cast amid conditions that are the least calculated to win him back again. . . . "The generation between 1865 and 1894," as Henry Adams remarks, "was already mortgaged, and no one knew it better than the generation itself." . . . Henry James knows it, knows it in advance: has he failed to catch the signs of the times, to foresee the chaos of the new age, the decline of the social life of his countrymen, the drop of the American barometer? Far from reassuring is the spectacle that lies before him. The age of faith has come to an end; the age of business has begun.
One pictures Henry James, then, peering anxiously into the future, terrified by countless omens of a wrath to come. He saw himself confronted with a population given over comprehensively to what Mr Rockefeller was to describe as sawing wood; for such as himself, he must have felt, there was as little room in his own country as there was for Alice at the Mad Hatter's table. "She found her chief happiness," our author says of the repatriated American baroness in The Europeans, "in the sense of exerting a certain power and making a certain impression; and now she felt the annoyance of a rather wearied swimmer who, on nearing shore, to land, finds a smooth straight wall of rock where she had counted upon a clean firm beach. Her power, in the American air, seemed to have lost its prehensile attributes; the smooth wall of rock was insurmountable." So it seemed to James, no doubt; he had no single point of contact with what a contemporary was to describe as this new "bankers' Olympus." Nor was Boston capable of arousing his affection. Those years in the New England capital were marked, to quote Henry Adams again, by "a steady decline of literary and artistic intensity. . . . Society no longer seemed sincerely to believe in itself or anything else." We have it all, or much of it, in The Bostonians, that admirable novel which deserves its generic title; we have there a most memorable image of the aftermath of the heroic age, the ebb-tide of all those humanitarian impulses which, at an exceptional hour and at the hands of exceptional men, had assumed such elevated if rather fantastic forms, and had now lost themselves in fatuity and petrifaction. To James, who had no hereditary associations with it, whose mind reverberated with the echoes of the great world, and who saw it now in its hour of Götterdämmerung, Boston was nothing if not repellent: he expressed the feeling of a lifetime when he placed in the mouth of
