# The Dial (Third Series)/Volume 75/Henry James: The American Scene

HENRY JAMES: THE AMERICAN SCENE
BY VAN WYCK BROOKS
IN the last story that he published, The Jolly Corner, James presents an expatriate like himself, Spencer Brydon, who, returning to New York after an absence of a quarter of a century, finds himself obsessed with thoughts of what his destiny might have been if he had remained in America. He still owns the old house on lower Fifth Avenue, the "jolly corner" in which he had passed his childhood: it is empty and deserted and full of dusty memories, and Brydon falls into the habit of passing his nights there, roaming through the great blank chambers and evoking the past. "It's only a question," he says to a friend, "of what fantastic, yet perfectly possible, development of my own nature I may not have missed. It comes over me that I had then a strange alter ego deep down somewhere within me as the full-blown flower is in the small tight bud, and that I just took the course, just transferred him to the climate, that blighted him at once and forever." And thereupon he becomes convinced that the old house is still haunted by the self who stayed at home. Who is he, what is he, what has he become, that abandoned, that American self? Brydon, invaded by the illusion, stalks the ghost; and at last, one night, in the first glimmering of the dawn, he becomes aware that it has actually taken form. Prowling about the house, he has himself opened a certain door; he returns to the room and finds it closed. Shall he open it? It comes over him that the other Brydon does not wish to be seen. He hesitates; he masters his curiosity; he turns away; he has decided not to pursue the reluctant spirit. He descends the stairs; then he perceives that the street door stands open. The figure is before him, against the wall, with its hands over its face. Brydon starts forward; the hands drop; it is a face of horror. And Brydon faints and falls upon the floor.
It is impossible to mistake the personal bearing of this story, impossible to question the implication of that face of horror which presents itself to Brydon. Who can doubt that it expresses a conviction which James himself had never outlived, a conviction that, ​but for the grace of Europe, his life too would have ended in some monstrous fiasco? His return to America at seventeen, after his first long visit to the Old World, had signified, to his aching fancy, as he tells us, "premature abdication, sacrifice and, in one dreadful word, failure." How did he feel in his old age? "When I think," he wrote to Mrs William James in 1913, "when I think of how little Boston and Cambridge were of old ever my affair, or anything but an accident, for me, of the parental life there to which I occasionally and painfully and losingly sacrificed, I have a superstitious terror of seeing them at the end of time again stretch out strange inevitable tentacles to draw me back and destroy me." A superstitious terror! Strange inevitable tentacles! James was a man of seventy when he wrote that.
To the end of his life, then, and however disenchanting his experience of Europe may have been, America, to James, signified failure and destruction. It was the dark country, the sinister country, where the earth was a quicksand, where amiable uncles ended in disaster, where men were turned into machines, where genius was subject to all sorts of inscrutable catastrophes. He had taken to heart numberless examples that seemed to have been placed, as if to warn him, directly in his path. There was his father, whose mind he had never understood, but whose brilliant capacity was no more obvious than the fact that somehow he had mysteriously failed to effectuate himself. There was William Page, the painter, the friend of the family, whose extraordinary pictures were already turning black and vanishing from their canvases owing to "some fallacy as to pigments, some perversity as to basis, too fondly, too blindly entertained," as James was to remark later, a tragic story of waste, of "unlighted freedom of experiment possible only (for it comes back to that) in provincial conditions." There was Washington Allston, whose talent had grown thinner and vaguer every day in the bleak atmosphere of Cambridgeport: long and long James had looked at that last unfinished, laboured canvas of his in the Boston Athenaeum, drinking in the lesson that he was constrained to draw from it. The American artist in the American air was a doomed man: pitfalls surrounded him on every side. Was not even Hawthorne a case in point, Hawthorne who had himself attributed the paucity of his productions to a "total lack of sympathy at the age when his mind would naturally have been most ​effervescent"? What might not Hawthorne have become if he had sprung from another soil! . . . Thus Henry James read his own fears into the world that surrounded him. Was there any occasion for these fears, any justification in the facts of the case itself? It suffices to say that he felt them: the instances to which I have referred, and which are all to be found in his writings, show us how constantly his mind was occupied with this question. We remember how the narrator in The Aspern Papers marvels that Jeffrey Aspern, that American Shelley of the previous age, had "found means to live and write like one of the first; to be free and general and not at all afraid; to feel, understand and express everything." We remember the moral that James tells us he had drawn from Hawthorne's case before his first naïve opinion of Hawthorne had been subjected to the test of his friend H. B. Brewster's "cosmopolitan culture," the moral "that an American could be an artist, one of the finest, without 'going outside' about it." Clearly, Hawthorne to James' mind was the exception that proved the rule, the rule that, without "going outside," an American could not be an artist at all, and even Hawthorne ceased to be an entirely convincing exception. As for Poe, Thoreau, Whitman, whose poems he was so soon to read, they could never have dispelled his apprehensions. Of Poe he said, that "to take him with more than a certain degree of seriousness is to lack seriousness oneself"; and of Thoreau, that "he is worse than provincial, he is parochial." And he accused Whitman of "discharging the undigested contents of his blotting-book into the lap of the public." It might be said of these estimates that they reveal simply a series of legitimate personal antipathies, though I think they suggest more than a little of that provincial humility, that inability to believe that any good thing could come out of the American Nazareth, which he exhibited when he found his opinion of Hawthorne so sadly reduced at the approach of a Europeanized friend. My present point, however, is that, feeling as he did about the greatest of his predecessors, he could find neither in the world about him nor in the history and traditions of that world anything to reassure him, anything to counterbalance the fears, the dread, with which from the first he had looked out upon it. The "striking evidence" of his childhood that "scarce aught but disaster could, in that so unformed and unseasoned society, overtake young men who were in the least ex​posed" was confirmed for him now in the artistic as well as in the general human sphere: "exposure," he was evidently convinced, signified disaster as much for the American artist as for the American young man. He could not, in the phrase of one of his contemporaries, keep himself too carefully in cotton.
Such were the prepossessions with which, at the outset of his career, Henry James appears to have regarded the American scene. Was he not, for comprehensible reasons, the prey of that "fear of life" to which Flaubert also confessed himself a victim? Undoubtedly; and to this may be traced perhaps the deep longing for security, privacy, ceremony that was to mark his later years. But to return from the ultimate to the immediate, what a light this fact seems to throw upon the great "renunciation" with which his career opened! In the Notes of a Son and Brother he describes a certain moment when, as he was sailing back to Newport one evening after a visit to a camp of wounded soldiers at Portsmouth Grove, a sudden "realization" had come to him, a "strange rapture" of realization, that one might be "no less exaltedly than wastefully engaged in the common fact of endurance." He means that the passive rôle, the rôle of the spectator of life, had suddenly been endowed in his eyes with a certain high legitimacy: he who had been prevented by an accident from taking part in the Civil War had "worked out," as Miss Rebecca West puts it, "a scheme of existence . . . in which the one who stood aside and felt rather than acted acquired thereby a mystic value, a spiritual supremacy, which—but this was perhaps a later development of the theory—would be rubbed off by participation in action." In this faith, as we know, James was to live ever after. But would he have embraced it with such a "strange rapture" if, for him, life, action, passion had not been invested with singular terrors?
It is with some such question as this in our minds that we see him emerging from the New England of the 'sixties. His family had left Newport; they had settled in Cambridge. Not till he was twenty-seven was Henry James to return to Europe for a second visit. Meanwhile, upon what sort of scene was he destined to look out? In what light does he himself appear to us? What thoughts filled his mind? We seem to see a grave and somewhat priestlike figure, sedate and watchful, guarded in his movements, slow and hesitating in speech. He has not yet acquired that look of an ​Elizabethan sea-captain that is to accompany the black, silky beard of his early London days; he suggests rather some Hellenized Roman of the third century, though there are times when his personality is enveloped in a kind of shadow. He is reserved and yet, one would say, eager for experience, affectionate and suspicious, precise and slightly prosaic, but full of the keenest sort of aesthetic subtleties. His talk, enchanting in the presence of a single companion, bristles with intense little preferences and sharp little exclusions. His personal pride appears to be almost morbidly over-developed. Of what is he thinking? He has not been able to forget the humiliation of those first hours of the war, his accident, his invalidism. He remembers his childhood, the failure that he had been in the eyes of his tutors, his inability either to grasp the rudiments of his studies or to play with other boys. He had scarcely known a time in those days when he would not have been willing to exchange his lot for that of somebody else, with the assured certainty of gaining by the bargain! He is determined to vindicate his existence, to write as man has never written before: had he not convinced himself, in the face of Mr Lincoln's call for volunteers, that this might be "at least a negative of combat, an organized, not a loose and empty one, something definitely and firmly parallel to action in the tented field"? He is infinitely curious about life; his sensibilities are clear and fresh. For the rest, he is circumspect and somewhat prim. Should an artist have passions? He believes that an examination of this question is always premature. Like Longmere, in Madame de Mauves, he has in his composition a lurking principle of asceticism to whose authority he has ever paid an unquestioning respect. Like Longueville, in Confidence, he is annoyed when he discovers that he has obeyed a force which he was unable to measure at the time; he has little taste for giving himself up and never does so without very soon wishing to take himself back. Like Roderick Hudson, in the latter's first phase, he has a tendency to regard all things in the light of his art, to hand over his impulses to his genius to be dealt with, to invest every gain of soul or sense in the enterprise of planned production. . . . Does he strike us as somewhat dry, cold, and frugal, this young man who yet nourishes in his heart an inordinate appetite for colour and form, for the picturesque and the romantic? . . . One thing may be said of him: if he has been estranged from life, his lot has been ​cast amid conditions that are the least calculated to win him back again. . . . "The generation between 1865 and 1894," as Henry Adams remarks, "was already mortgaged, and no one knew it better than the generation itself." . . . Henry James knows it, knows it in advance: has he failed to catch the signs of the times, to foresee the chaos of the new age, the decline of the social life of his countrymen, the drop of the American barometer? Far from reassuring is the spectacle that lies before him. The age of faith has come to an end; the age of business has begun.
One pictures Henry James, then, peering anxiously into the future, terrified by countless omens of a wrath to come. He saw himself confronted with a population given over comprehensively to what Mr Rockefeller was to describe as sawing wood; for such as himself, he must have felt, there was as little room in his own country as there was for Alice at the Mad Hatter's table. "She found her chief happiness," our author says of the repatriated American baroness in The Europeans, "in the sense of exerting a certain power and making a certain impression; and now she felt the annoyance of a rather wearied swimmer who, on nearing shore, to land, finds a smooth straight wall of rock where she had counted upon a clean firm beach. Her power, in the American air, seemed to have lost its prehensile attributes; the smooth wall of rock was insurmountable." So it seemed to James, no doubt; he had no single point of contact with what a contemporary was to describe as this new "bankers' Olympus." Nor was Boston capable of arousing his affection. Those years in the New England capital were marked, to quote Henry Adams again, by "a steady decline of literary and artistic intensity. . . . Society no longer seemed sincerely to believe in itself or anything else." We have it all, or much of it, in The Bostonians, that admirable novel which deserves its generic title; we have there a most memorable image of the aftermath of the heroic age, the ebb-tide of all those humanitarian impulses which, at an exceptional hour and at the hands of exceptional men, had assumed such elevated if rather fantastic forms, and had now lost themselves in fatuity and petrifaction. To James, who had no hereditary associations with it, whose mind reverberated with the echoes of the great world, and who saw it now in its hour of Götterdämmerung, Boston was nothing if not repellent: he expressed the feeling of a lifetime when he placed in the mouth of ​Christopher Newman the opinion that those who spoke ill of the United States should be carried home in irons and compelled to live in the neighbourhood of the Back Bay. "What it all came to saying," as he remarks in his life of W. W. Story, apropos of the latter's attempt to adjust himself to an earlier Boston, "was that, with an alienated mind, he found himself again steeped in a society both fundamentally and superficially bourgeois, the very type and model of such a society, presenting it in the most favourable, in the most admirable light; so that its very virtues irritated him, so that its ability to be strenuous without passion, its cultivation of its serenity, its presentation of a surface on which it would appear to him that the only ruffle was an occasionally acuter spasm of the moral sense, must have acted as a tacit reproach." And Story had "belonged"; and that had been Boston at its best!
Boston! And, beyond Boston, that great unendowed, unfurnished, unentertained, and unentertaining continent where one sniffed as it were the very earth of one's foundations! "I shall freeze after this sun," said Albrecht Dürer, as he turned homeward across the Alps from Italy. And where was James to turn for warmth, he whose every fibre longed for that other gracious world, that soft, harmonious, picturesque "Europe" of his imagination, that paradise of form, colour, style from which he had been ravished away and which had captured and retained, as in some delirious, some alas, too soon interrupted embrace, the virtue, the very principle of his desire, his fancy, his every instinct? Ah, that secret passionate ache, that rebellious craving of the unsatisfied senses! One felt like a traveller in the desert, deprived of water and subject to the terrible mirage, the torment of illusion, of the thirst-fever. One heard the plash of fountains, one saw the green gardens, the orchards, hundreds of miles away. Europe. And then this emptiness, this implacable emptiness: not a shadow, nothing but the glare of a common-place prosperity.. . . . There were moments, to be sure, when Boston seemed almost European. How one rejoiced in those quiet squares, in the ruddy glow of the old brick walls in the late October sunlight! And there was Norton's great brown study at Shady Hill. . . . But one seemed somehow to lose the feeling of one's identity, one seemed to breathe in a vacuum. There was so little spontaneity in the air; it was all so earnest, or so cold and restrained, or so complacent—wit itself in Boston seemed to be a ​function of complacency. And outside, in the streets, how shrill were the voices, how angular were the gestures, how deficient somehow in weight, volume, and resonance were the souls one discerned in these hurrying passers-by! . . . And there was the Cambridge horse-car, clattering along through the dust on its lazy everlasting way: one could sit there on a summer noon, utterly alone, jogging home to one's work-table, with a sense of being on the periphery of the universe, twenty thousand leagues from the nearest centre of energy. One stared through the dingy pane of the window at the bald, bare, bleak panorama that seemed to shuffle past: an unkempt field, and then a wooden cottage, and then another wooden cottage, a rough front yard, a little naked piazza, a foot- way overlaid with a strip of planks.
Was it all like this, was it all a void or a terror? He had received every encouragement, certainly; and yet he had never been really drawn out, as young men were drawn out—or weren't they?—in England, in France. People seemed somehow never to expect one to become, or even to want one to become, what one was determined to become. A portent, a veritable genius—that would have been so disconcerting in Boston! There was something a little indecent in the mere thought of such a thing: it appeared to be taken for granted that a bright young American ought not to make himself too conspicuous, ought not even to desire a destiny that deviated too far from the common lot. And then there were those prescriptions, those impalpable moulds that one was supposed to have accepted. There was Howells' repeated warning, for instance, against not "ending happily": one laboured always under the conviction that to terminate a fond aesthetic effort in felicity had to be as much one's obeyed law as to begin it and carry it on in the same rosy mood. And in any case—granting that one didn't, for one's life, for the very life of one's imagination, dare to penetrate too far beyond one’s own circle—how could one ever create a comédie humaine out of the world at one's disposal? It was utterly, fantastically impossible!
Years later, in London, Henry James told his friend E. S. Nadal that before deciding to live in Europe he had given his own country a "good trial." It was true; for the greater part of a decade he kept his eyes fixed upon the American scene, and even then for a number of years he seems not to have relinquished the idea of re​turning to it. "I know what I am about," he writes at thirty-five to William James, "and I have always my eyes on my native land." But there was something that came between him and the picture, something that is revealed in the fact that he endeavoured to find America in such places as Newport and Saratoga: a certain pattern that he had drawn from his reading had taken shape in his imagination, and he could look in the world about him only for the traces of that alien literary world. He could scarcely conceive indeed of an art of fiction that dispensed with the mise-en-scène of the writers he admired. Was this merely, was it purely, a matter of spontaneous taste? Is it not more accurate to say that a certain preconception had taken root at the very base of his literary consciousness? By whatever name we are to call the vision that filled his mind, he expressed it, in any case, in the following passage in his life of Hawthorne—a passage that explains better than anything else the inevitable rift between himself and his own country:
"It takes so many things, as Hawthorne must have felt later in life, when he made the acquaintance of the denser, richer, warmer European spectacle—it takes such an accumulation of history and custom, such a complexity of manners and types, to form a fund of suggestion for a novelist. . . . The negative side of the spectacle on which Hawthorne looked out, in his contemplative saunterings and reveries, might, indeed, with a little ingenuity, be made almost ludicrous; one might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left. No State, in the European sense of the word, and indeed barely a specific national name. No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages, nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches, nor great universities, nor public schools—no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class—nor Epsom nor Ascot! Some such list as that might be drawn up of the absent things of American life—especially in the American life of forty years ago, the effect of which, upon an English or a French ​imagination, would probably, as a general thing, be appalling. The natural remark, in the almost lurid light of such an indictment, would be that if these things are left out, everything is left out. The American knows that a good deal remains; what it is that remains—that is his secret, his joke, as one may say."
It could not have occurred to James in the 'seventies that most of the items he enumerates here are absent as much from the texture of Russian and Scandinavian as from that of American life, and that this was not to prevent the emergence in Russia and Scandinavia of a fiction entirely comparable with that of England and France. The evidence for such a deduction was still to come, at least for an American reader; but so much for the general law involved in this bill of the novelist's rights. Was Howells mistaken when, in his review of James' book, he remarked that after one had omitted all these paraphernalia one had "simply the whole of human life left"? Was there anything, anything but the limitations—the mental configuration, rather—of the individual himself, to make it impossible for an artist to shape in prose the material that Whitman, for example, had found so abundantly at hand? Or is there some truth in the theory that a given society must have arrived at a certain equilibrium and crystallized in certain more or less permanent forms before the novelist can effectively handle it? "Looking about for myself," James wrote in 1871, "I conclude that the face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But," he adds, "it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. . . . To write well and worthily of American things one needs even more than elsewhere to be a master." And that, at least, was undoubtedly true: would it not have required a Tolstoy, a Balzac, one of those veritable creators of societies, really to present the America of the generation that followed the Civil War—to present it with anything like the adequacy with which novelists of the second or the third rank had been able to present the organized societies of Europe? However this may be, James had taken his world and his scale of values from the fiction with which his mind was saturated. He was thus destined to make certain exactions of America which America could not fulfil.
For if it was a question of palaces, castles, thatched cottages, and ​ivied ruins, if it was a question of the "luxuries and splendours of life," of "ambassadors, ambassadorial compliments, Old World drawing-rooms, with duskily moulded ceilings," if it was a question of such things as these, of which, like the hero of Watch and Ward, James himself "liked to be reminded," then America was unprofitable indeed. There was the New York of the dancing-masters—a world of echoes. There was Boston society, but that was a "boy and girl institution," a "Sammy and Billy, a Sallie and Millie affair," as another caustic observer had just remarked, "very pleasant and jolly for young people, but, so far as the world and its ways were concerned, little more than a big village development." And between the two there was Mrs Howe, propounding, alas, apropos of the new-born son of her Newport neighbour, the Turkish minister Blaque Bey, the riddle, Can a baby a Bey be? "Mrs Howe was very gay," writes Colonel Higginson in his diary, "and sang her saucy song of 'O So-ci-e-ty,' which is so irreverent to Beacon Street that I wondered how the A's could remain in the field." Henry James, with his inner eye fixed upon the denser, richer, warmer European spectacle that filled his imagination, upon the palaces, the castles, et cetera, that had formed such a fund of suggestion for the novelists he revered—Henry James might easily have listened to that saucy song, and with what a sinking of the heart. Clearly, as he was to put it later, the apple of America was not to be negotiated by any such teeth as his.
Later on, after he had settled in London and could look back upon these years of indecision, he was to find that certain aspects of American life had left upon his mind indelible impressions. He was then to produce, in Washington Square and The Bostonians, the most brilliant pictures of the two cities in which he had lived: the New York that he had absorbed as a child and the Boston that he had observed in the heightened light of the war. He had known his America, he had understood it, far more deeply than he had ever supposed. But as long as he was in that world he could see it, as Don Quixote saw Spain, only in terms of the novels that possessed his imagination. As a boy, he had written a letter to an actress in Boston who had sent him in return a printed copy of her play, "addressed," as he says, "in a hand which assumed a romantic cast as soon as I had bethought myself of finding for it a happy precedent in Pendennis's Miss Fotheringay." He had never ceased to ​read into the incidents of his life, into the scenes that confronted him, associations with the novelized Europe from which he had drawn such "mystic strength": he had caught in the legend of his father's friendship with Edwin Forrest echoes of the diaries and memoirs of "the giftedly idle and the fashionably great, the Byrons, the Bulwers, the Pelhams, the Coningsbys"; he had seen in Miss Upham's boarding-house in Cambridge a translation in American terms of Balzac's Maison Vauquer; he had found in his cousin Robert Temple, newly returned from Europe, a character "in the sense," as he puts it, "in which 'people in books' were characters, and other people, roundabout us, were somehow not. . . . We owed him to Dickens or Thackeray, the creators of superior life to whom we were at that time always owing most." And as the years had gone by and the American scene had failed to stimulate his interest on its own account, he had continued to romanticize it in this way, re-creating it in the image of the pattern within his brain. Glance at his stories of this period. In Crawford's Consistency, Elizabeth is brought up "in the manner of an Italian princess of the Middle Ages," in a "high-hedged old garden" at Orange, New Jersey. In De Grey: A Romance, Mrs De Grey keeps a priest in her house to serve as her confessor. In Poor Richard, the young New England farmer is represented as kissing Gertrude's hand whenever he meets her, while she, a homespun Yankee by every implication of her being, maintains in her rustic parlour the ritual of an English country-house. In Eugene Pickering, the story turns upon the fact that a marriage had been arranged when Eugene was a boy between himself and the daughter of one of his father's friends. "I have an especial fondness for going into churches on week-days," says Miss Guest, in Guest's Confession. "One does it in Europe, you know; and it reminds me of Europe." Virtually all these early stories of James' are the fruit of a similar nostalgia, a similar effort to discover in the American world the traces of a Europe either of memory or of fantasy: their creator was as much out of key with the scene upon which his eyes rested as Roger Lawrence, in Watch and Ward, standing on the piazza of his house and surveying the bursting spring through an opera-glass. As for the American spectacle in and of itself, he could make nothing of it. "I believe I should be a good patriot," says Miss Condit, in The Impressions of a Cousin, "if I could sketch my native town. ​But I can't make a picture of the brown-stone stoops in the Fifth Avenue, or the platform of the elevated railway in the Sixth. . . . I can sketch the palazzo and can do nothing with the uptown residence." And this was precisely the situation of Henry James.
In his old age, when he returned to America, he commented on "the thinness, making too much for transparency, for the effect of paucity, still inherent in American groupings; a law under which the attempt to subject them to portraiture, to see them as 'composing,' resembles the attempt to play whist with an imperfect pack of cards." Well he remembered that sensation of helplessness, of impotence, as of those creatures of the deep sea who change colour and shrink when they are astray in fresh water. He had felt so baffled, so powerless in this environment that refused to conform to the shapes within his brain; he had not been able to conquer his world, and every day it had seemed to him more menacing. "Long would it take," he says in his reminiscences, "to tell why [New England] figured as a danger, and why that impression was during the several following years much more to gain than to lose intensity." But we can restore perhaps a few filaments of the mood that possessed him. He would lose, if he remained, the wondrous web of images that shimmered in his mind! He would forget the thoughts that he had laid away, nuts or winter apples, in the dim chambers of his consciousness! He would sink into a dull conformity with the cautious, conventional, commonplace routine literary Boston. At fifty, at sixty . . . he could see himself rather stout, a little shabby, his arm laden with parcels, waiting at the corner of Boylston Street for the Cambridge horse-car, his mind running on a new serial, another "old New England story" for the Atlantic. . . . Shades of Balzac and the world forgone! The world, alas, the great, the dangerous, the delightful world!
The recurring theme of James' first period as a novelist was to be that "hatred of tyranny" of which Mr Ezra Pound speaks, that defence of "human liberty, personal liberty, the rights of the individual against all sorts of intangible bondage." His novels, Miss Bosanquet observes, are "a sustained and passionate plea for the fullest freedom of the individual development that he saw continually imperilled by barbarian stupidity." Who that recalls The Bostonians, that picture of a world which seems to consist of noth​ing but hands, manipulating, repressing, reproving, pushing, pulling, exploiting hands, can doubt that, in all this, James was inspired by the sacred terror of his own individuality? The characters in his early novels are not as a rule quite sure of what they want in Europe, though they all exist for the sake of getting there. What they are sure of is that they want to escape from America—and they never do quite escape: the "strange inevitable tentacles" that James himself still felt as a man of seventy are always trying to drag them back. Hands reach for them over the sea; their friends pursue them; peremptory letters follow them, imploring them to return. Who can forget Isabel Archer's efforts to shake off those importunate well-wishers, Henrietta Stackpole and Casper Goodwood, who are always reminding her of her "old ideals" and of her proper destiny as a "bright American girl"? Or the letters that follow the young painter Singleton, appealing to him as "son, brother, fellow-citizen"? Or Roderick Hudson's family, watching him from across the ocean, ever ready to intervene if he makes what they consider a false step? Or, to go forward to The Ambassadors, Strether's attempt to get Chad back from Paris, and Mrs Newsome's attempt to get Strether? From the first page of The Ambassadors to the last one seems to feel that ship, waiting, under full steam, in Boston Harbor, to speed away at a moment's notice and fetch Strether home. And what does America signify to these characters? The destiny of Jim Pocock, to put it in a phrase, vulgarization; that is to say, the eclipse of all their finest possibilities: Strether; we recall, has hoped that Jim Pocock would come to Paris—it would so clearly reveal to Chad the sort of life to which they are all trying to induce him to return. . . .
Can one doubt that in these fables James was expressing his own fears? . . . But let me make one further observation. Jim Pocock's face is the same face of horror that Spencer Brydon encountered when the ghost of his American self dropped its hands.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
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