SOURCE: "Classical Vision and the American City: Henry James's The Bostonians," in the New England Quarterly, Vol. XLVI, No. 4, December, 1973, pp. 543-57.

[In the following excerpt, Morris explores urban settings in Henry James's The Bostonians.]

A number of recent studies have stressed the great problems which the modern city has posed to the sensibilities of imaginative writers during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—writers such as Dickens, Dostoevski and Baudelaire, Dreiser and Crane, Kafka, Fitzgerald, Celine, Orwell, and even that apologist for the technological era, H. G. Wells.¹ This essay will consider a late nineteenth-century American view of the city, by Henry James, and his efforts to invest the American urban scene with an aesthetic significance which, in James's opinion, it sorely needed.

One view holds that James was principally a "realist" who sought, in his fiction, to give a faithful transcription of contemporary life. The difficulties in this view are worth considering briefly. It is this sense of James as a realist which informs a study by Daniel Lerner and Oscar Cargill.² In writing of the development, in The Bostonians, of an extended classical comparison drawn from the Antigone of Sophocles, the authors conclude that James recognized his novel to be a failure because he had violated the criteria of realism to which he normally subscribed; and they remark that elsewhere James "deliberately suppressed classical allusion in the bulk of his fiction, feeling perhaps that it was inappropriate to the contemporary tone he wished to give his writing" (317). If it is indeed the mark of a realist to suppress extensive historical or literary analogies, then James cannot be termed a strict realist. But Cargill and Lerner's belief that the "realistic" James tended to suppress classical allusion in the bulk of his fiction is itself very much open to question. Classical themes such as the one mentioned in The Bostonians figure in a number of his stories and novels. In a chapter on The Europeans, Peter Buitenhuis observes that James's imagery "draws heavily from the pastoral tradition."³ J. A. Ward has noted a somewhat similar pattern in The Princess Casamassima, where London momentarily takes on the appearance of a pastoral landscape, provoking the hero, Hyacinth Robinson, to dreams of release from his "anonymity" and of escape from the "urban murkiness and congestion" prevailing in that novel.⁴ It also seems a question whether James really believed that classical allusion would be inappropriate to the contemporary tone of his writing. Ward's view of The Princess Casamassima might suggest that the novelist consciously employed classical comparisons to underscore the blight of industrial London. Moreover, as this discussion will show, James appears to have used classical allusions in a surprisingly sustained fashion in his descriptions of contemporary American life. It would seem, in fact, that James was as much an allusive or an aesthetic novelist as a writer of realistic fiction. It is the aesthetic dimension of James's art—specifically, the accretions of figurative detail on his pictures of contemporary life—which will bear most heavily on the subject treated here.

As late as 1904, when James returned to America after nearly two decades spent in Europe, he was tantalized by the resemblance of the American landscape to an idealized pastoral world. In the opening chapter of The American Scene, the idea which informs his vision of New England is that of a classical pastoral, "exquisitely and ideally Sicilian, Theocritan, poetic"; and he is led to ask: "Why was the whole connotation so delicately Arcadian, like that of the Arcadia of an old tapestry, an old legend, an old love-story in fifteen volumes. . . . "⁵ If this classicized vision of New England fails as a controlling idea in The American Scene, it is because James recognizes that the real actors on the American scene are not the bucolic remains of old New England, but "the monstrous form of Democracy" and the looming shapes of a new and unsettling urban technology. Glimpsed by the returning traveler from across New York Harbor, the city appeared as a "monstrous organism . . . some colossal set of clockworks, some steel-souled machine-room of brandished arms and hammering fists and opening and closing jaws. The immeasurable bridges are but as the horizontal sheaths of pistons working at high pressure, day and night, and subject, one apprehends with perhaps inconsistent gloom, to certain, to fantastic, to merciless multiplication" (75). Apparently conceived as an imaginative alternative to this enormous urban geography in The American Scene, the pastoral ideal still could offer no real defense against the new urban technology. James frankly admits that failure. And yet it is significant that, not so very long before, he had sought to infuse his description of the American city itself with a classical sense. In focusing upon The Bostonians (1886), this essay will show how James was driven by a need to impose order upon the chaos which he believed to exist in American urban life. This discussion will reveal several lines of classical pastoral imagery and landscape imagery, which are not always directly related, but which bear upon James's attempt to set the American city in a harmonious aesthetic context.

Criticism does not seem very precisely to have located the center of James's interests in The Bostonians. Recent interpretations have tended to regard the ideological struggle between Basil Ransom and Olive Chancellor as the subject of the novel. Maxwell Geismar, for example, is sure that Ransom is "close to being the Jamesian spokesman" and equates Ransom ("a Post-Civil War Southern Conservative, a traditionalist who is almost a royalist") with the arch-"Royalist," James himself, whose position in this "satire" on New England intellectual life was "conservative, traditional or reactionary."⁶ Irving Howe, on the other hand, has denied that Ransom is James's spokesman and sees him figuring in a "harsh comedy in which both sides . . . are scored off by James."⁷ Criticism appears to have fastened rather fruitlessly upon the question of competing ideologies. Perhaps what interested James more is the odd similarity of Olive's and Ransom's positions rather than their opposed philosophies of life. Both are represented as déracinés, Olive because of her "nervous" and "morbid" modernity (she is a women'srights zealot), and Ransom because he is an up-rooted Southerner. Both suffer recognizably from anomie, engendered by their experience in a society which often seems mechanical and cruel. James appears to take considerable trouble in order to suggest the similitude of their experience. Olive, suffering agonies in a crowd, sees "a barrier of broad male backs," dumbly registers laughter "that verged upon coarseness," and feels insanely oppressed by the "glancing smiles" directed at her across the room, "which seemed rather to disconnect her with what was going forward on that side than to invite her to take part in it."⁸ Ransom similarly is frequently described at moments of extreme discomfort, as at the Burrages' crowded evening party, where he feels caught up in a tide of people, who "edged about, advanced and retreated," whose faces seem animated "with sudden nods and grimaces," and whose effect upon him is strangely Kafkaesque. Even the room itself is made to accentuate Ransom's intense awareness of the crowd: "The walls of the room were covered with pictures—the very ceiling was painted and framed. The people pushed each other a little . . ." (254). Given this context, we should perhaps see The Bostonians as grounded in a painful sense of the pressures and the spiritual emptiness of contemporary urban life.

But if the ideological contest between the characters is less crucial than it has been made out to be, what was James seeking to accomplish in writing the novel? The clue to his purpose seems to lie in the imagery, especially its extensive use of classical imagery, and its often stylized contrasts of urban and rural landscape scenes. Earlier it was indicated that James used classical allusion in his fiction in a complicated way, mixing together a classical and a contemporary sense of life. In effect, it seems that James was seeking to enrich the contemporary world, in an attempt not wholly unlike what James Joyce later sought to accomplish through his use of The Odyssey in Ulysses. Or to put it somewhat differently, James was groping towards the creation of an urban mythology, a means of imaginatively interpreting his increasingly technological era. If James failed, and he did fail, he nevertheless provides an interesting early illustration of the problem which Hart Crane defined, in the 1920's, as central to his own time: ". . . unless poetry can absorb the machine, i.e., acclimatize it as naturally and casually as trees, cattle, galleons, castles . . . [it] has failed of its full contemporary function."⁹ Put most simply, James's purpose in The Bostonians was to "acclimatize" the American city, a task, however, which was not to be easily accomplished.

James's impressions of urban life are described repeatedly through the imagery of extreme sensory exacerbation—" . . . the relaxed and disjoined roadway, enlivened at the curb-stone with an occasional ash barrel or with gas-lamps drooping from the perpendicular, and west-ward, at the end of the truncated vista, of the fantastic skeleton of the Elevated Railway, over-hanging the transverse longitudinal street . . ." (191). The countryside, which in antithetical fashion he idealizes, becomes powerfully suggestive of his feeling that modern American life required some kind of readjustment. Before showing the use James was to make of a classical vision in describing that readjustment, it may be helpful to demonstrate his use in the novel of a strain of landscape imagery embodying distinct ideas about the superiority of the country to the city.

At the opening of the third section of The Bostonians, James has Ransom meditate on vacations during a train ride down Cape Cod in pursuit of Verena Tarrant, whom he wants to marry. Ransom's contrast of the city and the countryside is extreme in a comic way: "it had been described to him as the drowsy Cape, the languid Cape, the Cape not of storms, but of eternal peace. He knew that the Bostonians had been drawn thither, for the hot weeks, by its sedative influence, by the conviction that its toneless air would minister to perfect rest. In a career in which there was so much nervous excitement as in theirs they had no wish to be wound up when they went out of town . . ." (356). But the contrast is grim by implication, because the "refreshment" Ransom finds in tasting "the breath of nature" at seaside Marmion allows him to measure all the painfulness in "his long grind in New York, without a vacation, with the repetition of the daily movement up and down the long, straight, maddening city, like a bucket in a well or a shuttle in a loom" (357). James clearly has so much to say about the countryside in the novel that one supposes he was exploring it as a symbol of man's relief from the nervous tensions generated by urban life. But he also appears to have had a more ambitious use for the countryside than as the single vital contrast to an essentially negative vision of the city. At points in the narration, James can be seen trying to incorporate the city itself within this rural vision. It is this motive which seems to explain the presence of an aestheticized "landscape sense" in some parts of the description of the cities of Boston and New York.

The function of James's landscape imagery appears to have been rendering the city aesthetically harmonious. Yet there is a sense, running through much of the narrative, of the city's resistance to such an attempt. James's first efforts to harmonize the city are strangely qualified, indeed, partially vitiated by a satiric impulse. Frequently his characters engage in urban "view hunting," which, initially at any rate, James ridicules. Early in the novel, in the first of several scenes where characters are made to look from Olive Chancellor's drawing room window upon the Charles River basin, Ransom considers "a brackish expanse of an anomalous character" and finds the view rather "picturesque" (15). In a later instance, the Charles River and the industrial wasteland visible from Olive's windows are seen as " . . . desolate suburban horizons, peeled and made bald by the rigor of the season . . . straight sordid tubes of factories and engine-shops. . . . There was something inexorable in the poverty of the scene, shameful in the meanness of its details, which gave a collective impression of boards and tin and frozen earth . . ." (178). These items are presented in their oppressive detail to form a basis for James's parody of the excessively aesthetic interest taken in this scene at twilight by Olive and Verena: "There were pink flushes on snow, 'tender' reflections in patches of stiffened marsh, sounds of car-bells, no longer vulgar, but almost silvery. . . . They admired the sunsets, they rejoiced in the ruddy spots projected upon the parlor wall . . ." (178-179). These were "agreeable effects," James observes, and then allows the ladies to return to "the glittering tea tray and more and more talk about the long martyrdom of women . . ." (179). From such instances, it appears that James had strong doubts whether the city legitimately could be viewed in an aesthetic context. Nevertheless, the frequency with which landscape imagery is applied to urban scenes in the novel suggests that James was determined to impose some degree of aesthetic form upon the chaotic ugliness of the city.

However, the results of James's attempt at using landscape imagery in his descriptions of the city often are unfortunate. Here is a view of Basil Ransom's neighborhood in New York: " . . . an immense penthouse shed, which projected over a greasy pavement. Beneath it, on the dislocated flags, barrels and baskets were freely and picturesquely grouped . . . and a smart, bright wagon, with the horse detached from the shafts, drawn up on the edge of the abominable road (it contained holes and ruts a foot deep, and immemorial accumulations of stagnant mud), imparted an idle, rural, pastoral air to a scene otherwise perhaps expressive of a rank civilization" (189-190). The "picturesque," the "idle," the "rural," and the "pastoral" are, rather weakly, made to combat the oppressiveness of "rank civilization." The laboriousness, and the uncertainty, of this attempt to give the urban scene a rural and picturesque tone are apparent, but it should be recognized that what James was attempting was the idealization and enrichment of the urban environment.

James is far more successful when he can regard the city directly in terms of an actual landscape. When Ransom eventually goes to Central Park with Verena, James's description shifts with relief into a celebration of nature. The park "bristled with the raw delicacy of April, and, in spite of its rockwork grottos and tunnels, its pavilions and statues, its too numerous paths and pavements, lakes too big for the landscape and bridges too big for the lakes, expressed all the fragrance and freshness of the most charming moment of the year" (333). The scene is rendered both comic and beautiful, for the city no longer makes itself felt in a threatening way. Although the architecture in Central Park certainly is ungainly ("lakes too big for the landscape and bridges too big for the lake"), the disproportion is merely amusing and does not interfere with the "freshness and fragrance" which James's lovers encounter.

As James proceeds to develop the scene in Central Park, a number of motifs and thematic concerns—originally introduced at earlier points in the narrative—begin to coalesce imaginatively for the first time. The city blends harmoniously with nature: "The bowers and boskages stretched behind them, the artificial lakes and cockneyfied landscapes, making all the region bright with the sense of air and space, and raw natural vegetation too diminutive to overshadow" (348). Even the houses bounding the park are described as "chocolatecolored" and contrast, appetitively, with the sad, metallic appearance of the "red, rusty face" of Ransom's house earlier in the narrative (189). The whole urban landscape now appears balanced and harmonious, and it is even made to divide smoothly into painterly "grounds": " . . . streetcars rattled in the foreground, changing horses while the horses steamed . . . and the beer-saloons, with exposed shoulders and sides, which in New York do a great deal toward representing the picturesque, the 'bit' appreciated by painters . . . and on the other side the commercial vistas of Sixth Avenue stretched away with a remarkable absence of aerial perspective" (348-349). Here, even the hectic business of the city presents itself softly to the eye, with "a remarkable absence of aerial perspective." The swing away from ugliness in James's description makes us recall, earlier in the novel, the contrasting "truncated vista" created by the Elevated Railway, which "darkened and smothered" the city streets and made a "queer barrier" to vision itself (191, 302). James observes that even Verena Tarrant's dogmatically held opinions concerning democracy and women's rights begin to melt as she listens to Ransom in this setting, while the two characters themselves suggestively merge with the landscape and take on the first vague outlines of pastoral figures in an idealized landscape: "Strange I call the nature of [Verena' s] reflections, for they softly battled with each other as she listened, in the warm, still air, touched with the faraway hum of the immense city, to his deep, distinct voice, expressing monstrous opinions with exotic cadences and mild familiar laughs, which, as he leaned toward her, almost tickled her cheek and ear" (336-337). Elsewhere, Ransom and Verena are depicted explicitly as pastoral figures. Somewhat later, at Cape Cod, James again focuses elaborately upon the landscape: " . . . here all the spirit of a ripe summer afternoon seemed to hang in the air. There were wood-walks too; they sometimes followed bosky uplands, where accident had grouped the trees with odd effects of 'style,' and where in grassy intervals and fragrant nooks of rest they came upon sudden patches of Arcady" (395). The place itself is termed Arcadian. At other points in the narrative, James will view his characters themselves as classical Arcadians.

The difference between these two lush scenes and the earlier one where James had tried to find an aesthetic interest in Ransom's squalid neighborhood is, of course, great. But it should be remembered that James's methods of description are essentially similar in these contrasting instances. The city street scene, the scenery of Central Park, and the county landscape all are described with a significant degree of super-added aesthetic detail. The three scenes are depicted lavishly in "painterly" or "picturesque," as well as pastoral terms. It is in this context that James's intimately connected landscape and pastoral imagery may be seen deriving from the novelist's craving for an aesthetically satisfying vision of the largely urban world in which he lived.

The readjustment of modern urban life which James sought in The Bostonians was not merely a substitution of rural beauty for the exacerbation, blight, and "modern fatigue" (26) produced by urban life. What it involved was a simplification, and an imaginative enrichment of contemporary life. And yet it is clear from the novel that James found himself unable finally to arrive at such an imaginative vision. This failure is suggested by the continual tendency of his aesthetic and classical schemata to break down in the face of the intractable realities of urban life. Still, despite a tendency to collapse, the classical pastoral imagery of The Bostonians can be seen as an especially daring element in James's attempt at enriching modern life, daring because the novelist tries to use it to idealize both his characters and the natural and urban environment. This attempt at combining the classical and the modern proved as difficult for James as for any modern writer. It is clear from the novel that James's aesthetic needs often jarred with his artistic discretion and with his awareness of the inevitable falseness in any attempt to interpret the modern age through a historically remote classical ideal. The initial, satirical use of pastoral imagery reflects that strain markedly: "[Verena] has appeared to [Ransom] before as a creature of brightness, but now . . . she made everything that surrounded her of no consequence; dropping upon the shabby sofa with an effect as charming as if she had been a nymph sinking on a leopard-skin . . ." (228-229). The narrative eye here is Basil Ransom's, and the "nymph" and the "shabby sofa" transformed into a "leopard-skin" would seem to indicate that Ransom is indulging in a romantic fantasy. The balance between Ransom's imagery and the shabbiness of the scene merely serves to define Ransom's sentimentality. His "pastoral" idea of Verena appears rather different from (and less truthful than) his initial impression of her at Miss Birdseye's, when she had an air "of belonging to a troupe, of living in the gaslight": "If she had produced a pair of castanets or a tambourine, he felt that such accessories would have been quite in keeping" (59). It seems likely, from this instance, that James did not find it all that easy to idealize his characters so that they might fit a classical mold. And yet the novelist's subsequent use of pastoral motifs suggests that he had a less satirical purpose in mind than commenting upon Ransom's sentimentality. Later it is James himself who places Ransom and Verena in a much more idealized pastoral setting and combines the pastoral motif with a general interest in the aesthetic possibilities afforded by the New England landscape: " . . . accident had grouped the trees with odd effects of 'style'" (395). But as we noticed in his treatment of landscape imagery and of the "picturesque," James appears to have experienced great difficulty in working-up his motifs to a formal beauty. To speak more generally, James evidently was torn between a desire to find a harmonious order in modern life and a contrary, skeptical awareness of the flatness and ugliness of his characters' lives and of their world.

Throughout the novel, James's handling of pastoral metaphors appears to reflect a fundamental ambivalence. Towards the end of The Bostonians, he depicts an angry crowd at the Boston Music Hall in order to suggest a parallel to a Virgilian thunderstorm: "The storm was now raging in the hall" (461). At one point in the prolonged uproar, caused by Verena's mysterious non-appearance on stage, the Burrages are depicted simultaneously (and ludicrously) as pastoral figures and ruffled sophisticates: ". . . the arrival of the Burrages who had quitted the stage and who swept into the room in the manner of people seeking shelter from a thunderstorm. The mother's face expressed the well-bred surprise of a person who should have been asked out to dinner and seen the cloth pulled off the table . . ." (463). Here, where the pastoral and the modern seem not quite to jibe, it is as though James is mocking his own comparisons and calling attention, comically, to the impossibility of redeeming the modern world merely by evoking a classical past. Apparently reflecting that ironic awareness, a number of other classical allusions in the novel are made to focus on the absurd aspects (103), or on the sordidness of James's characters. Selah Tarrant, for instance, is regarded ironically as a modern postulant; the newspapers are his "temple," and he hopes to penetrate to the "inmost shrine" (L. penetralia): "The penetralia of the daily press were, however, still more fascinating, and the fact that they were less accessible, that here he found barriers in his path, only added to the zest of forcing an entrance" (106). Similarly, in the episode which closes the novel, Ransom's image for the Boston Music Hall is the Roman Colosseum: "The place struck him with a kind of Roman vastness; the doors which opened out of the upper balconies, high aloft, and which were constantly swinging to and fro with the passage of the spectators and the ushers, reminded him of the vomitoria that he had read about in descriptions of the Colosseum" (442). It is a metaphor appropriate to a troubled mind, such as Ransom's own, for it recalls not the classical world so much as the anomie, the hostile impersonality which rests with an iron weight upon the whole body of James's novel of modern city life. Some of his pastoral and classical comparisons are unattractive indeed, because they seem unable to help enliven modern life. We can more precisely examine the relation between the difficulties James faced in The Bostonians and his employment of a classical theme if we turn to the treatment of Ransom and Verena, who, like the whole urban environment, are often described in terms which prove resistant to a classical vision.

James has Ransom fall in love with Verena Tarrant in a way which seems designed to typify the randomness of encounters in urban life. Verena first appears, then disappears for a year, and then reappears with the same abruptness. Only then does Ransom fall in love with her. The moment occurs, in fact, even before he has seen her again, during a conversation between Ransom and Mrs. Luna in New York. James establishes the scene in a context of money worries and anxiety, and with the added complication for Ransom of having to ward-off Mrs. Luna's amorous "exhuberant provocation." Ransom, barely managing to escape from Mrs. Luna, "exhaled a soft vague sigh . . . such as a man might utter who had seen himself on the point of being run over and yet felt that he was whole" (213). What is most significant is that James makes a point of showing us this deracinated man in love as a figure which becomes almost eccentrically "strong." Verena, for instance, speaks repeatedly, and rather morbidly, about Ransom's formidable "will" (340, 346). But Ransom's description of being in love is especially interesting, because curiously unromantic. What it actually defines is less being-in-love than Ransom's struggle to keep his "balance" in a world which he finds disconcertingly complicated: " . . . he had a purpose which swallowed up . . . inanities and he was so full of it that it kept him firm, balanced him, gave him assurance . . ." (376). It is being in love that gives Ransom his forcefulness, and it is interesting to notice, later in the novel, what radical effects a loss of love has upon this character when James shows him trying, almost hopelessly, to track-down Verena in the labyrinths of Boston and New York: "He had been roaming in very much the same desperate fashion, at once eager and purposeless, for many days before he left New York, and he knew that his agitation and suspense must wear themselves out. At present they pressed him more than ever; they had become tremendously acute" (440). Thus, Ransom is depicted as a man on a pendulum. His strength has its roots in fearful anxieties, and his love in an exaggerated need for security. James describes him literally as a "modern" man, for Ransom is made to reveal the very same "modern" and "morbid" traits which he believed he detected in Olive Chancellor. The point is driven home for the reader when James pauses ironically over that "Boetian" thought of Ransom's, as he sat in Olive's Cambridge drawing room, to observe wryly that "morbidness" was somehow "typical" of the whole age (11). And so it was, in an age almost unrelievedly urban and mechanical.

To return to James's classical theme. Ransom's sentimentality in thinking Verena a pastoral "nymph" is understandable, because it is a product of the character's need to escape from an intolerable environment. Ransom needs the "simplicity" and freedom from neurosis which he imagines he sees in Verena. James indicates that this need was at the back of the character's mind throughout the first long conversation between Ransom and Verena at Cambridge: "Verena struck Ransom as constantly simple, but there were moments when her candor seemed to him preternatural" (251). Ransom's figure of the "nymph" is the result of that feeling. A disoriented urban man, Ransom sees Verena as the embodiment of a pastoral simplicity, the anti-type in short, of his own uncomfortable life. During the first moment of that scene at Cambridge, Ransom is shown feeling an intense discomfort, which he cannot quite fathom. He is surprised to discover how naturally Verena behaves, while he feels, in contrast, clumsily "ceremonious" and unable to explain what he wants from her (229). This discomfort can be interpreted as an instance of the anomie, the rootlessness which we noticed earlier. Ransom then becomes increasingly aware of Verena's "affable" smile in the face of his discomfort, and this results in a second, more extended pastoral figure: " . . . the listening smile, innocent as it was in the Arcadian manner of Mockery, seemed to accuse him of not having the courage of his inclinations" (229). Although not precisely aware of the fact, Ransom thus defines himself as an inhibited modern man wishing that his behavior were less subject to complication and inhibitions. In his fantasy, Verena (an "Arcadian") mocks him for that awkwardness. Several moments later James makes it clear that Verena has utterly "startled and confounded her visitor" with her naturalness (230). A third pastoral suggestion then occurs to Ransom, who receives a nostalgic echo of the "golden age" from Verena's conversation: "She added in her gay, friendly trustful tone—the tone of facile intercourse, the tone in which happy, flower-crowned maidens may have talked to sunburnt young men in the golden age" (230). Although James employs an extended pastoral metaphor in this scene to reveal his character's feelings of anomie, Ransom's fantasy on the golden age becomes oddly compelling. Ransom can be seen straining towards a more imaginative vision of life than what his own world offered. And so, in spite of his reservations, can James.

James does not greatly extend that vision of a pastoral time when "flower-crowned maidens . . . talked to sunburnt young men in the golden age." As the ambiguous tone suggests with reference to Ransom's pastoral fantasy, the vision is "facile" because modern conditions of life no longer jibe with it. Ransom is not permitted to speculate further on the golden age, although the novelist does. At the end of the novel, Ransom's hasty flight with Verena during a pseudo-Virgilian storm scene at the Music Hall, where even the guard at the dressing room door appears exaggerated, like some pastoral "butting animal" (448), merely indicates James's melancholy sense of the disruption of modern life. Ransom and Verena pass through the confused streams of people in the "outer labyrinth" of the Music Hall (463)—and in that image we recall their earlier passage through the slums of Cambridge, "a sightless, soundless, interspersed, embryonic region" (240)—to step out onto the street, bound nowhere very definite. The classical vision which we have been tracing through The Bostonians does not lead, finally, to a new urban mythology, but it does show that one of James's major concerns was the effort to come to grips imaginatively with the difficult, anomic facts of contemporary American urban life.

¹ See the following: Walter Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," in Illuminations, Hannah Arendt, editor, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, 1968), 157-202; Donald Fanger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism: A Study of Dostoevsky in Relation to Balzac, Dickens, and Gogol (Cambridge, Mass., 1965); John Fraser, "Photography and the City," Yale Review, LIX, 228-241; Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (New York, 1964); David R. Weimer, The City as Metaphor (New York, 1966).

² Daniel Lerner and Oscar Cargill, "Henry James at the Grecian Urn," PMLA, LXVI, 316-331.

³ Peter Buitenhuis, The Grasping Imagination (Toronto, 1970), 89-102.

⁴ J. A. Ward, The Search for Form: Studies in the Structure of James's Fiction (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1967), 138-140.

⁵ Henry James, The American Scene, Leon Edel, editor (Bloomington, 1968), 14.

⁶ Maxwell Geismar, Henry James and the Jacobites (Boston, 1963), 61-63.

⁷ Irving Howe, editor, The Bostonians (New York, 1956), xxvi.

⁸ Henry James, The Bostonians, Irving Howe, editor (New York, 1956), 130. Later quotations will refer to this edition.

⁹ Quoted in Marx, The Machine in the Garden, 240.