Exiles at Home and Abroad: Henry Adams and Henry James
1975; University of Western Ontario Libraries; Volume: 1; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/esc.1975.0005
ISSN1913-4835
Autores Tópico(s)American and British Literature Analysis
ResumoEX ILES A T H O M E AN D A B R O A D : H E N R Y A D A M S A N D H E N R Y JA M E S PETER BUITENHUIS McGill University I~ Ieirs and heiresses of all the ages, we in North America are also all exiles. In one way or another, to one generation or another, we have all left what Hawthorne called nostalgically "Our Old Home," and come to live in this troubled land. This is of course a fact that varying consciousnesses feel all the way from not at all to an intensity almost tragic. Generally speaking, the more intense the mind - and this was particularly true in the nineteenth century - the more intense the sense of exile, and the more strenuous the attempt to regain that lost home. This is perhaps only another way of stating a fact not about the North American mind alone, but the western mind in general; its most archetypal myth is of the lost Eden, which is closely followed by that of the hope of paradise regained. But, certainly, in this continent, the myth is lent a sharper poignance by the real conditions both of immigration and of wilderness (either actual or cultural), and ironically underscored by the historic fact that it was here that the promise was to be fulfilled, the paradise gained. That apocalypse has always been disconfirmed, though, as Frank Kermode has said, without being discred ited. The question of exile has a particular poignancy for Henry Adams and Henry James and their generation, mostly because they were so conscious, perhaps the most conscious that America has yet shown. For them both, exile was at least as much a state of mind as it was a place of residence. They tended, that Bostonian - New York - old family group, to think alike. Henry Adams expressed it to James in a letter of sympathy after the death of William James in 1910: "We all began together, and our lives have made more or less of a unity, which is, as far as I can see, about the only unity that American society in our time had to show."1 A rich book could be written about the relationship of these two men. All I intend to do here, however, is indicate a few of the ways in which their exile was experienced in life and expressed in art. First it has to be said that if there were a unity in this generation, or between these two men, it was unity in diversity. Nothing could be more different than their personalities and their habits. From his earliest letters, Adams expresses a self-deprecating pessimism about his talents and his ambitions, while James shows a quiet but confident optimism English Studies in Canada, 1 , 1 (spring 1975) about both. Adams was immersed throughout his life in public and interna tional affairs; James was ever the private person. Adams was above all an historian; James was, in Conrad's fine phrase, "the historian of fine consci ences." To Adams history was a science, and became increasingly in his life a predictive one, so much so that in October 1916, basing his estimate on figures going back to 1863, he predicted that the World War would end by reducing "Germany to absolute extinction" in August 19 18 .2 James regarded the march of history "very much as a man placed astride of a locomotive, without knowledge or help, would regard the progress of that vehicle."3 Beneath these differences, however, lay a profound unity of thoughtpatterns based on what I can only label morality. Above all, both men were concerned with the morality of power, Adams on a historical and political level, James on a social and personal one. This concern gave rise to the particular pattern of exile which each followed. I suppose that the most crucial passage in The Education of Henry Adams is the one in which the Irish gardener remarks to the child at the Edenic Quincy, " 'You'll be thinlan' you'll be President too!' The casualty of the remark," Adams goes on to say, "made so...
Referência(s)