Abstract
This story of cosmopolitanism in Boston begins with Charles Eliot Norton. Although Norton was not the first intellectual from Boston to interest himself in promoting the study of the art and traditions of the Old World, his success in this field was phenomenal. Most notably, he inaugurated the study of art history in America while teaching as Lecturer on the History of the Fine Arts as Connected with Literature at Harvard University from 1874 until 1898. His writings and lectures made him a long-time favorite of Harvard students, respected by many of his colleagues, and admired by most educated Americans of his day. As Norton’s most recent biographer James Turner points out, “knowing of Norton was in fact a touchstone of whether one was well educated” in the late nineteenth century.1
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Notes
James Turner, The Liberal Education of Charles Eliot Norton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), xiii.
Ibid., 387.
Henry James, “An American Art-Scholar: Charles Eliot Norton,” in Notes on Novelists—With Some Other Notes (New York: Biblo and Tannen, 1969), 421.
William to Henry James, January 24, 1909, in Henry James, ed., The Letters of William James, 2 vols. (Boston: Atlantic Monthly, 1920), 2: 377.
Kermit Vanderbilt, Charles Eliot Norton: Apostle of Culture in a Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1959), 85.
For Norton’s involvement with The Nation, see Turner, Norton, 199–200.
Norton to Edwin Lawrence Godkin, July 28, 1869, in Edwin Lawrence Godkin Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University; quoted in Turner, Norton, 234.
Ibid., 241.
Norton, journal entry of November 16, 1872, in Sara Norton and Mark De Wolfe, ed., Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, with Biographical Comment by his Daughter Sara Norton and M.A. De Wolfe Howe, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1913), 1: 429.
James Turner, “Charles Eliot Norton,” in A Companion to American Thought (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995), 499.
Norton, journal entry of May 15, 1873, in Norton and De Wolfe, Letters, 1: 503.
Ibid., 1: 510.
Ibid.
Ibid., 1: 507.
Ibid., 1: 504.
Ibid., 1: 511.
Six months later, in a letter to Thomas Carlyle, Norton wrote that Emerson “reflects himself in the world;—and if men were but all Emersons one might share his confidence!” Norton to Thomas Carlyle, December 22, 1873, in Norton and De Wolfe, Letters, 2: 26.
Norton, journal entry of May 1873, in ibid., 1: 503.
Norton to Thomas Carlyle, May 6, 1875, in ibid., 2: 51. In Norton’s journal of the voyage on the Olympus one can find a list of quotations from Emerson that were grouped together, it seems, so that Norton could record his own shock at hearing them. See ibid., 1: 505.
Charles Eliot Norton to G. P. Marsh, August 15 and November 9, 1861, University of Vermont Library; quoted in Turner, Norton, 170.
Shortly before the beginning of the Civil War, Norton assumed warrior-like rhetoric by dismissing “timid counsels,” and “compromises & concessions.” Norton to Aubrey de Vere, February 24, 1861, in Charles Eliot Norton papers; quoted in Turner, Norton, 166.
Norton to G. P. Marsh, May 9, 1863, University of Vermont Library; quoted in ibid., 181.
Charles Eliot Norton, “American Political Ideals,” North American Review, October 1865, 551; quoted in James Turner, The Liberal Education of Charles Eliot Norton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 202.
Ibid., 1: 506.
Norton to Edwin Lawrence Godkin, July 28, 1869, Edwin Lawrence Godkin papers, Houghton Library; quoted in Turner, Liberal Education, 234.
Norton, journal entry of May 1873, in Norton and De Wolfe, Letters, 1: 506–7.
Walt Whitman, “Democratic Vistas,” in Floyd Stovall, ed., Walt Whitman: Prose Works, 2 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1966), 2: 371.
Norton, journal entry of May 1873, in Norton and De Wolfe, Letters, 1: 504.
Norton to Thomas Carlyle, November 16, 1873, in ibid., 2: 18.
See Robert Burkholder, “Emerson, Kneeland, and the Divinity School Address,” American Literature 58 (1986), 9.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” in Selected Essays (New York: Penguin Classics, 1985), 102.
In a letter written to Thomas Carlyle in 1880, Norton describes his hopes for an “American School at Athens where, before long, our young students may go to drink deeper from the classic fountains than they can at home.” Norton and De Wolfe, Letters, 2: 112–13.
Norton, journal entry of May 1873, in ibid., 1: 505.
Norton to Edward Lee-Childe, December 20, 1873 in ibid., 2: 25.
Charles Eliot Norton, Historical Studies of Church Building in the Middle Ages—Venice, Siena, Florence (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1902).
Ibid., 29.
According to Norton, beginning around 1350 the love of wealth began to overpower the love of community in Venice. See ibid., 62.
Ibid., 29. Later we see that John La Farge also described the history of art as the common vocabulary from which artists could draw.
Ibid., 4, 43.
Ibid., 43–44.
Ibid., 42.
Ibid., 39.
Matthew Arnold, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” in Walther E. Houghton and G. Robert Stange, eds., Victorian Poetry and Poetics, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), 522, 527.
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© 2008 Mark Rennella
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Rennella, M. (2008). Charles Eliot Norton and the Dawning of Cosmopolitanism in Boston. In: The Boston Cosmopolitans. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230611214_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230611214_3
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