ROMOLAAND VICTORIAN LIBERALISM

Abstract

In his 1867 review of two recenthistorical novels, Henry James worried that, barring “a second Walter Scott,” no modern mind could synthesize the increasingly scientific discipline of history and the imagination of fiction. “[S]tory-tellers are, for the most part, an illogical, loose-thinking, ill-informed race” (280), James teased, while the new historian – he refers to “writers of a purely scientific turn of mind” such as “Niebuhr and Mommsen, Gizot and Buckle” (278) – “works in the dark, with a contracted forehead and downcast eyes, on his hands and knees, as men work in coal-mines” (279). James's anxious jocularity does little to disguise his interest in (and intimidation before) the ascetic historian, particularly that new professional's willingness to “say sternly to his fancy: So far thou shalt go, and no further.” Why, James subsequently wondered, should the novelist “not [also] imprison his imagination, for the time, in a circle of incidents from which there is no arbitrary issue, and apply his ingenuity to the study of a problem to which there is but a single solution” (279)?