Lifting the Yoke of the Genteel: Henry James, George Santayana, and Howard Sturgis

Abstract William and Henry James “were as tightly swaddled in the genteel tradition as any infant geniuses could be, for they were born in ... a Swedenborgian household. Yet they burst those bands almost entirely. The ways in which the two brothers freed themselves, however, are interestingly different.” George Santayana’s famous statement in his seminal essay of 1911 points to one of this chapter’s concerns: the impact of the late Victorian genteel “yoke” of propriety and repression upon the two eldest James brothers. They were raised in a household that seemed to embody both a sterile transcendental idealism and an energetic flouting of bourgeois conventions. This dual heritage is only one of several paradoxes that characterize William and Henry’s relation to the genteel tradition. Thus, the “almost” in Santayana’s claim regarding their bursting of genteel bands should remind us that compromise inheres in their revolt. The James brothers, like Santayana, were by birth or position part of the bourgeois aristocracy and enjoyed its privileges. They “sometimes sipped the rim of the plutocratic cup,” to borrow Santayana’s description of his own life (Persons 541).