New York After Paris

W[illiam] C[rary] Brownell (1851–1928) was a prominent American literary essayist who also served for more than four decades as an editor at Scribners, where he offered significant support and guidance to Edith Wharton during the initial stages of her career. Born in New York, in his early childhood he moved with his family to Buffalo, and after his mother’s death was raised by her parents in Rhode Island. He was admitted to Amherst College at the age of sixteen, and following his graduation in 1871 went to work at the New York World—first as a reporter, then as city editor. At the end of that decade, he began contributing articles on literature to the Nation, many of them concerned with important English-language authors of the nineteenth century. He was married in 1878 to Virginia Shields Swinburne, and the couple spent the next half-dozen years traveling abroad, living for the most part in Paris. When they returned to the United States in 1884, Brownell took a job at the Philadelphia Press, where he remained until he began his long association with Scribners in 1888.

Made up of a series of reflections on his experience of French culture, his first book, French Traits, was published the following year, and a further inquiry along these lines, French Art: Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture, appeared three years later. Brownell is probably now best known as the author of American Prose Masters, a 1909 study of the writings of Cooper, Hawthorne, Emerson, Poe, Lowell, and Henry James, which was reprinted by Harvard University Press in the early 1960s; this study had been preceded in 1901 by a companion volume, Victorian Prose Masters, concerning Thackeray, Carlyle, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, Ruskin, and George Meredith. Judged by Edith Wharton to be “the most discerning literary critic of our day,” in his later years Brownell produced four additional works: Criticism (1914), Standards (1917), The Genius of Style (1924), and Democratic Distinction in America, which came out in 1927, a year before his death.

The pages that follow, concerned with Brownell’s immediate impressions of America after his return from an extended sojourn in Europe, are taken from Chapter X of French Traits: An Essay in Comparative Criticism, published in New York by Scribners in 1889 and reprinted in 1896 by the Chautauqua-Century Press.

—SD

No American, not a commercial or otherwise hardened traveller, can have a soul so dead as to be incapable of emotion when, on his return from a long trip abroad, he catches sight of the low-lying and insignificant Long Island coast. One’s excitement begins, indeed, with the pilot-boat. The pilot-boat is the first concrete symbol of those native and normal relations with one’s fellow-men, which one has so long observed in infinitely varied manifestation abroad, but always as a spectator and a stranger, and which one is now on the eve of sharing himself. . . .

We fancy the old-fashioned, and imagine ours to be the most cosmopolitan, the least prejudiced temperament in the world. It is reasonable that it should be. The extreme sensitiveness noticed in us by all foreign observers during the ante-bellum epoch, and ascribed by Tocqueville to our self-distrust, is naturally inconsistent with our position and circumstances to-day. A population greater than that of any of the great nations, isolated by the most enviable geographical felicity in the world from the narrowing influences of international jealousy apparent to every American who travels in Europe, is increasingly less concerned at criticism than a struggling provincial republic of half its size. . . . But the happening of any one of a dozen things unexpectedly betrays that all this cosmopolitanism is in great measure, and so far as sentiment is concerned, a veneer and a disguise. Such a happening is the very change from blue water to gray that announces to the returning American the nearness of that country which he sometimes thinks he prizes more for what it stands for than for itself. It is not, he then feels with a sudden flood of emotion, that...