Henry James said “The Bostonians” was to be his “very American tale”. He wrote this in a note made in Boston in April 1883, just before his 40th birthday — he had been in America since December 1882, when he arrived just too late for his father’s death. The novel was written after his return to, and settlement in, England. In the note he went on: “I asked myself what was the most salient and peculiar point in our social life. The answer was: The situation of women, the decline of the sentiment of sex, the agitation on their behalf.”

It is a very American novel, related to Hawthorne’s “The Blithedale Romance.” It takes place in what James calls, writing about Hawthorne, “the light fresh American air, unthickened and undarkened by customs and institutions established”, which made for a thinness as James and Hawthorne saw it, of social density available for realist novelists.

“The Bostonians” is about idealism in a democracy still recovering from a civil war bitterly fought for social ideals. It is written, paradoxically, with a ferocious, precise, detailed — and wildly comic — realism that derives from Dickens and Balzac. In that paradox lie both its greatness and the edged tone that arouses instinctive dislike in many readers.

James half-envied Balzac’s freedom to invent novels in a historically younger world where (James thought) everything could still be seen with clarity and differentiated — partly because Balzac, writing early in the development of the social novel, constructed his form as he went along, partly because he escaped “the fatal fusions and uniformities inflicted on newer generations, the running together of all the differences of form and tone, the ruinous liquefying wash of the great industrial brush over the old conditions of contrast and color.”

Balzac’s Europe is bright and clear and complicated. James’ Europe is smoky and homogenized. (Or nostalgic for ancient graces and splendors.) Hawthorne’s America exists in a “dry American light”. In Hawthorne’s America, James wrote, “the individual counts for more, as it were, and thanks to the absence of a variety of social types and of settled heads under which he may be easily pigeon-holed, he is to a certain extent a wonder and a mystery.”

English and French thinkers can judge people quickly and easily. A European “has not that rather chilly and isolated sense of moral responsibility that is apt to visit a New Englander... he has the advantage that his standards are fixed by the general consent of the society in which he lives... American intellectual standards are vague, and Hawthorne’s countrymen are apt to hold the scales with a rather uncertain hand and a somewhat agitated conscience.”

James was able to write with a Balzacian particularity, and a Dickensian gusto, about the buzzing world of American idealism, in its lower and higher manifestations, because he grew up in it. He and his brother William had “queer lecturing blood” in their veins. Henry James Sr was both a Swedenborgian and a Fourierist. W.D. Howells remarked that William James’ “Pragmatism” was brilliant but not clear, “like his father, who wrote ‘The Secret of Swedenborg,’ and kept it.”

In “The Bostonians,” the sleazy Selah Tarrant and the beautiful Verena are direct descendants of the mysterious Priscilla of “The Blithedale Romance,” which takes place in a utopian community based on the transcendentalist “Brook Farm,” where Hawthorne stayed, and which later became a Fourierist phalanx. The feminist heroine of “Blithedale,” Zenobia, is based partly on Margaret Fuller. When, at the very beginning of “The Bostonians,” Basil Ransom discusses Olive Chancellor’s “weird meetings” with Mrs. Luna, he turns them into supernatural fantasy. “What kind of meetings do you refer to? You speak as if it were a rendezvous of witches on the Brocken.”

“Well, so it is. They are all witches and wizards, mediums, and spirit-rappers, and roaring radicals.”

“Do you mean to say your sister’s a roaring radical?”

“A radical? She’s a female Jacobin — she’s a nihilist. Whatever is, is wrong, and all that sort of thing.”

Basil Ransom, referring to Goethe’s “Faust,” brings in the German Romantic side of transcendentalism. Mrs. Luna gleefully coagulates the political and the occult. In the world Henry James grew up in, these were constituents of the surprising thin American air. All through both “The Blithedale Romance” and “Little Women,” there are references to “castles in the air.”

Louisa May Alcott also grew up in an idealist farming utopia, her father’s Fruitlands — badly run, and productive of mud, poverty and hunger. The real fantasy in her world is the solid comfortable dailiness of the March sisters’ home life. American literature and thought in the mid-19th century produced a concoction of “isms”, often inhering in the same individual minds and fiercely earnest communities. Spiritualism, mesmerism, communism, radicalism, Swedenborgianism, Fourierism, abolitionism, transcendentalism, feminism.

James is able to report the phantasmagoria of spiritual and political abstractions, magnetisms and influences, with a surfeited realist solidity of specification (to use his own phrase) because it is what he knew best and first.

Verena was partly based on the lovely Cora Tappan, whose formless, enthusiastic, ultimately meaningless “lectures” were collected in an elegant book with her elegant blonde photograph as a frontispiece. James makes her plausible as the child of her subtly drawn seedy parents, the survivors of religious communities, with sexual freedom thrown in — she has warmth, responsiveness, and no instilled puritanical principles.

The character of Miss Birdseye, a perfect New England type of emancipated woman, caused James some problems, as his family, including William, and acquaintances, reacted very strongly to his presentation of her, seeing it as a lampoon of Miss Eliza Peabody, originally of Salem, Hawthorne’s sister-in-law, who wrote on Swedenborg, stayed in Brook Farm, dabbled in mesmerism, and wrote for “The Dial.” James protested, as authors do, and gave her a beautiful death in a later episode, to conciliate critics.

Basil Ransom is a southerner who has been in the west and has complicated and skeptical views about society. He reads De Tocqueville, and knows his opinions “would probably not contribute to his prosperity in Mississippi any more than in New York.” He understands himself dryly. “It came home to him that his opinions were stiff, whereas in comparison his effort was lax.” He had suspicions that he “was attached to causes that could only, in the nature of things, be unpopular.” His belief that the age needed saving “from the most damnable feminization,” that “the masculine tone is passing out of the world; it’s a feminine, a nervous, hysterical, chattering, canting age” is not James’ (though it bears some relation to some of James’ views).

The novel’s colloquial realism goes with a use of a hinted allegorical scheme, a set of symbols and arcane references, which resonate both with the world of Swedenborgian and Fourierist cosmologies, and with the American tendency to think in parables, and fantastic tales, as Hawthorne noted of himself, and James observed about him.

The novel’s reception has been odd. It has been much hated. Early American reviewers did not like it — they felt James was mocking his serious countrymen. Rebecca West disliked it. She admitted “the beauty of the writing” but found the “musical disclosure of fine material interrupted past any reader’s patience by a nagging hostility to political effort.” Modern students, well read in feminist critiques of masculine assumptions, frequently find the novel unacceptable or unreadable. Leon Edel, James’ comprehensive biographer, is similarly unresponsive — he calls “The Bostonians” “a failure by comparison with his best work.”

But F.R. Leavis in “The Great Tradition” singled the novel out as “wonderfully rich, intelligent and brilliant”:

“I said that it is an acknowledged masterpiece, but I don’t in fact think that it has anything like the reputation it deserves. It could have been written only by James, and it has an overt richness of life such as is not commonly associated with him. It is incomparably witty and incomparably serious, and it makes the imputed classical status of all but a few of the admired works of Victorian fiction look silly.”

Much has been written on James’ presentation of the battle between good and evil in elegant cosmopolitan drawing-rooms, the lurking powers behind the possessions and the manners. Things don’t lurk or haunt in “The Bostonians,” which exorcises demons with wit and metaphor and argument. But that it inhabits the same metaphysical and moral world as James’ later fictions — presenting the problems with comic realism rather than mythic metaphors — can be seen if we consider how well, and how differently, T.S. Eliot’s description of James’ world and methods applies to both “The Bostonians” and “The Golden Bowl.”

Eliot, too, was a translated American who valued drawing-rooms but came from a theocracy founded by mystical puritans. It was Eliot who made the oft-quoted observation that James had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it — but it is not always understood that this is a statement of approval, and the “ideas” to which Eliot refers are those that fermented so busily in the Concord and New England of Henry James Sr, the Cayuga community, and the milieu of the Peabodies. Eliot wrote that James “was possessed by the vision of an ideal society; he saw (not fancied) the relations between the members of such a society. And no one in the end has ever been more aware — or with more benignity, or less bitterness — of the disparity between possibility and fact...

“The example that Henry James offered us was not that of a style to imitate but an integrity so great, a vision so exacting, that it was forced to the extreme of care and punctiliousness for exact expression. James did not provide us with ‘ideas’ but with another world of thought and feeling. For such a world some have gone to Dostoevsky, some to James; and I am inclined to think that the spirit of James, so much less violent, with so much more reasonableness and so much more resignation than that of the Russian, is no less profound, and is more useful, more applicable for our future.”

- 11 September 2003