 7, 56; compared to New York, 187–89; “The Hub,” 54, 59–61; and outsiders, 58–60, 225–26; shipping industry, 6–7; and Venice, 7. See also Back Bay; Boston Cosmopolitans; Boston Public Library; Copley Square; John Hancock Tower; Trinity Church Boston Cosmopolitans, 3–4, 6–17, 19–36, 49, 51–53, 55, 59–67, 69–70, 73–74, 77–80, 87, 92, 98–99, 105, 108, 110–11, 114, 116, 120–21, 125, 127, 129, 140, 143–46, 150–57, 163–67,

276

INDEX

170–72, 176–79, 181–93, 195–96, 198–204, 210–13, 215–16, 226, 228, 230–33, 240, 248; the “aesthetic view,” 10–11; and architecture, 143–44; balance, 129, 144, 150, 156; collaboration, 145, 193, 203; correspondence, 66–67; creative process, 51–53, 61, 77; criticism of, 8–9, 181–90; curiosity, 4, 6, 9, 52, 61; and difference, 87, 105, 230; and friendship, 51–52, 60–61, 201, 226, 232; and language, 92, 231; “poetry of motion,” 16. See also aesthetics; international cosmopolitanism; liminal space; the Precursors; public space; travel; World War I Boston Herald, 157–59, 167 Boston Post, 162 Boston Public Library, 3, 9, 10, 54, 64, 118, 140–43, 154–62, 165, 168, 170, 179, 193, 203, 244–45 Bourne, Randolph, 182, 194, 196, 252. See also “Trans-National America” Britannia (1840), 18, 20 Brooks, Phillip, 152–53 Brooks, Van Wyck, 8, 167, 182, 185, 187 Brown Decades, The (1931), 183 Buddhism, 122–23, 125 Bunker, Dennis Miller, 3, 20–21, 65, 114, 116–17, 196, 231 Buonomo, Leonardo, 87, 230–31 Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1, 38, 51, 58–61, 63, 67, 189, 226 Cameron, Elizabeth, 171–72, 174 Capitol Hill, 146–47 Carlyle, Thomas, 38–39, 41, 53, 210, 222 Cassatt, Mary, 116, 196 Cathedral of Chartres, 145–46 Chance Acquaintance, A, (1874), 79–83 Chapman, John Jay, 187–89 Chavannes, Pierre Puvis de, 158, 160 Chicago, Illinois, 6, 10, 156, 192–93, 244. See also Columbian Exposition China, 6, 22 Civil War, 3–4, 19, 36–37, 40–44, 55, 61, 67, 89, 91, 114, 134, 136–38, 146–47, 149, 160, 210–11, 222–23. See also antebellum period; Massachusetts 54th Regiment; postbellum era; Reconstruction; Shaw Memorial Clough, Arthur Hugh, 53–54 Coben, Stanley, 182 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 129

Columbian Exposition (1893), 10, 156, 192–93, 244 communitas, 23, 28, 129, 132, 219 Cooper, James Fenimore, 88 Copley Square, 3, 141, 150, 152, 155, 159–60 cosmopolitanism, 2–5, 9–10, 12–13, 25, 31–36, 41, 55, 79–80, 96–97, 102–5, 108–11, 113–14, 117, 120, 123, 140, 145, 154–55, 163, 168–79, 181, 192–97, 202–3, 206–9, 215–16, 222, 232, 243, 252–53; beginnings of, 31–36; definition of, 2; types of, 194–97, 252; uses of today, 4–5. See also Boston Cosmopolitans; international cosmopolitanism; national cosmopolitanism; Newport cosmopolitans Cosmopolitans. See Boston Cosmopolitans Crunden, Robert, 186 Cuba, 106 Cunard Line steamers, 18, 27 Declaration of Independence, 110, 147, 207, 235 democracy, 23, 37, 43–45, 88, 109–10, 115, 147–49, 157–60, 191, 194, 203, 211, 226, 241, 255 Democratic Vistas (1868), 43–44 Dewey, John, 183 Dickens, Charles, 18, 20 Divine Comedy, The, 8, 164 Douglas, Ann, 188–89 Drake, Francis, 57 école des Beaux Arts, 33, 115–17, 149–50, 154–55, 161–62, 193, 245, 251 Education of Henry Adams, The, 125 Eisenach, Eldon J., 186 Eliot, Charles, 64, 162 Eliot, John, 205 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 25, 34, 38–47, 49, 53–54, 56, 59, 80, 99, 121, 163, 183, 187, 209–11, 217, 222, 226, 236, 255; on scholars, 45–46, 255. See also the individual; the universal England, 10–11, 15, 18, 33, 51, 54–55, 62, 64, 67–69, 80, 101, 108, 115, 120, 147, 153, 173–74, 177, 185, 187, 204, 206, 210, 227–28. See also Great Britain; London Enlightenment, 206–7 entropy, 126–28, 200–202 Europe, 2–3, 7–8, 10, 17, 19, 21, 24–27, 29, 32–39, 42, 47–49, 51, 53–55, 57, 60, 63–67, 70, 72–73, 76–77, 80–81,

INDEX 98–104, 113–16, 119, 141, 147, 149–51, 153–56, 158, 162–63, 169–75, 183, 191–94, 196–97, 200, 204–5, 208, 210–12, 216, 224–25, 227, 230–33, 240, 251–53. See also England; France; Germany; Great Britain; Italy; Scotland; United Kingdom

277

Greenough, Horatio, 33

Fenollosa, Ernest, 122 Fenway Court, 3, 8, 140, 143, 146, 164–70, 203, 246–47 Florence, Italy, 27, 31, 101, 165, 217, 227, 233 foreign cultures, 4, 46, 53, 69–72, 88, 208–9, 213 foreign literature, 57, 61–63 France, 1–2, 4, 8, 18, 28, 33, 37, 51–53, 61–72, 101, 108, 115–20, 126, 138–39, 145–47, 149–51, 153–54, 160, 170, 177, 200, 206, 228, 231, 243, 253–54. See also Cathedral of Chartres; Enlightenment; French language; Giverny; impressionism; Paris Franklin, Benjamin, 206–9, 211, 254, 256 French language, 2, 18, 212, 231, 256 French Poets and Novelists (1873), 62, 67 French Revolution, 207 Frontier Thesis, 192–94 Fuller, Margaret, 33, 39, 54, 88

Harper’s Monthly, 98, 176, 225 Harvard University, 4, 7, 8, 21, 35–36, 47, 64, 108, 119, 122, 162, 164, 184, 187–88, 212 Haussmann, Baron, 154 Hazard of New Fortunes, A (1890), 74–76, 199 Historical Studies of Church-Building in the Middle Ages (1880), 47 history, 5, 13, 49, 94–95, 99–101, 116, 147, 184, 188–94, 198, 200–202 Hokusai, Katsushika, 130 Hollinger, David, 5, 185, 194–98, 252. See also Postethnic America (1995) Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 7, 54, 56, 227 Howells, William Dean, 1–2, 4, 10, 12, 25–27, 53, 55–63, 72–77, 79–96, 105, 107, 120, 171–73, 175–77, 185, 189–90, 199, 202, 204, 224–26, 229–31, 249, 251; criticism of, 249; and difference, 87, 230. See also Atlantic Monthly, The; Chance Acquaintance, A; Hazard of New Fortunes, A; Indian Summer; Lady of Aroostook, The; Parlor Car, The; Sleeping Car, The; Venetian Life; Their Wedding Journey Hubka, Thomas C., 184

Gardner, Isabella Stewart, 3–4, 8, 20, 53, 61, 65, 77, 127, 132, 140, 143, 164–70, 185–86, 219, 231, 244, 246–47, 249. See also Fenway Court Garrison, William Lloyd, 53, 223 Gaskell, Charles Milnes, 171, 174 “genteel tradition,” 8–9 Germany, 58, 108, 174–77, 192, 200, 205 Gérôme, Jean-Léon, 116 Gifford Lectures, 106 Gilded Age, 36–37, 43, 155–56, 183, 211, 255 Giverny, France, 28, 66, 118 globalization, 4, 12, 181, 197, 204 Godkin, E.L., 37 Golden Day, The (1926), 182–83 Grant, Ulysses S., 37, 210 Great Britain, 1, 10–11, 15, 18, 33, 49, 53–55, 79, 105, 153, 173–74, 205–6, 223. See also England; Scotland; War of 1812 Great Western, The (1838), 17 Greek Revival, 147–49, 160 Green, Martin, 185

immigration, 55, 73–77, 98–100, 126, 155, 178, 204, 228, 244, 252 imperialism, 105–6, 156–57, 178, 186, 197 Impressionism, 3, 8, 77, 113–14, 116–19 In a Japanese Garden (1898–1901), 119 India, 6, 20, 205 Indian Summer (1886), 190 the individual, 5, 41, 43–44, 46–47, 106–8, 144, 182, 194, 209–11 Innocents Abroad, The (1869), 6, 19 international cosmopolitanism, 5, 6, 196–97, 216 International Episode, An (1878), 87 Iriye, Akira, 5 Irving, Washington, 80–81 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. See Fenway Court isolationism, 1, 175–76, 178, 198 Italian Hours (1909), 4, 80, 93–98, 120, 143 Italian language, 89–93, 212 Italian Renaissance, 25, 52, 88, 164–65, 170

278

INDEX

Italy, 2, 7–8, 10, 16, 25–27, 31–33, 47–48, 52–55, 61, 66, 72–73, 80, 87–98, 101–2, 104–5, 107, 115, 121, 146, 154–55, 165, 176, 178, 202, 210, 217, 223, 227, 230–31, 233. See also Florence; Italian Hours; Italian language; Rome; Venice; Venetian Life James, Garth Wilkinson, 136 James, Henry, 1–2, 4, 11–12, 15–16, 24–25, 27, 29, 31–34, 36, 51, 57–58, 60–63, 67–74, 76–77, 79–80, 87–89, 93–105, 107, 115, 120, 125–26, 134–36, 143, 149, 163–64, 171–78, 182, 185–86, 189–90, 196–99, 202, 211, 215, 217, 221, 224, 227–29, 231–35, 247, 249, 252; on American culture, 98–104; analysis of intellectual traditions, 67–69, 228; as British citizen, 1, 173–74, 177, 215; on Charles Eliot Norton, 36; and cosmopolitanism, 97–104, 232–33; on novels, 11; and war propaganda, 173; and World War I, 171–78. See also The Ambassadors; The American; The American Scene; French Poets and Novelists; An International Episode; Italian Hours; John Ruskin; Newport cosmopolitans; Notes of a Son and Brother; Portrait of a Lady; William James; William Wetmore Story and His Friends James, Robertson, 136 James, William, 4, 8, 9, 15–16, 21–22, 27–28, 33, 36, 58, 66, 80, 102–11, 113–14, 125, 127–28, 133–39, 163–64, 178, 183, 186, 189–90, 200–201, 211, 231–32, 234–35, 237, 239–40, 249; on Charles Eliot Norton, 36; and cosmopolitanism, 108–9; criticism of, 183; and the individual, 104–11, 234. See also Harvard University; “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings”; pragmatism; Shaw Memorial; The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature Japan, 8, 28–30, 77, 114, 117, 119–23, 126, 128–33, 144, 146, 170, 178, 202–3 Japanese language, 130–33, 238 Jar of Dreams, The (1923), 117 Jefferson, Thomas, 147, 207–9, 212, 241, 256 Jim Crow laws, 114, 133

John Hancock Tower, 141–42 Johnson, Andrew, 37, 210 Judson, Adoniram, 209, 255 Kakuzu, Okakura, 131–33 Kipling, Rudyard, 27, 173 La Farge, John, 3, 9, 28–31, 102–3, 114–15, 117, 121–33, 138, 140, 144–45, 153, 156, 170, 202, 237. See also Artist’s Letters from Japan, An Lady of Aroostook, The (1879), 26 Lamberth, David, 107 Language. See French language; Italian language; Japanese language Lears, Jackson, 186 leisure, 13, 103–4 Letter to American Teachers of History (1910), 200 Lewis, R.W.B., 220 The Library of Universal Adventure By Sea and Land, 57 liminal space, 21–31, 49, 60, 75, 81–87, 143, 158–59, 219 Lincoln, Abraham, 2, 146–47, 152, 241 Lloyd, Henry Demarest, 27 London, England, 55, 101, 153, 185, 206 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 8, 56, 61, 230 Lowell, James Russell, 33, 39, 56, 61 MacMonnies, Frederick William, 54, 161. See also Bacchante Maddocks, Melvin, 21 Massachusetts, 18, 53, 99, 188. See also Boston; Cambridge; Massachusetts 54th Regiment Massachusetts 54th Regiment, 3–4, 114, 134–37, 238–39 materialism, 30, 35–36, 42–46, 98–104, 163, 183, 211, 223, 230 Mather, Cotton, 204–6, 209 McKim, Charles Follen, 3, 9, 10, 25, 54, 140, 149, 154–57, 160–63, 193, 196, 243–45, 251. See also Boston Public Library; Columbian Exhibition; Pennsylvania Station McKim, Mead, and White, 155, 157, 159–60, 165, 193, 244 modernization, 97, 125–29, 182, 186. See also entropy the module, 150 Monet, Claude, 65, 116, 118 Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres (1904), 126 multiculturalism, 194–95, 198, 203, 253

INDEX Mumford, Lewis, 8, 115, 157, 182–85, 217, 236. See also The Brown Decades; The Golden Day Museum of Fine Arts, 8, 64, 132, 167 Nation, The, 37–38 national cosmopolitanism, 5, 196–98, 216. Compare international cosmopolitan national identity, 5, 77, 81, 146–49, 173–77, 193–97, 206 nationalism, 24 neoclassicism, 3, 153, 155–57, 162, 193, 196 New England, 6–7, 39, 54–60, 117, 152–53, 185, 187–89, 224 New England: Indian Summer (1940), 185 New York, New York, 1, 6, 7, 53, 59, 61, 73–77, 98–102, 120–21, 123, 125, 128, 135, 156, 159, 175, 185, 187–90, 204, 225, 228, 244, 233. See also Pennsylvania Station New York Times, 159 Newport, Rhode Island, 102–4 Newport cosmopolitans, 103–4 Norcross, Orlando Whitney, 184 North American Review, 38, 175 Norton, Charles Eliot, 4, 25, 27, 34–49, 60–61, 73, 77, 80, 162–64, 184, 211–12, 217, 222, 249, 255–26; and the Civil War, 37, 40–42, 222; journaling, 8, 38; on Ralph Waldo Emerson, 38–47, 49; on scholars, 46. See also art history; Harvard University; Historical Studies of Church Building in the Middle Ages; the individual; the present Norton, Susan, 37–38, 42 Notes of a Son and Brother (1914), 60 Of Time and the River (1935), 20, 26 Ohio, 55, 59, 224 Olmstead, Frederick Law, 151–52, 189 “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” (1899), 4, 97, 200, 202, 232 Open Air Concert (1890), 118 “organic” intellectuals, 192, 251 Paris, France, 37, 63–64, 66–67, 101, 115–17, 149–50, 154, 160, 193, 200, 253. See also école des Beaux Arts Parlor Car, The (1889), 80, 83–86 Pennsylvania Station, 156–57, 244 Perry, Commodore, 8 Perry, Lilla Cabot, 3, 6, 58, 64–65, 77, 113–14, 116–20, 196, 203, 227, 231, 236. See also Alice in the Lane; In a

279

Japanese Garden; Jar of Dreams, The; Open Air Concert Perry, Thomas Sargeant, 4, 24, 28, 51, 57–67, 102–3, 119, 197, 226–27 Philippines, 105–6, 109–10, 178 Pissaro, Camille, 116, 118 Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896), 133 pluralism, 194–95 Portrait of a Lady (1881), 4, 21, 103 postbellum era, 2, 4, 6, 10, 18–21, 23, 32–34, 40, 42–45, 49, 52–53, 55, 58, 60, 70, 77–79, 181, 183–84, 191–94, 196, 210–11, 222. See also Reconstruction Postethnic America (1995), 5, 194–95, 198, 252 pragmatism, 8, 28, 66, 106–9, 183 the Precursors, 31–34 the present, 2, 46, 67, 100–101, 120, 128, 153, 232 Prichard, Matthew, 167–68, 247 public space, 12, 101–2, 140, 143, 149, 151–52, 154, 156–60, 179, 203, 246 publishing, 10, 79 racism, 73, 133, 137, 140, 178–79, 228, 238–39. See also Jim Crow laws railway travel. See travel, railway reason, 206–8, 210 Reconstruction, 42–43, 210. See also postbellum era religion, 106–7, 152, 182, 201–2, 204–7, 209–10, 234–35 religious tribalism, 201–2 Richardson, Henry Hobson, 2–3, 7–8, 10, 114, 116, 123, 126–27, 134, 140–43, 145–46, 149–53, 155, 159–60, 165–66, 170, 182–84, 189, 203, 231, 240–43. See also Richardsonian Romanesque Richardsonian Romanesque, 7–8, 142, 145, 150–51, 153, 170, 243 Robbins, Bruce, 195–96, 216 Rome, Italy, 10, 31–33, 48, 55, 154–55, 176. See also American Academy in Rome Roosevelt, Theodore, 109, 173, 248 Roth, Leland, 156, 244–45 Ruskin, John, 11, 38–39, 93–95, 107, 149, 222 Saint Gaudens, Augustus, 3, 25–26, 114–15, 121–23, 125–26, 133–40, 145, 149, 158, 162, 193, 196, 203, 237–39, 245. See also Shaw Memorial

280

INDEX

Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin, 62 Salon de la Societe des Artistes Francais, 118 San Francisco, California, 6 Santayana, George, 8, 21–23 Sargent, John Singer, 63, 115, 173, 182 Scotland, 105–6, 108 September 11, 2001, 141, 179, 199 Seven Years’ War (1756–63), 206 Shakespeare, William, 88 Shaw, Robert Gould, 134–40 Shaw Memorial (1897), 3–4, 114, 133–40, 179, 203, 238–39 Shelly, Percy Bysshe, 232 Smith, Joshua B., 134 Spain, 105–6, 147 Spanish-American War, 105, 109, 186, 197 Stein, Gertrude, 182, 190 Stowe, William W., 190 Sleeping Car, The (1889), 79–80, 86 steamship. See under travel Stones of Venice, The (1853), 93–94

Twain, Mark, 6, 19, 57, 190

Temple, Minny, 103 Terry, Luther, 33 Their Wedding Journey (1872), 4, 74 Transcendentalism, 52, 53 “Trans-National America” (1918) travel, 1–2, 4, 6, 8, 12–13, 15–31, 38, 49, 51–55, 60–61, 73–75, 77–87, 117, 133, 143, 158–59, 178–79, 190–91, 203–4, 208, 210–13, 215–16, 219, 222, 228, 233; and Boston Cosmopolitans, 16–17, 23–31, 51–53, 73, 77–80, 143, 178–79, 190–91, 211–13, 233; philosophy of, 21–3; and pilgrimage, 23, 28; railway, 16, 22, 31, 49, 55, 74, 79–80, 83–87, 133, 159; steamship, 6, 12, 16–22, 24, 26–27, 31, 38, 49, 52, 54–55, 74, 79–80, 159, 179, 222. See also communitas; liminal space; nationalism travel literature, 4, 10, 18–19, 74, 80, 89, 94, 104–5, 233. See also American Notes; The American Scene; The Innocents Abroad Trinity Church, 2–3, 7–8, 123, 126, 140–43, 145, 150, 152–53, 155, 159–60, 165, 168, 170, 184, 203 Trio, The (1898–1900), 119, 203 Turner, Fredrick Jackson, 192–94. See also Frontier Thesis Turner, James, 7, 35, 42, 217, 224–25 Turner, Victor, 23, 129, 132

Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, The (1902), 80, 106–8, 110, 201 Venetian Life (1866), 4, 10, 27, 61, 72–73, 80, 88–94 Venice, Italy, 2, 7, 48, 53, 61, 66, 72–73, 80, 88–98, 102, 104–5, 107, 165, 202, 223, 230. See also Italian Hours; The Stones of Venice; Venetian Life Victorian era, 8–9, 115, 182–85 visual art. See art

the Union, 37, 41–42, 134, 136 United Kingdom, 173 United States, 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 11–13, 18, 26, 29–30, 33, 37, 40–43, 49, 55–56, 75–76, 80, 88, 90, 93, 98, 105–6, 108–10, 115, 119, 129, 132–33, 137–39, 146, 149, 151, 153, 155–56, 160, 163, 166, 170, 175–78, 183, 186, 191, 194, 196–99, 203–4, 217, 228, 236, 241; dearth of art schools, 33, 115, 149, 196; foreign policy, 109–10; “golden day” of, 40, 183, 217, 236; and prejudice, 198–99, 203. See also American culture; American exceptionalism; American West; imperialism; the individual; isolationism; Jim Crow laws; materialism; Philippines; Spanish-American War; the Union; War of 1812 the universal, 45, 57, 69, 80, 107, 129–33, 138, 203–4, 206–10

War of 1812, 147, 153 Warren, Samuel, 167 Washington, Booker T., 134 Washington, D.C., 60, 121, 140, 146, 160, 241. See also Adams Memorial; Capitol Hill Wharton, Edith, 173–74, 178, 248 White, Stanford, 25, 114, 121, 123–25, 134, 237, 243–44 “White City.” See Columbian Exhibition Whitman, Walt, 43–44, 183 William Wetmore Story and His Friends (1903), 25, 31–33, 97, 149, 220, 233 Wings of the Dove, The (1902), 4, 103 Wolfe, Thomas, 20, 26 World War I, 1, 8, 13, 23, 115, 155, 171–78, 182 Wright, Natalia, 88, 230 Zola, Emile, 62–63