Henry James's disposition of withheld involvement was frequently felt by his critics to be at odds with the development of a proudly committed, nativist American literary culture. An anonymous writer in the New York Herald in 1904 lamented the fact that American fiction had remained unchanged since the Gilded Age of the 1890s; only ‘from the dilettante point of view’ could James's The Golden Bowl and William Dean Howells's The Son of Royal Langbrith be classed as ‘the finest’ writing of that year. Many current tendencies, including Theodore Roosevelt's election to the presidency, suggested that Americans endorsed the ‘strenuous life’ which its literature chose to ignore: ‘our novelists remain untouched by the forces … seething around them’. In preference to the ‘trivial details’ and ‘dainty ineffectualities’ of writers like James and Howells, the reviewer proposed Kipling, Hardy, Conan Doyle and Rider Haggard as more virile antidotes. Although British, these were authors felt to be more expressive of ‘the mental struggles of the age’ than any American equivalent. An earlier critic of James, the Unitarian historian George Willis Cooke, identified the differences in contemporary writing with similarly gendered nuances, although his nomination for literary greatness was quite different. In ‘Emerson's View of Nationality’, one of the lectures given at the Concord School of Philosophy in 1883 (William James also lectured there that year), Cooke rhapsodised on the Emersonian themes of American exceptionalism: ‘The true America is in the soul that is free, intelligent, and aspiring.