Review of the Bostonians It might be supposed, at first glance, that Mr. James in The Bostonians was not going to let us off, but intended to drag us with him into the labyrinth of the woman question. Nothing could be more unjust. Mr. James, with the quick instinct of an artist, saw his opportunity in the strange contrasts presented by a phase of Boston life which is usually taken too seriously for purposes of fiction. We do not remember any more striking illustration of Mr. James's general self-expatriation. He comes back, as it were, to scenes once familiar to him, bringing with him habits of thought and observation which make him seize upon just those features of life which would arrest the attention of an Englishman or a Frenchman. The subtle distinctions between the Laphams and Correys are nothing to him, but he is caught by the queer variety of humanitarianism which with many people outside Boston is the peculiar attribute of that much suffering city. He remembers, we will suppose, the older form, the abolition sentiment which prevailed in his youth, and now is curious about the later development, which he takes to be a medley of women's rights, spiritualism, inspirationism, and the mind cure. He notices a
disposition on the part of what a clever wit called Boston Proper to break away from its orbit and get entangled in this nebulous mass, and so he takes for his main figure a woman who is young and old by turns, according to the need of the novelist, a Bostonian of the straighter sect, who has yet, by the very force of her inherited rigidity of conscience, martyred herself, and cast in her lot with a set of reformers who are much the worse for wear. Olive Chancellor's high-bred disdain of her seedy associates is mingled with lofty devotion to the cause which they misrepresent, and the composition in character is extremely truthful and skillfully shown. What renders it even more fine as a personal portrait is the admixture of passionate, womanly appropriation of the girl whom she looks upon as the young priestess of the new church of womanhood; and the manner in which the woman is always getting the better of the doctrinaire strikes us as showing more completely than anything else in the book how thoroughly Mr. James has possessed himself of this character. The second lady of this drama is Verena Tarrant, who was constructed for the purposes of the story, and is, we may say, a
purely imaginary being. Mr. James may have had an indefinite image of the Priscilla of Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance floating in his mind when he built this impossible Verena. Impossible, we say, because, while Hawthorne manages to invest Priscilla with a delicacy of nature in spite of her surroundings, Mr. James, in his analysis of Verena, makes her refined, beautiful, spiritual in her power, and in a hundred ways, when he is not analyzing her, succeeds in betraying a cheap imitation of spiritual beauty. That Olive Chancellor, with a cataract over her inner eye, should fail to perceive the innate vulgarity of the girl is not surprising, but it is too much to ask of us that we should make Basil Ransom stone blind also. Basil Ransom, however, is in certain ways equally remote from the life which he is supposed to represent. It was a clever notion to bring the antipathetic element from the South, and in a few features this hero of the story has a little likeness to an actual Mississippian; but we cannot resist the conviction that Mr. James has never been in Mississippi, as the phrase goes, and trusts to luck that his readers have not been there either. We have not much
quarrel with him on this ground, however. Perhaps we ought to be thankful, since an intimacy with Ransom's native surroundings might have produced another book of the story, in which the hero should have been built up as patiently and minutely as was the case with The Bostonians themselves. Suffice it to say that the fact of an extreme Southern birth and breeding count for a great deal in orienting this important character. The character, however, on which Mr. James has plainly expended the most careful and, we are tempted to say, loving descriptive art is that of Miss Birdseye. At first one fears that the author does not appreciate her, but one ends by seeing that Mr. James knew the pathetic nobility of the figure, and admired it, even while he was apparently amusing himself and his readers. It is not art alone that can do this,--something of personal tenderness must go into the process; and this character is the one redeeming feature of the book, if one is considering the humane aspects. The other persons are either ignoble, like the Tarrants and Mrs. Luna, or they are repellent for other reasons; but Miss Birdseye one falls in love with, quite to the exclusion of the proper heroine.
Mr. James himself is, we fear, somewhat contaminated by the people whom he has been associating with in this study. His book begins, as we have said, with a remarkable piece of writing, but by and by he falls into a manner which could only have been caught from the Tarrants. His own manner has a trick of being almost too familiar, with its elisions and its easy-going phrases; but his constant resort to the initial well in conversation, and his habit of reporting the mind as well as the conversation of his baser characters in a sort of third personal evasion of elegance, add to the general effect of slouchiness which much of the book produces.