Henry Adams and Henry James invite obvious comparisons. Exact contemporaries on the American literary scene, both were beguiled by European culture, both were distressed by American ills. Philosophically and aesthetically they also had much in common. But these two writers arrived at logically opposite extremes in struggling with the historical, political, economic, and social problems of their age. Adams came to view the basic impulse toward unity as the force that could give coherence to the multiplicity of experience; he viewed philosophies of history as aesthetic systems that made it possible to organize the incoherence of historical and natural events. James, on the other hand, felt that art and history were inextricably related, and that history could be viewed in terms of the differing interpretations man designs to relate himself to the social or natural world.
ATTRIBUTION:
John Carlos Rowe (b. 1945), U.S. educator, critic. Henry Adams and Henry James, preface, Cornell University Press (1976).
