THE SENSE OF THE PAST INHENRYJAMES'

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This is to certify that the

thesis entitled

THE SENSE OF THE
PAST IN HENRY JAMES

presented by

James R. Huffman

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Major professor

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ABSTRACT

THE SENSE OF THE PAST
IN HENRY JAMES
BY

James Richard Huffman

The sense of the past is ubiquitous in James's thought
and fiction, and develops both as a theme and as a set of
techniques in his work. His famous "international theme"
is reinforced to a great degree by the sense of the past,
for to James's Americans Europe _i_§ the past. And as the
sense of the past becomes the central philosophical basis
of the international theme, the issue of cultural contrast
becomes much broader, including what stance a modern man
should have toward the whole human past and how he should
envision reality. James sees intelligent existence as the
fine perception of the continuity of the past and the
present, and he sees taste and even morality as integrally
related to the proper apprehension of the past influencing
the present and building the future. Fighting against both
sentimental assessments and blithe rejections of the past
which were common in America, James tries to distinguish
what is valuable in customs and conventions from what is
merely antiquated and preserved by nostalgia. He strives
for a constant organic relationship with the past, and

encourages the broadest cosmOpolitanism by portraying

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maturity as full consciousness of the past and by satirizing
deficient sensibilities.

James's representation of the sense, first as a sensi-
tivity to the concrete residue of the past and then as an

essential function of consciousness, develops in conjunction

 

with his techniques of writing fiction. The external demon-
stration of awareness changes to the direct portrayal of
consciousness, as his characters assimilate immediate im-
pressions, compare them with past experiences, and then
generate viable assessments of their current situations.
Concurrently, these characters change from national types to
archetypes, supplementing the thin veneer of "visitable

past" which James portrays directly with a shadow of nearly
mythic depth. Only about a century of the past can be im-
mediately sensed by an observer with any accuracy, and a
much shorter span is most common. So James uses archetypal
situations and characters in the major phase which adumbrate
patterns of human behavior reaching deep into the past.

This use of archetypes develops partly from James's
keen awareness of past literature. Likewise, not sur-
prisingly, the sense of the literary past appears as a
strong element in several of his characters. Most important,
the maintenance of that illusion of reality which alone de—
fines realism for James comes to depend very strongly on
reminding the reader of past conventions of literature, so
he can contrast James’s "realistic" deviations from them.

Realism becomes primarily the explicit violation of romantic

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James Richard Huffman

cmwenficns, that is, as James sets up mnemonic devices de—
mgnaito manipulate the reader's credulity. The setting
m>ofpmrallel scenes and images that can be perceived only
frmnthe reader's viewpoint is another example of James's
cmmfmlcontrol of the sense of the past in his audience.

The developments and crises in James's personal sense
of‘flw past and in his musings on it, are reflected in both
unmauc and technical uses of the sense of the past in his
ficfipn. In addition, the relation between the golden
afternoon in so many novels and the sense of the past; he—
twemificelles as the sense of the past and the sense of
thepmesent, and the main character as the consciousness
amflmilating each; between ultra~modern and anachronistic
chammters, or those without pasts and those with them; and
theimlation between the conception of a novel and the
working out of its chronological connections, are only a few
ofthe facets of the sense of the past worth investigating
inJames. In all these cases, the past is less the past of
hisumy than the vast existential realm of the infinite
mmmer of moments preceding the present. Both the conscious
mm the subconscious effects of the past appear in James's
mmracters, and the recurring images which remain in their
mHMs and the reader's take on symbolic significance in the
Srmnng web of association. Philosophically, James affirms
thevalue of continually reassimilating the past, of adapting

itto the present, and vice versa--a fair definition of the

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James Richard Huffman

artist's current responsibility. Technically, he helps
develop methods similar to stream—of—consciousness, enriched
by characters with exquisite sensitivity to the past, which

revolutionize the twentieth-century novel.

 

 

 

 

THE SENSE OF THE PAST IN HENRY JAMES

By

James Richard Huffman

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1970

 

 

 

 

 

 

INTRODUCTION AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The sense of the past is too ubiquitous in James not
to have been commented upon already by many readers of his
fiction. But it is likewise so broad and so multi-faceted
a topic that only parts of it have been adequately dis—
cussed. Several areas are yet untouched, and no compre—
hensive study has been attempted. One scholar has nibbled
directly on the topic before me, but was wise enough to
limit his study carefully. My own work is limited as well,
attempting to survey in some depth a few major points and
to map the areas that remain unexplored, but I hope this
beginning will someday become the full study needed.
Ruminating over The: Tragic M2 in his notebooks, James
notices that "I have, of course, as usual, spread myself
too much in the first chapter--been too complacently de—
scriptive and illustrative." Chapter III, the first one I
worked on, suffers somewhat from the same fault. Ideas
coalesce quickly around the first available organizing
unit. And James more than repays the student of his work;
he anticipates him, often doing a great deal of the pre-
liminary probing thought. He is one of his own finest
critics, and provides extensive commentary on his work for

the analyst and historian. As he remarks in the preface

ii,

 

 

 

 

 

to "The Aspern Papers," "The historian, essentially, wants
more documents than he can really use; the dramatist only
wants more liberties than he can really take." James
thoughtfully solves part of the historian's problem by pro-
viding so many documents for him. But the writer of a
dissertation on James still has major problems——more docu-
ments than he can really use, yes, but a great desire to

use too many of them due to their fine quality; and he has
the dramatist's temptation as well, to take liberties with
the material to make it fit the required shape. Luckily

the two problems complement each other, with the desire to
use so much evidence offsetting any tendency to distort it.
Accuracy thus acts as a fine excuse to cover up the
scholar's dependence upon James's own analysis-«to cover up
the fact that he has been seduced by the eminent quota-
bility, at length, of James's prose, and by the fine breadth
and depth of his thought.

Acknowledgments are an old convention, but like the
best ones, they gain value from a balance between adherence
to the old forms and sincere departure. If I err in
striking the balance, I hope it is in the direction of
sincerity. I should like to express my thanks to Professor
Kenneth S. Lynn, who first introduced _T_h_e_ Portrait 9;; a
Ifly to this unknown student and encouraged him to go to
graduate school, and to Professor 1?. John Eakin of Indiana
University, then finishing his dissertation on James's

women, who as my tutor at Harvard helped find and mold the

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critical faculties lurking under the naivete. My greatest
thanks go to Professor Clyde E. Henson, for demanding crit—
ical intelligence just by expecting it as a matter of

course, for refusing to settle for less than fine quality
work, and for encouraging me in numerous personal ways. His
seminar on James focused my thinking, and the resulting
study shows his professional guidance in its combination of
flexible yet traditional form. Professors C. David Mead,
Russel B. Nye, and Joseph J. Waldmeir have aided me with
their carefully considered suggestions for this study and
in several other projects over the past four years, and
their efforts are deeply appreciated. The generosity of
the English department, the Office for Advanced Graduate
Studies, and the Alumni Distinguished Graduate Fellowship
program in providing research funds also contributed mea—
surably to the progress of this work. Since a dissertation
is a product of more than the last year of study, I think
it is proper to honor here the contributions of Professors
Bernard J. Paris and Arthur Sherbo to my development as
well. Similarly, the alert minds of friends, whom I have
often imposed upon in my preoccupation, have helped me
sharpen my ideas. Not the least among these friends is my
wife Carolyn, who not only allowed me to bore her with my
ideas but treated me more considerately during their incu-
bation than any praise can repay. She has not read much
James; she has read even less of my manuscript; nor has

she typed a single word. Instead she has been a good wife,

iv

 

 

 

 

which has been I am sure more important. Some acknowledg—
ments even include the family pet, but I must admit that

the goldfish contributed very little except profound silence.
Nevertheless, to my daughter Julie, who accidentally made
paper dolls from part of my manuscript, I owe the refresh-
ment of warm diversion, the sane perspective of humor, and
the incentive of a tangible goal. As trite as it may sound,
without the patient indulgence of my family, friends, and

mentors, this study would not have been completed.

 

 

 

 

 

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Chapter I.

Chapter II.
Chapter ITI.

Bibliography

TABLE OF CONTENTS

The American Sense of the Past and
Henry James: Background, Definition
and Review

The Sense of the Literary Past

The International Theme: Search
for a Relationship Between the Past
and the Present

Introduction

1 The Early Period (1860-1883)

2. The English Period (1883-1901)
3. The Major Phase (1901-1904)

4. The Reassessment (1905-1914)
5. The Final Years (1914-1916)

Conclusion

Vi

 

49

122
127
164
220
290
325
364
372

 

 

 

CHAPTER I

THE AMERICAN SENSE OF THE PAST AND HENRY JAMES:
BACKGROUND, DEFINITION, AND REVIEW

While Henry James was growing up, America was under-
going great changes. The frontier was narrowing and would
soon disappear into plots cultivated by new implements and
ringed with barbed wire; the machine was turning the ideal
pastoral garden into a mechanized producer of incredible
fecundity; industrialization was gradually changing an
isolated rural land into a powerful and cohesive urban
nation. Such changes caused a shift in American attitudes,
or at least introduced some new problems which were uncom—
fortable companions to older ways of life. The crowding
and noise and economic stresses of the Gilded Age, though
hOlding out all the promises of fast wealth, made some
nOStalgic for the agrarian past as they idealized their
memories and conceptions of it. The doctrine of progress
was difficult for all to uphold through repeated depres—
Si‘mS: Particularly for those left with the promises and
expectations alone.

But the fast pace of industrialization in the second
quarter of the nineteenth century, in which James was born,

left little room and time for doubters of progress and

 

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American superiority to air their views. Belief in progress
meant hope in the future and repudiation of the past, so no
historical arguments were heeded. Before the Civil War the
average American "had little sense of the past or concern
for it, was not historic minded, and relegated interest in
genealogy to spinsters who could have no legitimate interest
in the future. Even the recent past became speedily
legendary . . . and as the future belonged to his children,
he lived in them, worked for them, and pampered them.":L
James followed such compatriots to Europe in his post—Civil-
War fiction-~the "passionless pilgrims," shallow tourists , i
like the Rucks and the Millers, families dominated by their A ‘
children and their pocketbooks, and completely insensitive
to the European heritage. But few such Americans bothered
to go to Europe before mid-century. They felt that they
did not need Europe, and most had not yet made the for-
tunes which would take them there. They had chucked the
Old World for a new one, in which everything could start
over "in a divinely granted second chance for the human
race."2 The American was a new Adam, and the frontier was
Eden. The only possible direction for a man with a future
to take was west.

This Jeffersonian agrarian ideal, though tarnished
and amended by the gold and silver rushes and the robber
barons, held on long after cities became grimy necessitieso
Frederick Jackson Turner did not propose the famous thesis

that glorified the frontier as the real America until 1893,

 

 

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but even this late "it was inevitable that such a formula
should appeal to a people who felt instinctively that they
had created more than they had inherited and that they owed
little to the Old World" (Commager, 296—7). The myth of an
agrarian utopia helped suppress the uncomfortable reality
that there was no escape, that dirt and poverty had had
longer tenure on the farm than in the sweatshop. Since the
frontier was disappearing and would not have to be returned
to, it could be safely idealized by the factory worker.
The President had barely seen a log cabin, let alone been
born in one, so the log cabin could become a symbol of
democracy in politics and the ideal childhood rather than
hardship, poverty, and the rudest survival.3

As progress left the farm behind, Americans developed
a sentimental sense of the past, catered to by so—called
historical novelists and even scholarly historians. They
had had this tendency for some time, and the pace of in-
dustrialization just made it clearer. For even though
"Americans of the Middle Period were conditioned from their
cradles to think in terms of change and to fix their minds
upon the future," their weakness for idealism prepared them
with ready homage for glorified episodes from the past.4
When his history was not particularly romantic, the Ameri-
can idealized it. Bare facts about Pilgrims and Puritans,
backwoodsmen and trappers, miners, cowboys and Indians soon
turned into legends. Textbooks on American history taught

the Yankee heritage as "a story and a romance, a record of

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battles, of deeds of daring, and of mighty blows struck
for freedom; it was a monument to the Pilgrim fathers, the
Indian fighters, the patriots of the Revolution, the Found-
ing Fathers, the trailmakers and pioneers of the West"
(Commager, 24, 37). Paradoxically, the people with the
greatest hope for the future and greatest contempt for the
past were the ones most embarrassed by their lack of a his—

tory and most ready to create one:

A people made up of such conglomerate elements
and with so little racial or religious or even
geographical unity were at pains to emphasize
their common historical experience and validate
their historical unity. A people whose collec-
tive memory was so short were inclined to cherish
what they remembered and to romanticize it. A
people living in the present were conscious of the
necessity of connecting that present with the past,
of furnishing for themselves a historical genealogy.
(Commager, 284)

But this task did not fall primarily on historians, in spite
of their responding with romanticized textbooks. It fell on
the poets and writers of fiction:

In America the image of the past was largely the
creation of the poets and the storytellers, and
chiefly of the New England—New York group who
flourished between the War of 1812 and the War
for the Union. That group familiar to an earlier
generation through the amiable game of Authors:
Irving, Cooper, and Bryant; Longfellow, Hawthorne,
and Whittier; Emerson, Lowell, and Holmes. These
were the Founding Fathers of American literary
nationalism . . . [America's] nationalism was, to
an extraordinary degree, a literary creation,

and . . . the national memory was a literary and,
in a sense, a contrived memory. The contrast
'here with the Old World is sharp.

Americans had a heritage ready-made for them, one they could

have imported from their former homelands in Europe. In his

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stories of "passionate pilgrims," particularly to England,
James depicts Americans attempting to find some viable re-
lationship to the old heritage. But it is too late; the
bonds have been broken, and few can find homes or clear
titles to an Old World past. England had been a land of
poverty and persecution for some of their ancestors, had
been a villainous enemy symbolized by George III; memories
of the homeland were very ambivalent, and the bonds of
loyalty had been disrupted by stirrings of national pride.
Furthermore, the "European" heritage could be a common bond
only early in the nineteenth century, when that heritage

was primarily English. Once the Irish and Scotch, Germans

 

and French, Poles and other Slavic peoples immigrated to
America, the range of ethnic heritages made the nation a
patchwork quilt. With the rise of nationalism, in both its
political and literary forms, powerful abrasive forces
worked toward a conformity out of which might arise a com-
mon identity. This development of American identity is
recorded in some of the tales of James's "English period,"
discussed further in the chapter on his "international
theme."

Such uprootings and ambivalence created strange incon—
sistencies in American attitudes toward the past. The
American who repudiated Europe completely as a guide to
politics might be a slave to tradition in architecture and
art, an aberration prominent in several of James's passion—

ate pilgrims. In some fields the typical American valued

 

 

 

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Till the products of the past, when he valued them at all:
"Art was something that had happened in the past, and when
he could afford it he bought the paintings of artists long
dead, listened to lectures on French cathedrals, and built
museums to look like mausoleums" (Commager, 10). Anti-
intellectualism coexisted uneasily with the worship of cul-

ture. Americans in general seemed to consider the past

 

something totally separate from everyday reality, and had
little sense of the living influence of the past on the
present. The past was a decoration for parades and holi-
days; until it faded far enough away to be legendary, it
was useless.

These conflicting attitudes toward the past were often

 

.held by the same people, but separate groups also formed
about the polar clusters of ideas. Historians like

W.H. Prescott and Francis Parkman loved the past, coating
it with nostalgia and fierce romance; flagwavers like

George Bancroft, on the other hand, attempted to demon-
strate that the future New World would be the "consummation
of the universal historical process," supporting the old law
of progress (Lewis, 160—65). Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman

and the Transcendentalists, of course, and to some degree
William Dean Howells, were the main "party of Hope," re—
jecting the past and glorifying spontaneity, children, and
the future. Writers like Irving, Hawthorne, Longfellow,
Lowell, and their New England successors represented the

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tradition and custom in sometimes reactionary ways. A size-
able group of local colorists and now lesser known histori—
cal novelists similarly painted the past in golden colors.
Lowell had switched from the hopefuls to the old guard, the
reverse of the usual direction, and naturally there were as
many mixtures and variations of the two groups as there were
intelligent men to discriminate. Cooper had retreated from
custom, tradition, and cities to the romantic wilderness of
the past. Hawthorne had struggled with the past again and
again, sometimes wanting to be free from it, sometimes feel—
ing lost without it.6

Some later writers, such as Mark Twain and Henry Adams,

were also caught uncomfortably in the middle. In works like

 

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Recollections _o_f £322 9_f_ A32, Twain presents the past as a
brutally inferior period, subscribing to the Dickensian view
of the nineteenth century as "the most advanced and enlight—
ened century of all the centuries the sun has looked upon."'7
History seems meaningless, repetitious, or even decadent,
however, by the turn of the century (Burhans, 622—25).
Twain vacillates between hope and despair, with neither
view of history ever solidifying, though the less optimis-
tic views are more prominent in his later years. The result
is a terribly confused and anguished philosophy of life per-
haps indicating wider American insecurity:

Twain has no theory of history because his

view of history is an uneasy mixture of con-
flicting and inconsistent elements which he

 

 

 

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never reconciles. . . . Twain as a repre-

sentative figure suggests the emergence in

his time of a dangerous weakness in American

culture and in its image of itself and of its

destiny.

(Burhans, 617)

Even Henry Adams, with his great imaginative theoretical
projections, is hardly the calm philosopher. With his
glorification of the Middle Ages yet fascination with rail—
roads and the power represented by the dynamo, Adams is a
similar study in ambivalence. He felt caught, like Matthew
Arnold, between his own dying heritage and a new world being
born without him.
Nearly all these artists and historians were trying to
find some workable relationship between the past and the
present. As Rufus Griswold, one of the loudest hopeful ad—
vocates of a new national literature, explains, "The ques-
tion between us and other nations is not who shall most
completely discard the past, but who shall make the best
use of it."8 But few writers had much success in uniting
past and present. As Commager notes, "The literary task of
creating a usable past was largely performed by 1865; after
that date perhaps only Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and Louisa
May Alcott added anything substantial to the treasure house
of historical memories."9 Those who looked toward the west
found no past at all, but only open land and an alien civ-
ilization, so they recorded local color and mythology with
little historical depth. Later Willa Gather would find a

thin veneer of history on the prairies, but only after the

age of pioneers had long passed. Turner's thesis gave the

 

 

 

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West no past, but only explained its influence, and his ac-
count of American character and history touched less than a
century of its existence. Those who looked toward the East
and Europe, such as James, Howells, Adams and occasionally

Twain, found abysses of history as often as clues to the

)
American experience. James certainly discovered more connec-

tions between America and Europe than most, as I shall dis—
cuss in the chapter on the international theme, but he placed
more hope in future social integration than in the surviving
common heritage. Certainly he found little of England left
in New England, and nothing of York in New York. Edith
Wharton discovered traces of old New York and New England,
but only well after the turn of the century, and her touches
had some of the flavor of the local colorists and historical
novelists of the nineties. These local colorists or region-
alists, such as Sara Orne Jewett, generally portrayed scenes
restricted both in time and space, although 1kg: Country 9;;
:03 Pointed 15:13 (1896) captures a Maine passing quickly

into anachronism if not history. Or, when American writers
set out to be deliberately "historical," they chose set-
tings as far away in American time as possible--such as the
Revolution, a gold mine for historical romancers like

8. Weir Mitchell. Few connected the recent past effectively
with the present. Several historical novelists found the
time too short in America to give romance the proper atmos-
Phere, and shifted the scene across the Atlantic to gain

remoteness in space and time; hence even the responsible

 

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A novelist Edith Wharton set her first work in eighteenth—
century Europe. Writers in the South had a little better
success at capturing the tone of the second half of the
nineteenth century, perhaps because the South seemed to have
more history and tradition imported from Europe and nursed
through the war. Twain always distilled more in his records
of steamboating and in his Southern home town fiction than
in his Western or European exploits, though he combines a
good deal of sentiment and nostalgia with his history. His
Pudd'nhead Wilson achieves a reasonable success in tracing
the town of Dawson's Landing back to the founders of Virginia
without losing its contemporary focus. Again, however, most
treatments of the South of the Civil War and Reconstruction
came not from the downtrodden generation itself, but from
reconstructing writers of the twentieth century; and these
often built as much legend as history. Margaret Mitchell's
Swim t_h_e_ Wind (1936) is almost too late to count, for
writers like Thomas Nelson Page, Ellen Glasgow and Stark
Young began the nostalgic trend back at the turn of the
century.

Interestingly enough, aside from his affinity for
Hawthorne, James most resembles the best of these early
twentieth—century writers on the past, particularly in his
insistence on portraying a time within reach of the writer's
memory. He most differs from the usual "historical
novelists" among his contemporaries in refusing to dig

further back than about fifty years even in fertile European

 

 

 

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soil, and in fighting sentimental romance with every pos—
sible weapon. Willa Gather would be a perfect parallel to
him except for her later fall into the romantic:

To Willa Gather the past was significant for
its moral qualities, and only gradually did
romanticism triumph over morality. Through-
out her long literary life she was engaged in
an elaborate remembrance of things past—-the
past of the pioneers who had built the West,
of the immigrants . . . of those earlier
spiritual pathfinders, the Franciscans and
Jesuits . . . of the Arcadian Virginia of

her childhood, of the golden Nebraska of her
youth, of the New York she had known as a
young journalist, of the shimmering Southwest
that belonged to the past even in the present,
and the Quebec that seemed to have only a
past . . .

Here was an imagination that could pick up the thin dime's
worth of American past and make it pay. One wonders what
James might have made of America had he been born a few
decades later, and if he had known the South as well as
Stark Young. Particularly if one keeps the example of
Faulkner in mind, Stark Young seems incredibly like James
with his "ever-present sense of the past" in this compari-
son of the two writers by Commager:

That sense of the past comes out in the feeling
for tradition and usage, in affection for family
and place and for material things even, when
sanctified by time and familiarity: the old
plantation houses, lovely in themselves and
dearer because built by ancestors; the rosewood
and mahogany furniture, brought over from

France or England, perhaps, or carted across the
mountains to what was a remote frontier; the
family portraits, be they ever so bad, and the
bright silverware and gleaming crystal glasses,
polished by devoted hands; the magnolias and oak
and crepe myrtle, the roses and camellias and
yellow jasmine, whose shade and fragrance re-
called the faith and affection of those remote

 

 

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ancestors who had planted them. For the world
Stark Young re—created was, like that which
Henry James re—created, filled with furniture,
but it was not in any sense furniture which
Willa Gather repudiated, nor yet the mere stage
furniture so carefully installed by historical
novelists. It was rather a set of properties
which united the present with the past and
acknowledged its indebtedness, as the carvings
and stained glass windows of medieval churches
unite present with past in acknowledgement of
the eternal truths of religion. It all gave a
sense of continuity and thus of security, re—
minded men that they belonged in the stream of
history and that their lives had meaning onl

as they touched other lives. (Commager, 148

Here is that "sensuous rather than intellectual" perception
of the past, the "enriched, magnified, more deeply lived

and understood present moment" that Osborn Andreas de-
scribes in James; here are the old houses, plantations

rather than estates like Somerset, which so penetrated

James in Europe; here are the bad portraits that haunt
White-Mason in "Crappy Cornelia," the trees and the shade

and the afternoons.]'0 With a few additions and qualifica-
tions, the passage could just as well describe James, and
goes far toward putting into perspective his distaste for

historical novelists .

For James was often impatient with even the local

 

colorists when they overstepped their chronological range,
and he was sickened by the historical romancers. Edith
Wharton and Sara Orne J ewett were fine when they kept their
own place and time, but terribly false or incomplete when
they left it. He writes Miss Jewett with repugnance of
“the flood of tales of the Past that seems of late to have

been rolling over our devoted country," and exhorts her to

 

 

 

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13

”some back to the palpable present intimate that throbs
responsive " :

The 'historic' novel is, for me, condemned even
in cases of labour as delicate as yours, to a
fatal cheapness, for the simple reason that the
difficulty of the 'job is inordinate and that a
mere escamota e, in the interest of ease, and

of the abysmal public naivet’e becomes inevitable.
You may multiply the little facts that can be got
from pictures and documents, relics and prints as
much as you like—-the real thing is almost im—
possible to do and in its essence the whole effect
is as nought: I mean the invention, the repre—
sentation of the old consciousness, the soul, the
sense, the horizon, the vision of individuals in
whose minds half the things that make ours that
make the modern world, were non-existent.1i

(Edel, Letters, pp. 234—5--0ct. 5, 1901)

Perhaps James was recalling some of his own lame efforts,
such as Madame Bellegarde of _T_h_e_ American, who is dated

mainly by her ignorance of the telegraph. Edmund Gosse
receives this account of the flood of historical novels

at the turn of the century:

But I do so hunger and thirst, in this deluge
of cheap romanticism and chromolithographic
archaics (babyish, puppyish, as evocation, all,
it seems to me,) for a note, a gleam of reflec-
tion of the life we live, of artistic or plas-
tic intelligence of it, something one can say
yes or no to, as discrimination, perception,
observation, rendering . . .12

James also writes Gosse about Andrew Lang's account of Joan
0f Arc, regretting that "even there, with all the accomplish-
ment, all the possession of detail, the sense of reality,

the vision of the truths and processes of life, the light

0f experience and the finer sense of history, seem to me so
wanting" (Letters, 1, 277). The "finer sense" of history,

the rendering of the fine consciousness of an era, is

 

 

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impossible to recapture for ages long past.

Certainly the most relevant past to James is not
ancient history nor even the golden eras portrayed by con-
temporary historical novelists--there are no antique manu-
scripts serving as excuses for romance, no resurrected
mummies unwinding the lore of the ancients, no Wellsian
travels deep into time in his fiction. His Connecticut
Yankees may mystify Europe, but they make a shambles of
contemporary manners and chivalry rather than King Arthur's.
James's innocents abroad crash more parties than precious
pottery, put out more hostesses than eternal flames.

Baedeker in hand, some do at least visit the ancient monu—
ments, but any residue from the past falls off with the
dust from their shoes; or, if more perceptive, they take
away some essence of the past, some personal impression,
that has more to do with their preoccupations than Caesar's.
History is a thematic and aesthetic backdrop for contempor-
ary drama and psychology in James.

He does write novels with a definite historical milieu

and focus--no startling discovery to readers of such works

 

as $133 Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima. Neverthe-

less, James did not set out to write "historical novels" in

the usual sense of that genre. The Bostonians attempts to

capture the most prominent feature in American life at that
time, the 1880's, and even The Princess Casamassima, with
its roots in French history, has a contemporary focus--

much like the Dickensian social novel (See Notebooks, 47, 69),

 

In fact, none of James's major works has a setting far in

15

the past. The novelist is, however, the most precious kind
of historian to James, and he inteded to be just such an
historian. Instead of writing re~creations of the past,
James wrote what could be called "contemporary chronicles"
(lacking a better term), works attempting to capture the
"spirit of the age" in which he was living. He hoped that
his canon would form a continuum of the era, just as Whitman
desired in _S_ox_15 of Myself to record what it felt like to be
an American in the nineteenth century.13
Many writers in the movement known as "realism" set
such chronicles as their goal-~to "do" a place in their con-
temporary world, an exhaustive painting of milieu and charac-
ter. The tremendous amount of accurate concrete detail used
in such works, particularly by French and Russian realists,
makes them much different from the floating romances, com—
paratively once upon a time and in unknown countries, which
preceded them. James was strongly influenced by this school
of realism, but from the beginning there was a difference
between the nearly photographic Continental forms of realism
and the "finer sense" of life that James was trying to re—
cord. The problem of _T_h_§ Europeans illustrates part of this
difference very well.14 James pictures horse trolleys in
Boston ten years before their actual introduction, an
anachronism that was not lost on the reviewers. The fact
that James had chosen to portray a period somewhat before

his time made the error seem pure ignorance. But the year

 

 

 

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before publication James had written to Howells that "for
the sake of the picturesque I shall play havoc with the
New England background of 1830," which suggests that he
purposely violated literal history (Edel, Letters, 100).
That horse cars were not spinning through the hub of New
England until some years later is irrelevant; artistically
they catch the spirit of the time which he wanted to por-
tray. The gathering and scattering of the populace into
and from such conveyances perfectly pictures the accelera-
ting pace and unstable cohesion of American society even
before mid—century. Similarly, the fact that the Went-
worths had not met many artists before, in spite of their
presence in American society at the time, represents the
general American innocence of art--whether artists were
around or not. James thought little of mildly violating
literal chronology for the sake of capturing the tenor of
history, the intellectual and social conditions of an age.
After all, chronology is partly a matter of chance. Like
Dickens, Scott and the writers of the Elizabethan chronicle
Plays, James felt free to use facts for purely artistic
Purposes, and to reveal the subjective life rather than
Just the objective balance sheet of an era.15 As long as
a situation or character is not "intrinsically false," the
inaccuracy is unimportant--"for the mere accidental and
relative falsity," says James, "I don't care."16 Similarly,

James refuses to identify actual historical figures in his

 

fiction, which would bind him to literal fact rather than

 

 

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give him rein to discover and represent the essential truth
about typical characters. The artist, the fine historian,
must not be limited to showing "clumsy Life . . . at her
stupid work."l7

Novels should not be like history books. Too many
facts make a novel heavy and uneconomical. Criticizing
Middlemarch early in his career, James remarks that its docu-
mentary quality "acts as a limit, we think, to the develop-
ment of the old-fashioned English novel. Its diffuseness,
on which we have touched, makes it too copious a dose of
pure fiction. If we write novels so, how shall we write

History?"18

Eliot‘s desire "to reproduce the total sum of
life in an English village forty years ago" is too heavy a
task for the novel (261). James finds a similar fault even
in his incomparable Balzac:

He sees and presents too many facts,--facts of

history, of property, of genealogy, of topography,

of sociology, and has too many ideas and images

about them; their value is thus threatened with

submersion by the flood of general reference in

which they float, by their quantity of indicated

relation to other facts, which break against

them like waves of a high tide.19
So James does not become a photographic realist; when he
paints a picture, he stresses composition as much as con-
tent. Eventually he discovers, in contrast to Balzac and
Tolstoy and Dostoevski, that exhaustive concrete detail is
not necessary to the capture of the essence of a time and
place. In fact, it can be a hindrance, a kind of short-
hand for representing moods and attitudes. So James begins

concentrating on the selection of exactly the right detail,

 

 

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the most representative and symbolic touches, rather than
recording every minute point. Consequently the late works
rely as much on metaphors and symbols like a golden bowl,
the wings‘of a dove, or an ivory tower, as on the rudimentary
details of everyday living. James knows how to use details
in place of finer evocation, as his shorter works with more
dense concrete detail show. But he prefers to draw out the
threads of consciousness in a more authentic manner, going
back to longer forms of fiction because such fine representa—
tion takes much more space. Consequently the common charge
that James is too abstract is readily explicable; the pre—
sentation of numerous concrete details is one of those
shorthand methods of skirting the problem of representing
character and fine consciousness that James eventually
comes to detest. James has a different method of recording
"history" than piling up masses of fact.20
Determining how historical James's novels are, or in
what sense they are historical, helps define the quality of
the sense of the past in his work. As I have argued, James
does not, like the historical novelist, focus on the past
in his fiction. Though a forerunner of the impressionist
and stream~of—consciousness writer, James nevertheless does
not focus strictly on the present either. Rather, the con-
sciousness at the centre of a James novel is founded solidly
on the present, but with an acute perception of the past as
it continually influences that present-~much like stream-of-

consciousness writing as developed by Faulkner. As a result,

 

 

 

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the history James is interested in is more a matter of con-
sciousness than a matter of record; history is not a set of
documents to him, but is itself a sense of the past: "His-
tory is never, in any rich sense, the immediate crudity of
what 'happens,‘ but the much finer complexity of what we

21 At

read into it and think of in connection with it."
Concord, for example, "All the commemorative objects . . .
speak, no doubt, in one of the subtlest tones of which
official history is capable, and yet somehow leave the ex—
quisite melancholy of everything unuttered. It lies too
deep" (261). Somehow the observer, with his "intelligent
after-sense," must "get round behind, in the past, as it
were, and more or less understand" intuitively what Concord
was (258). He can gain that sense mainly by reading litera—
ture: the "concentrated Boston of history" is "the Boston
of Enerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Lowell, Ticknor,
Motley, Prescott, Parkman and the rest"--the Boston of the
artists and imaginative historians of the time (245). James
finds a lecture by Emerson or an abolitionist speech by
Wendell Phillips "breathing more of the consciousness of
literature and of history" than any architecture, relics,
or imitative restorations of the New England past (249).
The best history is not statistics but recorded conscious-
ness, and the best sense of history comes from assimilating
such documents into the imagination.

As James learns in revisiting America, a sense of his-

tory often depends entirely on the observer's imagination.

 

 

 

 

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When he went to Richmond, stronghold of the Confederacy, he
"had counted on a sort of registered consciousness of the
past, and the truth was that there appeared, for the moment,
on the fact of the scene, no discernible consciousness,
registered or unregistered, of anything" (AS, p.370).

Nothing was left; the Civil War had obliterated the Southern
past in Richmond-~a fact making James feel the weight of the
past by its very absence. "'It came back again . . . to the
quantity to be 'read into' the American view, in general,
before it gives out an interest" (372); "It is the poverty
that is, exactly, historic; once take it for that and it
puts on vividness" (394). History is the imaginative grasp
of a time by the mind of a later observer, just as the
finest record of a time is in the mind of an alert contem-
porary. James realizes that truth in America better than
in Europe, for America provides almost no objective cor—
relative for his sense of the past at all. Consequently,
given the tiny amount of concrete residue left, "It was
absurd," he says, stopping in the train station for fifteen
minutes, "what I made of Savannah" (429).

What James wanted to do in coming to America was to go
"scratching, scratching for romance, and all tenderly, in
the deposit of history; but, plainly, no deposit would show"
(393). The thinness of the past in America causes the
"trivialization of history-—a process one scarce knows how
to name-~its inaccessibility to legend . . . if the question

is of legend we dig for it in the deposit of history, but

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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21

 

the deposit must be thick to have given it a cover and let

it accumulate" (383). James does find one legend in the
South, "this theory of an undying rancour" against the

North, and he is fascinated by its development: "The flame-
coloured 311% has flowered out of the fact, and the interest,
the 'psychologic' interest, is to see it so disengage itself,
as legend, as valuable, enriching, inspiring, romantic

legend, and settle down to play its permanent part" (386).

If this heroic past, this legend, is nursed, it may ulti-
mately create concentrated history--literature (of. 387).
James perceives this relation of literature to history best
in America, for American novelists, having little to work
with, must "improvise, with the aid of the historian, a
romantic local past," then construct an action around it
(458). This form of history, legend distilled by the living
imagination, is James's interest.

Consequently direct historical allusions are relatively
rare in James's works, though he uses cities with romantic
and legendary pasts for his settings fairly often. He culls
history only for "romance," using historical subjects or
situations for that value rather than documentation. In

1133 Ambassadors much of Madame de Vionnet's romantic quality

 

is the result of her being part of an ancien regime, in
effect, with her home laden with treasures of the French
Past. Strether senses Napoleon and the First Empire in
her anterooms; sounds that remind him of the French Revolu-

tion come through her open windows; and at one point she is

 

 

 

 

 

 

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22

explicitly compared to Madame Roland. Since such allusions
are rare, when they appear they generally relate closely to
the theme of the novel or the psychological situation of a
main character. In this case Strether's subconscious mind
may, ironically, be recalling Madame Roland's well known
lament as she was taken to the scaffold-—"O Liberty! what
sins are committed in thy name!"--as an analogue to Chad's
and Madame de Vionnet's use of freedom (Cargill, 318).
Similarly, when the Countess Gemini refers to Madame Merle
as both Machiavelli and Vittoria Colonna, the allusions are
not gratuitous. 0n the surface Selina is as pious as the
poet, but in effect she has been as manipulative as the
philosopher.

Since James is attracted to the dramatic and romantic
side of history, he often recalls such moments even when
they are not finely appropriate. In Th_e_ American _S_c_e__r_1_g,
"absurd as it may seem," James says, he thinks of young men
and women being sent to the scafford when he sees some
American buildings marked for demolition (158). But he does
not throw such historical allusions into his fiction without
giving them a clear relation to its themes or characters.
Milly Theale, with her incurable illness, reminds him of a
noblewoman waiting for the guillotine because she too is a
martyr (XX, 311,2).22 Likewise when the Colosseum appears
at strategic points in "Daisy Miller" and TE Portrait 9:3
E1311, it is not there simply as romantic scenery; it is a

STIRbolic reminder that both heroines are martyrs. As

 

 

 

 

 

 

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23

Jonah Raskin points out in an article on James and the
French Revolution, great events and historical places are
used primarily for imagery and background in his fiction.
James developed a reciprocal relationship between his fic—
tion and the past; his "art was molded by the sense of the
past, and it in turn reshaped the facts of history."23
History is always subordinate in James to the demands of
art, not the reverse, as in the traditional historical
novel. As James remarks in the preface to "The Aspern
Papers": "The historian, essentially, wants more documents
than he can really use; the dramatist only wants more
liberties than he can really take" (Prefaces, 161).

Consequently James's sense of the past is not formu—
lated upon any strict theory of history. "The Wheel of
Time" (1892) makes one man's private history cyclical, but
only for the purpose of creating an ironic reversal of sit—
uation. "The Last of the Valerii" (1874) makes history
essentially progressive, with the Roman state as a primitive
time in the history of man, antedated by even more primitive
periods; history is also progressive in Th_e_ Kings of fly:
101e, with Milly Theale as the culminating "heiress of all
the ages." But both these stories, like "The Wheel of
Time," use such views of history only for their effects on
the themes, characters and situations of the particular
stories, not as evidence supporting or principles derived
from a theory of history. The course of human events is not

necessarily progressive to James, as it sometimes seemed to

 

 

 

 

 

 

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24

Twain when he surveyed the wonders of Pullman cars with

laxatories. The American Scene laments an America badly

changed by the Gilded Age and still changing for the worse,
just as James's letters denounce the decay of the European
heritage due to early forms of Americanization. But neither
is history necessarily decadent, as it sometimes appeared to
Mark Twain and Henry Adams. Old Juliana Bordereau of "The
Aspern Papers" may have had her golden age in the early
nineteenth century, but Ralph Pendrel of The _S_e_n_s_e e_f_‘ _t_h_e
Teei finds the same period unliveable, a crudely exploita—
tive period of British history. There is no utopian century
for James as there was for Adams.

Even if there had been a utopian era in the far past,
James feels that no one would now be able to judge its value
because the remote past is essentially inconceivable. He
calls the distant past "dark" or "black" again and again,
not because it is necessarily primitive, but because it is
comparatively obscure for purposes of realistic artistic
representation. Adams' twelfth century is an imaginative
creation that James cannot believe in; a time so distant
is unimaginable, an "unvisitable" period, for the quality
0f daily living and consciousness so long ago is unrecover-
able. Some of James‘s early characters fail to condense
completely from ethereal to solid form because they arise
from such an era. James says Miriam Rooth of The Tragic
Mug "was a beautiful actual fictive impossible woman of a

past age, an undiscoverable century" (cf. VII, 126-27)—-and

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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25
she remains such a ghost, floating between reality and
archetype, while her mother becomes one of those transi-

tional anachronisms that "reconciled being alive today with

having been alive so long ago" (VII, 114). Madame Merle

of hie Portrait _o_f_ _a_ Lady figuratively comes from another

era,she says, antedating the French Revolution; Carteret

of The T_ra_g_ie Mh_s_e is a clock stopped about 1830; Juliana
Bmflereau of "The Aspern Papers," Waymarsh and Madame de
Vimnmt of The Ambassadors, date from the early nineteenth
cmfimry--yet each of these characters is fully realized.
Mm reason these anachronisms come to life even while
acfing as markers in time is that they are carefully con—
zmcted to a present situation, and do not come from a past

eczemote that its immediately perceptible essence, its

amwsphere, its flavor, cannot be sensed. They are the

literally visitable past, bridging past and present.

James describes this optimum relation between the past

an the present most fully in the preface to "The Aspern

Papers":

.. . the case had the air of the past just in
the degree in which that air, I confess, most
appeals to me--when the region over which it
hangs is far enough away without being too far.

I delight in a palpable imaginable visitable
past-~in the nearer distances and the clearer
mysteries, the marks and signs of a world we may
reach over to as by making a long arm we grasp an
object at the other end of our own table. The
table is the one, the common expanse, and where
we lean, so stretching, we find it firm and con—
tinuous. That, to my imagination, is the past
fragrant of all, or of almost all, the poetry of
the thing outlived and lost and gone, and yet in
which the precious element of closeness, telling
so of connexions but tasting so of differences,

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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26

remains appreciable. . . . We are divided of
course between liking to feel the past strange
and liking to feel it familiar; the difficulty
is, for intensity, to catch it at the moment
when the scales of the balance hang with the
right evenness. (Prefaces, 164

Under R.W.B. Lewis' categories, James is thus clearly one
of the "party of Irony" like his father, one of those who
see more complexities than either the optimists or the

reactionaries, and who therefore seek "an organic relation-

ship between past experience and the living moment" (The

American Adam, 7—8). If there is any law of history James

believes in, it is Orestes Brownson's "law of continuity,"
which states that "the present was elaborated in, and
evolved from the past. The future must be . . . the elab-
oration and evolution of the present" (Lewis, 187). This
sense of continuity is the whole basis for "The Aspern
Papers," in which the "final scene of the rich dim Shelley

drama" is "played out in the very theatre of our own

'modernity ' ” :

This was the beauty that appealed to me; there
had been, so to speak, a forward continuity, from

the actual man, the divine poet, on; and the
curious, the ingenious, the admirable thing would

be to throw it backward again, to compress-—

squeezing it hard!-—-the connexion that had drawn

itself out, and convert so the stretched relation
into a value of nearness on our own part

(Prefaces,.l63)
James always works for and appreciates this continuity.
After weeks of experiencing the usual American disjunction

01' past and present on his return in 1904. James finds a

refreshingly "ancient house without lapses or breaks, Where

 

   

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the past and the present were in friendliest fusion, so

 

that the waiting future evidently slumbered with confidence"
(A_S_, 330). In the South he finds that "Nothing could have

been a happier link than the old Confederate soldier-~a
link from past to present and future, I mean" (g, 392).

The sense of the past is always this integrally connected,
organic fusion with the present in James, a faculty which
does a remarkable job in The American Me of also per—

ceiving the future.
James discovered the value of placing restrictions of

 

the depth of the past portrayed in fiction not only from
the extreme historical novelists of his time, but from

studying his better contemporaries and immediate pre-

decessors. George Eliot felt that "to reconstruct a past

world, doubtless with a view to the highest purposes of
truth" was the most glorious "work to be in any way present
at, to assist in, though only as alamp—holder!"24 The

lamp of the present in Eliot shines backward to illuminate
the past, rather than the reverse as in James. And older
contemporaries like Dickens sometimes foraged further back
than the lamp would reach. In fact, "not only Dickens but

practically all the Victorians were retrospective in their

outlook and had a tendency to push novelistic time back be-
hind the 1830's to the pre-railway era" (Raleigh, 127).
They did not tie that past to the on-going present. Like
many of their American counterparts, the Victorians reacted

to the intrusion of the machine in the pastoral garden With

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

l"?

marked nostalgia. Some, such as Hardy and Eliot, were more

28

mmmlex and ambivalent than the paradoxically nostalgic
optmusts like Dickens, but most still wanted to recapture
wmflds of the past. James too had deep misgivings about
madflnes and capitalism, but he at least became reconciled
totheinevitable changes, and was on fairly good terms
wifi1the automobile. He doggedly clung to the present.
Wmt he learned from these older contemporaries, both from
flwir failures and their successes, was just how far back
um novel could range with representational impunity, and
hmvto connect that past with the living present.

Sir Walter Scott and Nathaniel Hawthorne, his prede-
cmssors rather than his contemporaries, perhaps provided
mm best object lessons. Scott's medieval novels were
clanfly false and romantic as representations of daily life,
mm even the Scottish novels like Redgauntlet revealed to
Jammsthe infancy of the art of novel writing in Scott's
fine. But there was a difference between the Waverley
mwels and the medieval reconstructions, as Sir Leslie
mwphen points out, one that James could hardly escape per-
cehflng. The "creator of the Waverly world" was implicitly
cmmwnting on "the nature of the past and the present and
flm relationship between them" in a manner that the medieval
romanc er could not:

In theory a novelist could treat any subject
from the most contemporaneous to the most
antique. But Stephen argued that either ex-

treme was unsatisfactory. The present could
only be viewed in a harsh, confusing glare,

 

 

 

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while the remote past was lost in darkness;

and he admitted that most of Scott's medieval

novels were false. The ideal time was the

remembered past, where things could still be

seen but not in a harsh light—-'the twilight

of history,’ as Stephen called it.25
James may even have read Stephen's article on Scott; but
in any case his conception of the proper depth of history
in the novel, even in using the metaphor of light to de-
scribe it, is exactly the same. Hawthorne proved the same
lesson to James, with his explicit attempts "to connect a
bygone time with the very present that is flitting away
from us."26 He could fathom the American past to a certain
depth, but he could not recreate the fully convincing im-
mediacy of the Puritan period from dry documents alone. Nor
could he find the key to relate the States to mother
England, though he sensed their connections in anticipation
of James's international theme. He was ambivalent toward
each nation, and strongly ambivalent toward the past. Al—
though he felt the affinity of past and present and his
works were not escapes, Hawthorne was generally unable to
reconcile Europe and America, past and present, solitude
and commitment.27 As in TE Marble Faun, he dug too deep
to represent the life of the past; instead he formulated
myth, fable and romance. This same tendency attracted
James, who learned however to salvage romance and mythic
value without losing immediate credibility. He does so by

starting always with the present and working back gradually

into the past, building careful continuity at each step and

 

 

 

 

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keeping the focus on the present. Hawthorne begins with
the past, as in The Scarlet Letter, and tries to make a long
leap forward at the end; or he makes symbolic bridges deep
into the past, as in The Marble Faun, which will not hold
the necessary weight. But in such works as The House _o_f. the
Seven Gables, even with its defective ending, Hawthorne is
able to hold time fairly firmly in place, keeping the past
from floating away in all but a few chapters (such as the
flashback to "Alice Pyncheon") through a constant connec—
tion with the created present of the work.28

Several critics have recognized James's rigid control
of the past, his constantly tying it to the present.29 In
general the technique has been praised. But George Poulet,
comparing the representation of time in many authors, sets
James apart for this fusion of past and present in an un-
complimentary way:

Far from being, as with Proust, a past that was

rarely and fortuitously recaptured by the opera-

tion of the involuntary memory, the past for James

is always present, always spreading out like a

dr0p of oil upon consciousness; so much so that,

in the final analysis, the great problem for James

is not remembering but, on the contrary, disen~

cumbering his thought by forgetting. For it is in

swarms that images of the past, exactly like repre-

sentations of the present, spread over conscious-

ness . . . 0
Poulet feels that as a consequence, memory does not "enlarge
and deepen the field of consciousness" in James, for it is
constantly being restrained by the limits of the present
(351). James's "visitable past" is therefore "not a true

past": "By reason of its shallowness it is almost. flush

 

 

 

 

 

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31

with the present; it is without distance and without depth"
(352). Poulet claims that James ignores the "true past"

in general, so that in his works "there is no depth to the
past. Itself bordered by death, it forms the vacant under-
margin of‘the present, and thus a delimitation" (353). The
best James can come up with, in his later works exploring
what "might have been," is "a virtual past" based on the
memories of his characters (354). This criticism is ex—
actly parallel to T.S. Eliot's characterization of James.
Comparing him to Hawthorne, Eliot claims that in one way
Hawthorne is superior, in his "very acute historical sense."
Hawthorne is concrete, "solid": "Both men had that sense
of the past which is peculiarly American, but in Hawthorne
this sense exercised itself in a grip on the past itself;

"31 That is, James does

in James it is a sense of the sense.
not apprehend the past itself so much as the faculty which
senses the past. Both these criticisms are valid. Eliot's,
however, is a mere criticism of technique or mode of pre—
sentation, since James chooses to portray the sense of the
past through a central consciousness. What James might

reply to Poulet, if he cared for theory, is that Poulet‘s
"true past" is a philosophical and chronological entity that
cannot possibly be apprehended by the mind. For the sense
0f the past is a function of consciousness for all practi—
cal purposes; and the only directly valid past, the only
past which can be apprehended first—hand, is that which

the mind perceives from its own memory of experience and

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

..‘

 

 

32
from the residues of the past still surviving in the present.
The objective, external past exists, but is fundamentally
imperceptible. How deeply James drank from his brother's
well of pragmatism is clear when his practice is turned
into theory.

A more useful assessment is John Henry Raleigh's essay
on the three kinds of time in the English novel.32 Accord—
ing to Raleigh, the novel is involved perhaps more than any
other form "with the dialectic between man and time and/or
history," balancing between the subjective individual sense
of time and the more objective collective measure of his—
tory (43). Using Nicholas Berdyaev's formulations, Raleigh
distinguishes in the English novel cosmic time (the cycle
of days, seasons, life and death), historical time (linear
chronology) and existential time ("an extreme form of in—
dividualism" which makes the sense of time totally subjec-
tive). The Victorian time—sense is almost strictly linear,
with little cyclic recurrence or, "despite the preoccupation
of the nineteenth-century with the past," little truly
"acute sense of time" or "deep sense of history" (45).
Dickens, Trollope and Thackeray suspend the time convention
of the novel at will; "their time convention was vague and
loose as compared, for example, to the rigorously observed
'continuous present' of the late James" (46). Victorians
lack "that more profound sense of the past," the "obsession
of modern man that the past is continually impinging on the

present and assuming the proportions of a nightmare" (47).

 

 

 

 

 

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Jams,however, exercised an early form of that modern
sense of the past:

James was one of the first novelists to take

time seriously and to make it an implicit part

of his work. Preeminently in James things

happen in time. In the typical James novel,

meaning a late novel, all the psychic action

is seen as the relentless unfolding of time,

minute by minute, hour by hour, year by year,

within the mind or sensibility of an individual.

History or the sense of the past likewise

begins to appear in the novels of James. James

of course, did not have the historical imagina-

tion of his friend Henry Adams with its concep—

tion of man's past as a construct of great forces

bearing down on the present. Nevertheless, it is

history that plays, generally, a major role in

the motivation of all James's novels and it is

history that becomes an obsessional preoccupation

in his late novels. )
mfleigh's use of the term "history" here seems loose when
appUed to James's sense of the past, but his observations
mm essentially correct. He would be more accurate, I think,
ifkm would take the formulation for James directly from his
smure: "Berdyaev makes no distinction between the time-
smme and the historical-sense, taking them both to be
epmnfic manifestations of the general attitude toward
tmmmral experience" (45). For in James, to sense time is
h>sense the past-present, to assimilate the present moment
asit immediately becomes the past, and to perceive the
mmtinuing influence of the immediate past--as far back as
mmmny and imagination can conceive it—-on the living mo-
ment. This quality of the sense of the past in James makes
hhna.key transitional figure from the linear Victorian
time~sense, which is much more properly called a "histori-

cav'sense that James's, to the Joycean fusion of cosmic

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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34

history and existential time into the huge nightmare of

 

Finnegan's Wake:
James's time-sense . . . is, in effect, a

secular version of existential or subjective
time. Ralph Pendrel of The Sense of the Past

———.—.—.——.——.

existential time-«he escapes from history.

Less obvious is the implicit sense of exis-

tential time in all of James's late work,

where there is no objective reality, and thus

no real time, outside of the mind of the in-

dividual . (51)
In his late fiction, therefore, "simple historical time,
built along the idea of progress, is breaking down and
cosmic and existential time are becoming the province of
the novelist, who is, simultaneously, developing an his-
torical sense and an immortal desire for an immersion in
the past" (51). The late novels are thus "a critical
stage" in the development of fiction, turning inward while
simultaneously providing a window to the outside by chang-
ing "the idea of time—history into a complex metaphor which
affords a glimpse of eternity" and by providing a "vision
of life, under which man, now time—obsessed, is, at cer—
tain moments, free of time and, at other moments, bears the
whole of human history, like a cross, upon his back"
(53-54). To test the truth of this formulation, one need
only recall Strether escaping the restrictions of time in
Paris or, on the other side, Isabel Archer feeling the
whole weight of Rome and human suffering. The novel is
turning from sociology to psychology in James, from the
Objective to the subjective. The sense of the past is

becoming in fact a "sense," a function of consciousness.

 

 

 

 

 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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35

The effect of this kind of time-sense on James's style

 

and technique is tremendous. The optimistic Victorian
novel, based on the assumption of progress, ended vaguely
and happily at "a conjunction of the present-future"; the
modern novel, however, ends at "a conjunction of the past—
present," and is consequently more ambiguous. The future
is not so certainly happy (Raleigh, 51, 53). Again, a brief
recollection of the endings of The Portrait gt: 3 Lady, The
Wings 9: the Dove, and The Ambassadors places James clearly
in the later group. Time is no longer objective and abso-
lute, but is subjective and relative:

Moreover, this internal time, while it flows

continuously, does not always move at a con-

stant rate. What happens in James is that

time is extricated from history, as, with the

clock stopped, James explores, often for pages,

the infinity of implications arising from an

instantaneous impression, and, in a sense,

James's late novels constitute a long essay on

the potential infinity of individual psychologi-

cal moments. (51)
A whole chapter may consist, as in The Golden Bowl, of the
thoughts and feelings of a character as he turns a doorknob;
01‘, as in The Portrait 9_f_.‘ _a_L Lady, the chapter may occupy
hours of pacing meditation. As a result "James's methods
and interests led straight to the central convention of the
twentieth-century novel, that is, 'the stream of conscious-
ness' or 'interior monologue'":

And this device, while its most obvious function

was to body forth the inner life in a fashion

impossible within the nineteenth—century novelistic

conventions, was also a way of objectifying time-

history in a manner unavailable to the Victorians:

first it permitted the illusion of a continuous
present (the existential), and, second, it permitted

 

 

 

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by reverie and memory, exploration of the

past and the juxta osition and confounding of

past with present the cosmic).
Except for certain rhetorical conventions of presentation,
this technique of portraying a stream of consciousness
continuously operating in the present but ranging from
reveries of the past to speculation on the future is James's
own technique. In fact, his presentation, when not intruded
upon by authorial comments, is perhaps more realistic than
many modern passages in stream of consciousness style.
For external reality breaks through the thoughts of a
Jamesian character a reasonable number of times, as James
records immediate perceptions as well as the digestion and
assimilation of experience.

The breaking in of reality upon such retrospection is
a major way James creates fine dramatic and pictorial scenes
in the late novels. Hisayoshi Watanabe, in a fine article
on "Past Perfect Retrospection in the Style of Henry James,"
discovers that "Drama takes place in James's novels when the
equilibrium of the internal world is broken by an action
from outside-—when the sensitive mind undergoes a new ex—
perience."33 A retrospective mind like Lambert Strether's,
exploring the impressions of the past, is suddenly snapped
back to the present by the intrusion of an external event,
changing the technique of representation from "picture" to
"scene" in a second. This pictorial technique, the por—
trayal of vision rather than action, is the almost in-

separable companion of retrospection in a Jamesian

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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37

 

novel-~though a character may on occasion recall dialogue

and dramatic action--and acts as preparation for drama by
reviewing the ground carefully for the reader.3ar In fact,
the technique of portraying retrospection solves a number

of problems for James. It disguises the usual "seated mass
of information after the fact" needed near the beginning

of a novel to fill in the past of the characters for the
reader (Prefaces, 320—21); instead of a long narrative
explanation or even a typical flashback, such as the one
touching Isabel Archer's childhood in Albany near the open-
ing of Th}; Portrait 9_f_ _a Lady, James can use careful retro-
spection in the mind of a character like Lambert Strether

to fill in the past without disturbing the illusion of a
continuous present. (The use of a ficelle like Maria Gostrey
to pump information is a useful alternate technique.) James
can control the reader's knowledge carefully with retro-
spection, revealing through the character's thoughts only as
much as he needs to prepare a planned effect (Watanabe,

166-67). He may, as in the opening of TheAmbassadors,

 

attempt a "synchronic introduction of all the main aspects
0f the narrative," or as he does later in the same work,
James may feed information piecemeal to the reader to build
up to a climactic perception, approaching his subject
through the well-known "crooked corridor."35 Even though
the action of the novel may stop during a character's
retrospection, the reader has the illusion that time is
passing and action is taking place; and the illusion of

reality is maintained without interruption by the fact that

 

 

 

 

if? '1'
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38

everything is related to the mind of the character, who may
exaggerate and misinterpret almost at will without calling
the verisimilitude of representation into question. Using
a central consciousness with a retrospective habit, James
gains both the illusion of a continuous present and the
freedom to range anywhere in time at any speed.

The portrayal of consciousness and duration are much
more realistic through retrospection, which can create a

sense of existential or relative time if properly used.

 

Watanabe uses the smashing of the crystal in The Golden
Bowl as the finest example. The Prince has been present in
the room with Fanny and Maggie for an undetermined period
of time; neither the ladies nor the reader are certain how
long. Consequently his opening remark breaks into Maggie's
and Fanny's "absorption with a sharpness almost equal to
the smash of the crystal," and the reader is catapulted
from a past-perfect recording of the scene to the present
tense (Watanabe, 173). The switch in tenses produces more
than a connection; it fuses past and present into a dram-
atic stasis. Watanabe eXplains the distortions of the usual
time sense caused by the switch from retrospection to im—
mediate perception:

It is as if everything else happened at the

same time with the destruction of the bowl,

and as if everything were standing still for

a moment around the shattered bowl. The re-

sult is one of those pictorial scenes of

which James was proud——or perhaps rather of a

Photograph stopping and holding a moment of
sudden action. (173)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

.1

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39

The scene . . . gives the effect of double image
mentioned earlier. With the past perfect and

the past functioning together, one image over—
laps another . . . There is a psychological

truth in the technique--it reproduces the way we
perceive things at a "great" moment when our at-
tention is concentrated, with images coming to

us overlapped. As it is actually perceived, time
does not appear homogeneous; it is felt at some
times thick, and at other times thin. (175)

 

The proper manipulation of tenses, then, can represent the
changing perceptions of time in a character. Almost by

definition, the past perfect tense connects past and present,

 

or deep past with shallower past, providing a moving time
frame for the author. The author of Roderick Hudson, com-
plaining in the preface about its ineffective presentation
of the lapse of time, did not use this framework to vary
the rate of presentation, so "his time scheme elapses at
the same monotonous pace" (Watanabe, 175). James later
solves the problem of the reader's sense of time elapsing
in the novel, that is, with the same technique that en-
hances his portrayal of consciousness.

One of the most striking results of this sense of time
in James, this continuous apprehension of the past merging
with the present, is the constant concentration required of
the reader--a foreshadowing of what Faulkner and Joyce would
require. For James's late prose style uses a complex web of
time-referents--numbers of adverbs, the sense for which
James calls "1:3 literary sense" (M, II, 214-15);
subordinate and coordinate conjunctions and prepositions

setting up chronological relationships, and successions of

 

 

 

 

 

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Mn:

 

 

..,

 

 

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m

 

"that's" connecting clauses with chronologically separate

40

or disjunctive events; intransitive verbs with carefully
controlled tenses, and transitive verbs with their action
stopped by passive voice; and numbers of infinitives, par-

ticiples and gerunds--all establishing a "multiplicity of

 

relationships" the reader must often hold in suspension

until the sentence ends, much as in German (See Watt, 259-
60). The prose is not difficult to read in its components
so much as complex in the syntactical and chronological
relationships of its simple parts. Supplementing Ian Watt's
analysis of the introduction to 2113 Ambassadors, from which
I have been borrowing, R.W. Short defines the complexity of
a Jamesian sentence as a similar problem in referents. The
connective words build on one another, "the relating expres-

sions extend in every direction, like the arms connecting

 

the chemical elements in diagrams of molecules."36 The
sense of the past is clearly represented in these relation—
ships:

The referents tend to include all of the complex

consciousness of a character or situation achieved

up to the present moment. Yet the expressions are

truly connectives rather than summaries . . . New

units tend to contain elements of orientation with

a great deal, if not all, that has gone before. (80)
The supreme example for Short is a bit of dialogue from
1113 Sacred Fouht: "You after all then now don't?" Aside
from the essential subject and verb, the words are all
referents-—"after all" summarizing what has gone before,
"now" bring it up to date, and "then" (like the word

"therefore" in this case) indicating the logical relationship

 

 

 

 

 

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41

 

between the chronological elements. But there are many more
examples. The ending of T_h_e Eggs pf 1h_e_ D__o_ve connects

past, present and future in one sentence: "We shall never
be again as we were." Even Strether's "there we are" end-
ing _T_h£ Ambassadors is not a simple statement of present

fact alone, but acts as a concentrated summary of all that
has occurred up to this point in time, a compressed expres—
sion of his sense of the Paris past. James has made the
relations which never truly end, as he admits, nevertheless
appear to stop for a moment, framing a point of stasis which
captures like a portrait the whole history that has gone be-
fore.

Virtually any of these major areas--style, structure,
characterization, theme, technique——can be treated at length
in terms of their relation to the sense of the past in
James. So far only isolated articles on single areas, such
as I have been quoting, have appeared, or treatments too
general or incomplete to be comprehensive. James's style
is still virtually untouched except for articles by Short,
Watt, Watanabe, David Lodge, and oblique treatments by the
major scholars of his work.37 Treatments of James's use
of the French Revolution and the Catholic Church, of the
relation between James and Hawthorne, and of James's ex—
patriation have filled in small corners of the picture of
his sense of the past, but no broad canvas has been
finished.38 W.F. Wright has a good short subchapter on

"The Present-Past" in The Madness 9_f_ Art, and notes passim

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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42

 

the importance of the sense of the past in James, but uses
far too few works for comprehensive coverage. Likewise

Osborn Andreas has a whole chapter on "The Sense of the

 

Past" in Henry James and the Expanding Horizon, and while
his treatments of nine stories are piercing, they are too
much like plot summaries to act as more than an outline of

James's use of the sense of the past as a theme. James's

 

techniques in creating a sense of the past are left virtually
untouched. Several fine critics of the past, such as Lyon

Richardson and Herbert Read, have made interesting general

 

comments on the sense of the past in James, but few have
tackled the topic in depth.39

Edward Stone, apparently the only graduate student
rash enough to nibble on the huge topic before me, wisely
limited himself to a fairly theoretical treatment of James
and Einstein's theory of relativity, avoiding "critical
judgments about character motivation peg; §_e_" which "would
therein assign my own study primarily to the realm of

"40

literary appreciation. He nevertheless gives fine treat-

ments, even from a strictly literary viewpoint, of The

 

Princess Casamassima, Th3 Tragic _Mgsg, the late novels, and
several intermediate works. But his somewhat non—literary
viewpoint also causes him to overlook the breadth of James's
sense of the past, as he claims that the sense of the past
has a negligible role in such works as fig American, _T_h_e
Portrait 5E _a_i _I_._§._c_1_y, and what Maisie _K_n_e_v_v--novels which are

N

important, if not central, to the present study. But I

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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43

 

cannot begin to claim a comprehensive study either; my re—
search has only convinced me of the magnitude of the task,
and the chapters which follow represent merely a partial
completion of the undertaking. This introduction, at least,
should provide some measure of the breadth of the field.
Chapter II, on the sense of the past as it helped create
realism from romance throughout James's career, and

Chapter III, on the relation of the sense of the past to the
lifelong international theme, are two major increments to—
ward a full study, I hope, and combine thorough treatment
of the tOpics selected with as great a representative range
of James's work and thought as possible.

In concluding this measurement of the topic, I can only
point out more that needs to be done: a complete examina-
tion of the use of time of day and the seasons in James's
fiction, factors which he felt were very important to an
understanding of Balzac and Hawthorne (The flag (_a_: Fiction,
71); a study of James's characters, the setting up of their
past relations to one another, as the notes to The M
T_ov_v_e_r_ particularly reveal the process, and the development
of his characters in time; the use of ficelles and ana—
chronistic characters as figures representing the sense of
the present and the sense of the past, respectively, to a
main character—-Maria Gostrey and Waymarsh play these roles
to Strether, Henrietta Stackpole and Madame Merle play them
to Isabel Archer; the use of anachronistic narrators, as in

"Maud Evelyn" and "The Tone of Time"; the centrality of the

 

 

 

 

 

mu

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

:Fr-f’

44
sense of the past as a producer of contrast, which James
considered essential to all fiction (Prefaces, 198; Eggs;
M, 291); a more thorough study than Andreas' of the

41 and

sense of the past as an element in James's themes;
finally, an examination of James's phenomenal memory, fond—
ness for childhood experiences, and preference for working

42 Strangely for a

through reflection and retrospection.
follower of realism, James wrote the portion of Roderick

Hudson set in America while he was in Germany, and the

 

portion set in Italy while in America, having "in general,
found it difficult to write of places under too immediate
an impression" of them.43 The most rewarding research

always turns up more questions than it answers. Here, then,

 

are a few clarifications and a lot more mysteries, hope-
fully adding both to the understanding and to the admira-

tion of a truly fine artist.

 

 

 

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Notes

lHenry Steele Commager, The American Mind (New Haven
and London, 1950), pp. 5-6. ' -

2

R.W.B. Lewis, T23 American Adam (Chicago, 1955),
p. 5.

3For a full discussion of industrial reality and the
agrarian ideal, see Leo Marx, _T_h§ Machine i_n t_h£ Garden
(New York, 1964), and compare Merrill Peterson, Th; Jefferson
Image i_n 33:12 American Mind (New York, 1960). Marx is es-
pecially good in treating the pastoral ideal in American
literature.

 

4Ra1ph H. Gabriel, The Course of American Democratic

_—————-—-———————

Thought (New York, 1956), p. 39.

5Henry Steele Commager, 313 Search Q; g Usable Past
_a__n_d_ Other Essays i_n Historiography (New York, 19675, p. 25.
All references to Comniager in the text are to T_h£ American
Mind, cited above.

 

6Lewis, pp. 123-24. For fuller accounts of these
"parties," see Lewis, pp. 7-8. The brief characterization
of Hawthorne's fight with the past is taken from Marius
Bewley, _Tpg Complex Fate (New York, 1954), PP. 58, 62-68.

f 7Quoted by Clinton S. Burhans, Jr., "Mark Twain's View

0 History " Publications _o_f the Michigan Academy of

Sciences, Arts and Letters, XiVI 19 , PP. 9-217
8Quoted by Lewis, p. 81; of. p. 8.

9T_}:1_e_ Search for a Usable Past, p. 27. Commager is
speaking, of course, of a particular kind of myth-making by
these authors. Writers like James, who found other uses
for the past, were successful well after the Civil War.
10
Osborne Andreas Henry James and the Expanding Horizon
(Seattle, 1948), p. 9’7. For the effect of a British estate
g2 Jlames, see F.O. Matthiesserz and Kenneth B3 Murdock,
e otebooks _o_f Henry James New York, 1947 9 p. '54. Here-
Ff'ter cited as Notebooks.

11Oct. 5, 1901, in Leon Edel, ed., The Selected Letters
giHenry James (London, 1956), pp. 234-35. Hereafter cited
as Edel, Letters.

 

 

45

 

 

 

 

46

Jan. 1, 1900, in Percy Lubbock, ed., The Letters QT
Henry James (New York, 1920), I, p. 345. Hereafter cited
as Letters. To simplify references in the text, dates and
addressees of letters will be given only when these are im-
portant to the meaning of the passage quoted or to dating
developments in James's thought. Likewise ellipsis marks
will be omitted at the beginning and ending of quotations
within the text for smoother reading. Internal ellipsis
and ellipsis in single-spaced quotations, of course, will
be noted.

12

13or. Notebooks, pp. 101, 105-06; Letters, 1, p. 158;
and James's statement on the Howells canon, Letters, II,
p. 225.

14See Oscar Cargill's discussion of The Euro eans in
Th3 Novels 9:; Henry James (New York, 1961, pp. 62—72, for
a full account.

 

15Cf. John Henry Raleigh's analysis of Dickens and
Scott on this point in Time, Place _a_._n_d Idea (Carbondale,
Ills, 1968), Pp. 114-15, 127.

16Henry James, The Art o_f 1kg Novel, with an intro—
duction by R.P. Blacmr—Tfiew York and London, 1962), p. 224.
Since these are the collected prefaces to the 1907 New York
Edition of James's works, this volume will hereafter be
cited as Prefaces.

 

l7Prefaces, p. 121. Cf. pp. 165-68 and 250-51 on the
problem of an early American poet comparable to Jeffrey
Aspern, and on the possible existence of such "supersubtle
fry" as James makes his artists. Similarly, James even
justifies revising some of William‘s letters for publica—
tion, changing "Abe" Lincoln to "Abraham" because the
formal reference was allegedly more common in the family.
Letters, II, pp. 347—48.

. 18Henry James, "Middlemarch" (1873), The House pi;
Fiction, ed. Leon Edel (London, 1957). 1). T2 7.“

 

19"The Lesson of Balzac" (1905). ibid., p. 70.

ZOCf. Letters, II, pp. 237-38, 324-, ch Tolstoy and
Dostoevski. On James's use of detail, see Joseph Warren
Beach, {II—he Method 9; Henry James (Philadelphia, 1954),

p. xciv; F.O. Matthiessen, Henry James: TE Ma‘or Phase
New York, 1944), p. 30; Christof Wegelin, Th3 mage of
Europe in Henry James (Dallas, Tamas, 1958), p. 47; am

Ian Watt: "The First Paragraph of [1313 Ambassadors: An
Egplication," Essays jg Criticism, X (July, 1960), pp. 255..

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

”2..
a. v

 

 

 

47

 

2lHenry James, Th3 American Scene, with an introduction
and notes by Leon Edel (Bloomington, Ind., 1968), p. 182.
Cited hereafter as pp.

22Tpg Novels _ap_d_ Tales 3T Henry James (New York, 1907-
1917), H, Tie Wings QT pkg Dove, p. 342. This is of-course
the famous New York Edition of James's work referred to
passim in the text. All canonical works are cited from this
edition, unless otherwise specified, solely by volume number
and page reference to simplify documentation.

 

23"Henry James and the French Revolution," American
Quarterly, 17 (1965), pp. 724, 733.

24Quoted by Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame 9T
Mind (New Haven and London, 1957), p. xiii.

25Raleigh, pp. 112, 118, commenting on Sir Leslie
Stephen's article on "Sir Walter Scott," Hours Tn g Library
(London, 1907), I, pp. 186—229. There is a chance, of course,
that James read Stephen's article, but his theory of the
ideal past had already been long formulated by 1907, the
year the New York Edition appeared.

26See the preface Hawthorne wrote for the 1851 edition
of The House of the Seven Gables.

————___.————_~_—

   

27cr. Bewley, Tpp Complex Fate, pp. 57, 62, 68.

28See Bewley's long treatment of Hawthorne and James
in 91g Complex Fate for a fuller discussion, and compare
James's remarks in his famous 1879 essay on Hawthorne.
Compare also my long treatment of James and romance in
Chapter II, pp. 56-118.

 

 

29Walter E. Wright, "The Present—Past," T_h_e Madness of
All (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1962), pp. 168-72; Andreas,"1‘he _—
Sense of the Past," pp. _c_i_t_., pp. 97—106; and Edward Stone,
"Henry James and His Sense of the Past," Diss. Duke 1949,
passim, but mainly the last chapter on The Sense of the Past.

3OStudies pp Human Time (Baltimore, 1956), p. 550.

31T.S. Eliot, "Henry James," Literature 11p America
(Cleveland, 1957), ed. Philip Rahv, p. 227.

32"The English Novel and the Three Kinds of Time,"
RE 313., pp. 43-55. Compare the fine article in the same
V°1ume on "Henry James and the Poetics of Empiricism,"
PP. 4-22, and my treatment of its implications in Chapter
III, Part 5., "The Major Phase," pp. 260-63.

L

 

 

 

 

 

1",.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

48
33American Literature, XXXIV (1962—63), p. 177.

34David W. Beams, in an article on "Consciousness in
James’s 'The Sense of the Past,” Criticism, 5 (1963), p. 150,
points out for example that "As Ralph comes into relation
with the portrait James forsakes the scenic for the 'picture'
technique, involving the more radical center of conscious—
ness. Past and present are thus sharply discrete in method."

35Ian Watt, "The First Paragraph of Tpp Ambassadors:
An Explication," Essays _i_p_ Criticism, X (July, 1960),
pp. 273-74. James uses the term "crooked corridor" in the
Letters, 1, p. 322, a metaphor for the indirect approach
to dramatic material. Elizabeth Stevens-on uses the term
as ther title for her work, Th3 Crooked Corridor: A Study
g Henry James (New York, 1949).

36"The Sentence Structure of Henry James," American
Literature, XVIII (1946), p. 80.

37See David Lodge, Language _o_f_‘ Fiction (London and New
York, 1966); and the well known standards of Jamesian
criticism, already cited, by Beach and Matthiessen.

38In addition to Bewley's well known study of James
and Hawthorne, see Wright Morris, "Use of the Past: Henry
James," T_hg Territory Ahead (New York, 1963), pp. 93-112;
R.P. Blackmur, "The American Literary Expatriate" and
"The Loose and Baggy Monsters of Henry James," T_h_e_ Lion and
tilgHoneycomb (New York, 1955), Pp. 63-76 and 274-87; J0EE
Raskin, "Henry James and the French Revolution," American
Quarterly, 17 (1965), pp. 724-33; and Robert M. Slabey,
"Henry James and 'The Most Impressive Convention in All
History'," Trpprican Literature, xxx (1958-59), pp. 89-102.

 

 

3gsee Richardson, ed. Henry James (New York, 1941),
American Writers Series, p. lxxxix, and Scott, M_en_ 93‘.
Letters (London, 1916), pp. 91-92, quoted by Edward Stone,
92. 2%” pp. 4-5. For a good summary of James criticism
up to Andreas (1948), see Beach's review of scholarship in
the introduction to The; Method 2; Henry James, pp. cviii ff.

40"Henry James and His Sense of the Past," Diss. Duke
1949, p. 6.

“Edwin Bowden takes up some of the slack in The Themes
93 Henry James (New Haven, 1956), but focuses on the use of
the "visual arts" in James.

_ 42These phenomena have been noted by James's major
blogI'alpher, Leon Edel, but not analyzed deeply.

43Prefaces, pp. 6-7, 27; cf. Notebooks, p. 135.

 

 

  

   

(,

m:
7.1, ,

.121

 

 

 

m‘ .

m!

483

 

CHAPTER II

THE SENSE OF THE LITERARY PAST

Since James's conception of the past is so imagina-
tive, his sense and use of past literature are far more
important in his fiction than his use of facts and histor-
ical allusions. For even his historical sense of a place
is shaped as much by novels as by history books.1 London
is made up of sites "of which I have read in all old
English novels. So does one move all the while here on
identified ground" (Letters, I, 54). Rural England, too,
is in "all things suggestive of the opening chapters of
half-éremembered novels, devoured in infancy" (I, 28).
Britain has a literary as well as a geographical map for
James. Brighton means Thackeray, and when James is near
Piccadilly he likes "to think that Thackeray's Curzon Street

9

in which Becky Sharp, or rather Mrs. Rawdon Crawley, had

lived, was not much further off."2

Likewise, "fifty other
London neighbourhoods speak to me almost only with the

voice, the thousand voices, of Dickens" (Prefaces, 212).

 

Visiting Scotland for the second time, James approaches a
castle at twilight in a carriage and finds himself suddenly

"in a Waverly Novel" (Notebooks, p. 36). Some places remind

49

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘w

 

 

'n
1.“.

 

 

u.

 

 

 

Fri

him of previous American pilgrims; English scenes often sug-

50

gest Irving and Hawthorne, and Italian ones recall Hawthorne
and Howells.3 America itself has at least one layer of
literary history for him. The Hudson Valley is Irving;
Concord is Emerson, Thoreau and Hawthorne.4 Indians at the
Capitol, "for a mind fed betimes on the Leatherstocking
Tales," foreshorten a whole era of American history (AS,
364). Even Florida has shades of the "old Spanish Dons"
and "passionate Creole beauties," Seminoles and Everglades,
recalled from a boyhood romance called T_h_e_ WEE 213$}. (AS,
437). Discussing the effect of James Russell Lowell on the
observer of New England, James remarks that his works give
the area "the direct literary consecration without which

even the most charming seats of civilization go through

 

life awkwardly and ruefully, after the manner of unchristened
children" (AS, 69). And when James sees a Pennsylvania
country house in a winter snow storm, he articulates the
question that typifies his sensibility: "What was it con-
fusedly, almost romantically, like, what 'old order' com-
memorated in fiction and anecdote?" (gs, 302). What
Margaret Fuller said of Longfellow is just as applicable
to James: "he sees life through the windows of litera—
ture."5

Van Wyck Brooks, noting the same phenomenon, claims
that James had in fact read too much literature, causing
him to perceive life--especially English life--in a very

idealized way.6 In his later years, when he could not get

 

 

 

51
out, James admits some replacement of life with literature,
but in a very special way: ". . . reading tends to take for
me the place of experience--or rather to become itself
(pour qui sait lire) experience concentrated" (Letters, II,
11). The fact that James assimilates literature so thoroughly
that it becomes experience naturally colors his perceptions
of reality. But James also travelled a great deal, walked
and observed incessantly, and knew London social life as
well firsthand as through literature. Furthermore, his
reading was broad and, as F.O. Matthiessen remarks, almost

7 so it is more likely that James's

oppressively contemporary;
reading supplemented his experience, enriched and concen-
trated it for him, firmly grounded him in his contemporary
world, than that it distorted his immediate perceptions and
romanced him back to another era.

I do argue, nevertheless, that James's particular form
of "realism" was tremendously affected by so deep an acquaint-
ance with literature. Brooke's charge that James "was to
become a novelist, in short, by studying other novelists"
(24), if not interpreted as depriving him of all direct ex—
perience, is essentially correct. The way James handles
concrete experience is inevitably but exquisitely guided by
what he has learned from other novelists, has refined and
incremented, and by his knowledge of the conventions of past
literature. The finest novelists become finer by such
study. James is outstanding in the depth and range of his

reading, and the broad use to which he put it.

 

 

   

 

 

 

 

I‘ ,
up

 

 

52
Nor surprisingly, some of James's characters exhibit a
similar literary education influencing their sense of the
past. Hubert Lawrence, the young parson in m _a_ng £3131,
remarks that "Your real lover of Rome oscillates with a kind
of delicious pain between the city in itself and the city in
literature. They keep for ever referring to each other and

8 The narrator of "A Passionate

bandying you to and fro."
Pilgrim" (1871), an American in London for the first time,
finds everything familiar due to his schooling in English
literature: "I had seen the coffeeroom of the Red Lion
years ago, at home——at Saragossa, Illinois——in books, in
visions, in dreams, in Dickens, in Smollett, in Boswell"
(XIII, 335). Arriving at a feudal village, he remarks that
"Just the scene around me was the England of one's early
reveries. . . . It was this mild moist air that had blown
from the pages of the poets" (XIII, 352). He and Searle
see "the" 'village green' of the tales of our youth" (364),
"Tennyson's Talking Oak" (367), and a panorama of familiar
scenery, as if taking a grand tour not of England but of
English literature:

We walked over, some seven miles . . . and all

through such a mist of local colour that we felt

ourselves a pair of Smollett's pedestrian heroes

faring tavernward for a night of adventures. . . .

Going further yet we entered the russet town--

where surely Miss Austen's heroines, in chariots

and curricles, must often have come a-shopping . . .

(365)
Isabel Archer has a comparable acquaintance with at least
the nineteenth-century English classics (III, 178). 311111..

larly in "A London Life" (1888), Laura Wing is reminded of

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

W

53
Johnson, Goldsmith, and Dickens in the great city (X,
354-55); of "the works of Mrs. Gore" by Lady Davenant's
tortured use of French (282); and of nursery tales by the
schoolroom and Shakespeare's comedies by the garden (290).
In many of these cases James is attempting to show the
affinity of the American mind for English life as the re-
sult of the common literary heritage-~and also the miscon-
ceptions such a preparation may involve. Clement Searle's
pathological sense of the past in "A Passionate Pilgrim,"
which will be discussed in connection with the international
theme, is a good example; likewise Isabel Archer's romantic
misconceptions are in part a result of her kaleidoscopic
acquaintance with Browning, Eliot, and others (III, 46).

Laura Wing has been brainwashed somewhat too. She does not

 

object to dowerhouses as unjust to widows like Lady Davenant,
unlike the more perceptive Fleda Vetch in Th3 Spoils fl
Poynton, due to the fact that "there had been dowerhouses in
the novels, mainly of fashionable life, on which her later
childhood was fed" (X, 270). The literary sense of the past
instilled in these characters has explicitly distorted their
Judgment-—a recognition by James that casts further doubt on
Brooke's charge that his perception was greatly blunted by
literature, for James was obviously well aware of the danger.
James is hardly criticizing the reading of literature,
01‘ course, or its role in forming a sense of the past; his
criticism concerns misunderstanding and misuse of literary

versions of the past. Many of his characters with literary

 

 

 

"'2

 

 

 

 

54
sense do not have such distorted views. A sense of litera-
ture is generally, in fact, a positive indication of proper
development. In addition James gains a touch of verisi—
militude by allowing his educated people to discuss or al-
1ude to literature on occasion. For a character to discuss
a play or compare his situation to the plot of previous
novels or plays can help create an illusion of reality if
properly handled. A character with a consciousness of lit-
erature may seem more outside literature by having it. If
he has a sense of past and present literature, if he has a
sense of place and history and culture, then his conscious—
ness begins to approach the variety and complexity of an
actual person's, and he may even begin to represent his age.
Allusions to literature may be very artificial instead, of
course, a fault James's early works sometimes suffer from.
According to one astonished reader, for example, his early
heroines "seemed to have read all Balzac in the cradle"

(Letters, I, 8).

 

As James continues to write, however, his use of allu-
sions to and conventions of past literature becomes more
and more refined, and even his early practice is not incom-
petent. When he uses a first person narrator, a technique
he was later to call the "abyss of romance" when used in
long works, he can incorporate allusions fairly well be—
cause the form allows so much freedom (Prefaces, 320).
Nevertheless, the result often makes the narrator seem

artificial, as in the opening remarks of "The Pension

 

 

 

 

55
Beaurepas" (1879), in which the young man testifies to his
reading of French writers:
I was an admirer of 'La Chartreuse de Parme',
and easily believed one couldn't do better
than follow in the footsteps of its author.
I remembered, too, the magnificent boarding-
house in Balzac' s 'Pere Goriot'--the 'pension
bourgeoise des deux sexes et autres,‘ keptb
Madame Vaquer, nee de Conflans.'9 (XIV, 393)y
This speech helps characterize the narrator through its mild
humor, of course, and parallels James's story with earlier
ones, but is not so subtle a reference as his later works
use. The device is too obvious. Allusions work a little
better when they occur later in the action of stories told
more objectively. Consider, for example, "The Siege of
London" (1882), when further along in the story two men
similarly discuss their situation in terms of French
literature:
"You're in the position of Olivier de
Jalin in 'Le Demi-Monde' ," Waterville remarked.
"In 'Le Demi—Monde'," Littlemore was not
quick at catching literary allusions.
"Don’t you remember the play we saw 1
Paris? Or like Don Fabrics in 'L'Aventuriere."
A bad woman tries to marry an honourable man,
who does n't know how bad she is, and they who
do know step in and push her back." (XIV, 259)
By using allusions in this manner, James is able not only
to characterize Waterville as better acquainted with litera-
ture than Littlemore, but also to maintain verisimilitude
even while alerting readers that he is dealing with a par-
ticular typical literary situation. Once the reader knows
the usual story, as in this passage, he is better able to

judge James's unconventional treatment--why the gentlemen

 

 

 

 

 

   

..x

 

h,

 

 

 

 

56

who know Nancy Headway's dubious past do not in fact step
in and keep her from marrying Sir Arthur Demesne.10

In fighting the tendency of allusions and conventions
to destroy verisimilitude, James learns to make them posi-
tive assets by a method that has not been generally recog—
nized. Nearly every reader of James has heard the comment
by T.S. Eliot that his mind was so fine that no idea could
violate it. The statement is primarily a compliment, I
think, meaning that James represents or portrays in his
fiction rather than abstracts or allegorizes. But
R.W.B. Lewis's reversal of the statement is more accurate:
that James had "an imagination so vigorous that no idea
could fail to be violated by it." (155). James's mutation
of the American Adam motif in connection with the interna-
tional theme, and the permutation described in "The Siege
of London," are only two of dozens of examples. The tech-
nique is so widespread, I suspect that what produces
"realism" in James——the illusion of reality sustained by
the reader's continuing suspension of disbelief--is prim—
arily the violation of the conventions of past literature,
particularly the conventions of the romance. His use of a
single consistent vieWpoint and the portrayal of conscious-
ness are strong components of his verisimilitude as well,
Of course, but these too are violations of previous prac-
tices by writers of typical romances. The technique that
I 8m primarily describing is the deliberate, explicit set-

ting up of a convention, followed by just as deliberate a

 

 

 

 

 

n

 

 

 

 

57

violation of it. The technique, according to James, springs
from the artist's "need to cultivate almost at any price
variety of appearance and experiment, to dissimulate like—
nesses" (Prefaces, 276). A simple way to hide parallels is
to point out contrasts, to set up the typical situation and
then give it a new twist. James's use of this technique
reflects a very important but often neglected truth--that
a new literary movement such as realism owes a great deal
to the movements immediately preceding it, if only by
negating their central principles or conventions through
youthful rebellion.

Since the conventions of romance partake so strongly
of the past (the very nature of conventions), James's set-
ting up of those conventions only to break them creates
realism by establishing a contrast between the romantic
past and the created present of the novel. A situation
seems real and current, that is, partly because it differs
in some important way from the stereotypical situations of
past literature.11 The reader's sense of the past is used
to convince him that what he is reading is a portrayal of
the present. In addition the setting up of the conventions
connects the .past with the present by delineating the
parallels as well as the contrasts, by associating the two
in the reader's mind. Life is different "now," but not so
greatly different from life "then." James's sense of the
present and his portrayal of it generally take shape as a

Comparison and contrast to his sense of the past.

 

 

 

   

 

nu

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

58
This device of contrasting past and present links James
evmimore closely with Hawthorne, adding to the validity of
Thrius Bewley's conclusions on their affinity. For as Lewis
so accurately notices, "Hawthorne conveyed the idea of
novelty by setting it in an ancient pattern: allowing it
thereby to be recognized," just as James emphasizes his

12

originality by setting up and breaking conventions. And

Thwthorne defines romance in a manner that perfectly paral-
lels his practice with James's linking of the past and
present:

The point of View in which this tale comes under

the Romantic definition lies in the attempt to

connect a bygone time with the very present that

is flitting away from us. It is a legend pro—

longing itself, from an epoch now gray in the

distance, down into our own broad daylight, and

bringing along with it some of its legendary mist,

which the reader, according to his pleasure, may

either disregard, or allow it to float almost im-

perceptibly about the characters and events for

the sake of a picturesque effect.
James would not consider the attempt to link the past and
Hm present as necessarily romantic, nor does he reach so
farinto the past for a picturesque effect, but the central
method James uses for turning romance into realism and con-
necting the past and the present is clearly carried forward
from Hawthorne.

Turning romance into reality is quite a trick and

develOps slowly, but the battle between the two begins With
his earliest works. Stories like "The Romance of Certain

Old Clothes," "A Problem," and "De Grey: A Romance" (1868),

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

u

 

 

 

59
to name only a few, are explicitly romantic, and almost
purely so. On the other hand, the plot of "My Friend
Bingham" (1867), in which a woman marries the man who
accidentally kills her son, is a concerted effort to fight
the romantic and the sentimental; love develops from lone-
liness and pity, and no child from the second marriage re-
places the first with trite poetic mercy. The word
"romance" occurs again and again in these works.13 But
generally the word is used in an attempt to dispel any
romantic aura, as in "Poor Richard" (1867), in which a
character remarks for the benefit of the reader that "This
is not romance, it's reality" (Talia, I, 224). Even this
early James sets up conventions, as in "Osborh's Revenge"
(1868), in which the old revenge motif is explicitly denoted
"quite romantic. It would do in a novel" (T_a_l_e__§, II, 43).
But he does not allow the convention to govern the story.
He adds psychological depth and ironic twists to make the
story new. The would—be avenger discovers his revenge is
misdirected and contemplates suicide, and his revenge is

inadvertently carried out by another person (Tales, II, 57).

 

Similarly the heroine in "Gabrielle de Bergerac" (1869)
considers the time-worn possibility of giving up her beloved
and going to a convent—~but she does not go (T_a_l_e§_, II,

158). With so much practice on revenge stories and problems
that families pose to marriage, James seems to be warming up
for _Th_e_ American.

He needs to practice. His method is far from perfected,

 

 

 

 

 

 

:w

 

 

 

.
Ii

 

60
and generally just produces a romance with a few curious
twists. Roderick Hudson (1875) seems far more romantic
than realistic, with its eXplicitly romantic symbolism,
conventional eavesdropping, coincidences and pastoral set-
tings, and apparent suicide ending the work.14 The climax
is underplayed compared to most romances and left ambigu-
ous, but when a character remarks just before the final
scene that "It's like something in a bad novel" (I, 511),
the reader is more inclined to agree than to contrast

worse ones. The American (1876-7) also comes off as an

 

unusual hybrid of romance and realism. The coincidence of
Valentin's duel and the broken engagement is too obviously
a convenience in the plot, allowing Newman to learn the
whereabouts of the family skeleton. Madame de Cintre's
choice of the convent and her passionate farewell scene
with Newman are highly romantic, even though James fights
the old conventions by making her reasons for the choice
slightly less than typical (II, 418-19). Newman's night
meeting with Mrs. Bread, the trusty old English servant,

is Gothic romance relieved only by caricature that may not
be intended (424, 456), and his choice of celibacy seems
very sentimental and conventional given his rather cavalier
initial attitude toward seeking a wife (476). T_h_e_ American
is like many earlier tales; its stroke of realism, at least
in the plot, comes mainly at the end-~ref1ecting the fact
that James is more realistic in his conceptions than in

his execution, and revealing that James conceives his

 

 

 

 

'M

|.m

 

 

61

reafistic fiction primarily as a contrast to romance. Con—
trastis his method. Newman thinks of the perfect romantic
ending for him and Claire, so of course James does not allow
it to happen (424).16 And mercifully, Claire has not simply
jilted Newman, "since injuries of this order are the stalest
stuff of romance" (Prefaces, 24). Neither does James allow
Newman a Gothic revenge for his wound and for the nearly
typical but ambiguous "murder" committed by the Bellegardes:
"both his wrong and his right would have been in these cases
of too vulgar a type" (Prefaces, 24). Newman's refusal to
stoop to revenge is the central action toward which the
entire novel is constructed. James creates an anti-romantic
climax according to plan and succeeds in keeping the emo-
tional value pure romance would have, but he also discovers
that in most of the rest of his work he "had been plotting
arch-romance without knowing it" (Prefaces, 22, 25).

Since The American is the novel over which James
puzzles most about the nature of romance and realism, its
preface provides a good key to his theory and practice of
both arts, and may establish a working definition of
"romance" long overdue in this discussion. James describes
the artist's love of each "value," the romantic and the
real, and claims that

The interest is greatest—~the interest of his

genius, I mean, and of his general wealth—~when

he commits himself in both directions; not quite

at the same time or to the same effect, of course,

but by some need of performing his whole possible

revolution, by the law of some rich passion in
him for extremes. (Prefaces, 51)

 

 

 

..x

..;‘,
Lh-

wet

 

 

62
The best artists, he goes on, do not deflect greatly in

either direction, but run a rich, mixed, middle course be-
tween the two.

James appreciates most cities like Baltimore,
fine combinations of the

"rich real and the rich romantic"
(AS, 322), and fiction like that of Balzac or even Howells,
in which the "romance of the real and

. . . the charm of
the common" balance the creation (Letters, II, 224).

Surely
James himself produces the same kind of fiction, finding .
"the extraordinary in the ordinary, the heroic in the anti-

heroic."l'7 Yet what is "romantic" or what is "real" in an

art that is based on effects, that is governed by the illu-
sion that can be created? James goes through dozens of
definitions of romance, rejecting those based only on the
presence of conventions such as tigers and "beautiful
wicked women," and disclaiming also the idea that romance

is simply the portrayal of the pursuit of danger (Prefaces,
32).

 

Neither of these formulations is broad enough. Nor
does the type of characters represented determine the genre.

A work may have a romantic heroine—-James suggests Madame

Bovary, but Isabel Archer would do as well--yet not

resemble a romance at all if the record of her adventures

is true to life (which is just as hard to determine as a

definition of romance). He can find only one definition

of romance with universal validity, described in the

following well-known passage:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

F________________________________nnnnnn

63

The only general attribute of projected romance
that I can see, the only one that fits all its
cases, is the fact of the kind of experience
with which it deals-—experience liberated, so to
speak; experience disengaged, disembrdiled, dis-

encumbered, exempt from the conditions that we
usually know to attach to it .

in a medium which relieves it,

. . and operating
interest,

in a particular
of the inconvenience of a related, a
measurable state, a state subject to all our
vulgar communities. The greatest intensity may
so be arrived at evidently——when the sacrifice
of community, of the 'related' sides of situa-
tions, has not been too rash. It must to this
end not flagrantly betray itself; we must even
be kept if possible, for our illusion, from sus—
pecting any sacrifice at all. The balloon of
experience is in fact of course tied to the
earth, and under that necessity we swing, thanks
to a rope of remarkable length, in the more or
less commodious car of the imagination; but it

is by the rope we know where we are, and from

the moment that cable is out we are at large and
unrelated:

we only swing apart from the globe-—
though remaining as exhilarated, naturally, as

we like, especially when all goes well. The art
of the romancer is, 'for the fun of it,’ insidi-
ously to cut the cable, to cut it without our
detecting him. (Prefaces, 33-4)

Th3 American, James notes, is made up of such "disconnected
mm.uncontrolled experience-~uncontrolled by our general
sense of 'the way things happen'-—which romance alone more
or less successfully palms off on us" (Prefaces, 34). The
conventions set up and broken in such works serve to deflect
the reader's suspicion that the events are not happening

as they would happen in the course of actual events, by

pointing out how unconventional the action is compared to

typical romances. The action may be highly improbable,

but if the artist can decoy the reader's sense of what is
likely, then his romance will have the same convincing

Quality as realism and preserve the emotional excitement of

 

 

 

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64
romance as well. On occasion the reader of James may be
unable to decide, early or late, whether a work is realistic
or is in fact a romance. For James is always at work be—
tween the two, and learns how to cut the cord quietly when-
ever it suits his purposes. T_h_e_ American is more success-
ful than most of James's early works in disguising romance
as reality: but it is not among those mature works in which
the conventions of romance abound but are consistently man-
ipulated, in which the reader is suspended between romance
and reality throughout the action yet always finishes with
the sense that he has witnessed solid experience.

The dozens of literary conventions which are violated,
often explicitly, in James, establish the importance of this
technique from the earliest to the latest periods. In addi—
tion to the early tales already mentioned, "Madame de Mauves"
(1874) provides a good example. Euphemia is taken to a
Gothic castle that "had battered towers and an empty moat,

a rusty drawbridge and a court paved with crooked grass-
grown slabs over which the antique coach-wheels of the
lady with the hooked nose seemed to awaken the echoes of
the seventeenth century" (XIII, 228). The deteriorating
state of the castle makes its romantic qualities very con-
temporary, especially when the reader learns that the
Mauves family is in need of money. Euphemia does not re-
main in the seventeenth century long. The lady with the
hooked nose turns out not to be a witch, breaking another

convention, but the American girl's only friend in the

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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65
place; the real schemers are the younger generation, who
plan to exploit her by marrying her money into the family.
Early in the English period The Princess Casamassima uses
one of these old literary conventions as a very destructive
myth, the idea that Hyacinth Robinson is the bastard son
of a British nobleman (V, 9-10). This fabrication, borrowed
from a novel, inflates his self—image and is ultimately
partly responsible for his suicide. Similarly, Miriam
Rooth is a very romantic figure in The Tragic Muse, but the
usual instant stage success does not materialize for her.
Trapped in an apparently unsavory kind of "A London Life"
(1888), unlike the idealized descriptions she has read in
fashionable novels, Laura Wing nevertheless does not "escape
and live in lodgings and paint fans" (X, 532). Every edi-
tor has his theory, his "little romance," about what "The
Aspern Papers" (1888) reveal of the relationship of the
poet to Juliana Bordereau—-a fact which remains a romantic
mystery. But the rest of the story is sordidly real. Al-
though previously in the best company, Juliana has had to
settle for visitors whose very names echo how far she has
dropped, and now she lives "obscurely in Venice . . . on
very small means, unvisited, unapproachable, in a seques-
tered and dilapidated old palace" (XII, 3).18 or romanti-
cally uncertain origin, she came abroad when sea travel was
almost heroic, and is supposed to be "too sacred for trivial
modernisms--too venerable to touch" (46-49, 68). Yet the

unscrupulous critic tries to swindle her out of her letters

 

 

 

 

 

 

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66

by romancing her niece in comically unconventional versions
of the garden scene in _Rpme_o gig Juliet and the immemorial
romantic gondola excursion (52, 79); Tina tries to bribe
the critic into marriage with the letters (133); and
Juliana herself is revealed as a "sarcastic profane cynical
old woman" who, believing there is "no more poetry in the
world,"‘stoops to the vindictive, grasping, virtual extortion
of money (71-5, 99).19

Even the later periods are laced with examples of such
manipulations of romantic conventions. What Maisie m
(1897) is hardly a romance, but the Dickensian caricature
Mrs. Wix, whose conversation is "an endless narrative, a
great garden of romance," could have walked right out of
one (XI, 27-28). Her character is explicitly patterned on
Mrs. Micawber, for she will "never, never, never desert
Miss Farange" (126). The sober reality is that she is
virtually the only one who will not, for one personal reason
or another, desert the child. Likewise in The Fines _o_f_ 3%
PER, Milly's sickness is by no means a fictional first and
has a definite romantic effect on the plot, yet no death
in the nineteenth century could be more common and real than
death by disease. James stretches the conventions by creating
his own particular heroism in her character, and by very
carefully handling her discovery that she is going to die.
to be sure to avoid any analogy with the medieval dream

Vision in his portrayal of Ralph Pendrel's excursion into

 

 

 

 

 

 

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the past (XXVI, 293). Yet he wants to retain his romantic
effect at the same time: "The 'romantic' of course has es-
sentially to be allowed for, but what on earth is the whole
thing but the pure essence of the romantic and to be bravely

faced and exploited as such?" (Notebooks, 366). Once again

 

I am reminded of Hawthorne in the fact that this "pure
essence of the romantic" is primarily an attempt to connect
the past with the present. The handling of Ralph's experience
as a drama of consciousness, and the deliberateness of his
stepping into the past, make the novel far from the old
dream vision yet not at all so unromantic as a case study.
Lastly, in his unfinished novel The Ivory Tower, James wants
in creating Graham Fielder "to steer clear of the tiresome
'artistic' associations hanging about the usual Anglo-Saxon
'brought up a'broad'; though only indeed so far as they are
tiresome" (XXV, 557-8). He avoids following his own con-
ventions of the international theme, that is, except as they
can be molded to fit the particular situation. He uses,

and perhaps sometimes abuses, conventions whenever and how-
ever they shit his purpose. Rosanna Gaw will come to visit
Graham first, not the reverse, in order to indicate Graham's
ability to draw her out of the ivory tower that social con-
ventions and her fear of being exploited have built (277).
To avoid staleness, there will be no trite complications in
Betterman's will (296). And for once Jane Austen's ironic
little "truth universally acknowledged" in Pride and Prejn:

dice, "that a single man in possession of a good fortune

 

 

 

   

 

 

 

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must be in want of a wife," will not be acknowledged in
quite the usual manner. Horton Vint assumes, like the
mothers in Austen's work, that a rich young man like Graham
must be after a spouse. Not so, says Graham, and he ap—
parently means it (204). Whether or not James would have
provided Graham a wife had he finished the novel is debat—
able; but one thing is sure--he would have teased as much
mileage out of the convention as possible through Rosanna
and Cissy before turning it loose.20

These short examples, of course, only establish the
ubiquity and variety of the habit; they do not reveal the
subtlety and development of the technique. Using "The
Madonna of the Future," "The Turn of the Screw," T_h_g

Portrait g_f_ _a_ Lady and The Ambassadors for somewhat closer

 

analysis, I would like to show the progress and depth in
James's use of conventions, to show how superbly his sense
of past modes shapes his materials into a synthesis of
romance and realism.

"The Madonna of the Future" (1873) is one of those
early tales in which James had the most trouble separating
and remolding "the American romantic" and "the American
real" (Prefaces, 193-4). Somewhat like "The Turn of the
Screw," the story has a narrator—-"H___," known as "a
clever man who had seen much of men and had a great stock
of reminiscences"-~who is recalling a tale of his youth
and Italy (XIII, 437-38). This device places the tale in

the past, like many romances, in the hope of putting the

 

 

 

   

 

 

 

 

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69
reader's suspicion off guard, of achieving objective dis-
tance. A reader is more willing to believe something hap-
pened in a time less familiar to him or faded by memory,
since he has less sense of the way things happened then.
The use of a narrator allows any romance or exaggeration
'uabe charged to his memory rather than the author's. Like-
wise not revealing H_____'s full name, though a standard de-
vice,i£;intended to give more verisimilitude to the narra-
nnras a figure; the mystery about his identity suggests
that the name would be immediately recognized if revealed
(I think of Howells, for example, just for the romance of
Inographical anecdote). Even when James is being utterly
mnwentional, in other words, he uses conventions designed
'u>preserve both the interest of romance and the conviction
of realism.

More striking is his alternation of romantic convention
wiuimore sober realism in the tale. The narrator is wan-
dering about Florence on a dark but moonlit night seeking to
see the city's beauty in the romantic soft light of the past
rather than the harsh light of the present. He meets a man
wearing "some fashion of black velvet tunic (as it seemed)
and with a mass of auburn hair, which shimmered in the moon-
light. escaping from a little beretto of the
einquecento. . . .":

He was romantic, fantastic, slightly unreal.

Hovering in that consecrated neighbourhood

he might have passed for the genius of

aesthetic hospitality-~if the genius of
aesthetic hospitality wasn't commonly some

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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shabby little custode who flourishes a calico
pocket-handkerchief and o enly resents the
divided franc. (XIII, 459))

 

James immediately breaks the romantic charm of the mysteri-
ous figure by a reference to his contemporary materialistic
counterpart. The pattern repeats itself as the two con-
verse. The stranger speaks eloquently of the romantic
night and the past:

I've known Florence long, sir, but I've never
known her so lovely as to-night. It's as if the
ghosts of her past were abroad in the empty
streets. The present is sleeping; the past
hovers about us like a dream made visible.

Fancy the old Florentines strolling up in couples
to pass judgment on the last performance of
Michael, of Benvenuto! The plainest burgher of
them, in his cap and gown, had a taste in the
matter. That was the prime of art, sir. The

sun stood high in heaven, and his broad and

equal blaze made the darkest places bright and the
dullest eyes clear. We live in the evening of
time. (439-40)

 

Theobald, the romantic painter, continues to combine his

 

idealizaticn of the past with the soft night, feeling "as
if the moonlit air were charged with the secrets of the
masters, and as if, standing here in religious attention,

wenught-awell, witness a revelation!" (44o). Suddenly

 

the more realistic narrator has a revelation of his own,

however, which breaks the spell the painter has been

 

 

weaving for the reader: "The mystery was suddenly solved;
my friend was the most characteristic of compatriots," an
American, whose romanticism is the national disease of

”the famished race" (441), The letdown drops even further

as the artist mentions the custom of money patronage of the

 

   

 

 

 

   

 

 

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71

arts: "For a moment I was alarmed. Was his irrepressible
passion mere Yankee enterprise?--was he simply a desperate
brother of the brush who had posted himself here to extort
an 'order' from a sauntering tourist?" (441). But no;
Theobald is a genuine romantic, raving on and on about the
lack of atmosphere in America and the exile of American
artists from the magic circle of beauty, until the narrator
bursts the rhetoric with irony: "You seem fairly at home
in exile . . . and Florence seems to me a very easy Siberia,"
he remarks, going on to give the artist very realistic ad—
vice about working instead of complaining (442). The nar-
rator's irony breaks in again as Theobald continues to
rant, bringing the reader's conception of the self-styled
uncommercial artist down to earth with such barbs as "I
had begun to feel unequal to the society of a genius of this
heroic strain," and with his sceptical desire to see the
artist "by common daylight" (444). Theobald disappears at
the first stroke of midnight as in a fairy tale, but a
morning view of him returns the perspective from the roman-
tic to the real:

His midnight mood was over and he looked as

haggard as an actor by daylight. He was much

older than I had supposed and had less bravery

of costume and attitude. . . . His velvet coat

was threadbare and his short slouched hat, of

an antique pattern, revealed a rustiness that

marked it an 'original' and not one of the

picturesque reproductions that members of his

craft sometimes affect. (445)

The reader is left with the impression that Theobald is

genuine, but that his romanticism is archaic rather than

 

 

 

 

 

I
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72

charming. At this point the artist reveals his desire to

paint a madonna, and in spite of the fact that it is to be
”the Madonna of the future," it would clearly be just as
archaic as the artist's tastes. His unrealistic incor-
ruptibility, "unsullied by the accidents of life," causes
the narrator to continue his iconoclasm, questioning "the
(reality of an artistic virtue, an aesthetic purity, on
which some profane experience had nit rubbed off a little
more" (456).

The biggest burst of the bubble concerns Theobald's
model for the madonna. He thinks she is perfect, but the
narrator gradually lets the reader know that she is not
exactly an immaculate figure for the artist's conception:
"The most beautiful woman in Italy was a person of a gener-
ous Italian type and of a great simplicity of demeanour.

. . . she seemed to have nothing whatever to $8.37" (465).
Except for the fact that the reader is conditioned by now
to expect irony and euphemism from the narrator, this de-
scription is still fairly neutral. The madonna is a picture,
even embroidering, apparently, "some ecclesiastical vest-
ment" for a priest. The first major hint that something is
amiss, is that even though the lady is still beautiful, she
is no longer young. Quickly, then, the picture cracks and
crazes. After a carefully worded description, the nar-
rator breaks down into bluntness, noting that the woman
”betrayed rather a vulgar stagnation of mind" and that

"furthermore, in plain prose, she was growing stout" (467).

 

 

 

 

 

 

73
This madonna also has a child, and the crowning irony is
that the lady, whose hands "lacked the traces of what is
called honest toil," turns out also to be "a maiden mother,
but she had been turned out into the world in her shame"
(470). The woman Theobald has idolized is now a prosti—
tute (476, 478-80). The narrator cannot keep the truth to
himself. When Theobald realizes that his ideal is old,
then for him "the charm in truth was broken" (473). He has
awakened from his romantic illusion.

It is at this point that James fails to draw his
romance fully back to reality. Theobald seems too extreme
a case; the narrator finds him, disillusioned after twenty
years, sitting before "a canvas that was a mere dead blank
cracked and discoloured by time" (485). So great a distor-
tion of the perception of concrete reality is difficult to
conceive. There is something too much like Hawthorne or
Oscar Wilde in the resulting parable, something too
didactic in Theobald's sitting "face to face with the past"
and its "terrible truth" (485-86). Like "The Beast in the
Jungle," the tale is too clearly attached to a moral on the
comparative value of past and present to fit the reader's
conception of "the way things happen," and may belong with
"Daisy Miller" as "pure romance" (Prefaces, 269-70). James
tries to pull the story out with a trick learned from his
French mentors. A cynical artist, a commercial sculptor of
satirical animal figures whom the narrator found consorting

with the would-be madonna, reappears for the last word.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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74

He is just caricature enough, I think, to help move the
tale back toward a suspension between romance and realism
instead of leaving it in the grasp of pure romance. His
epitaph for the story puts Theobald's experience enough
in perspective to move the case closer to the credible.
Referring to his work, the sculptor chants, "Cats and
monkeys, monkeys and cats-—a11 human life is there!" (492).

James would learn, like Flaubert in Madame Bovary, to
picture romantic characters with much less of a tinge of

romance in the portrayal. Yet the basic technique of set—

 

ting up and violating the conventions of romance to produce
realism would remain. The governess in "The Turn of the
Screw," Isabel Archer and Lambert Strether are all romantics,
but the difference in the way they are portrayed shows how
well James learns to control the conventions of literature
and the representation of consciousness to produce romantic
effects with all the conviction of realism.

"The Turn of the Screw" (1898) is a much later work
than the "Madonna," but is an example of a much more romantic

genre, the "ghost story," which James classifies as

 

"Ever . . . for me the most possible form of fairy tale"

(Prefaces, 254). By "most possible" James means that the

 

genre is easiest for him to write in without sacrificing
either strangeness or credibility. Sounding like his dis-
cussion of the elements of romantic and realistic fiction

in the preface to The American, James tries to define what

 

arouses "wonder" in the ghost—tale, and how it may be maintained

 

 

 

 

 

 

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(Prefaces, 30, 254). Again the solution is a mixture of
the romantic and the realistic: "To begin to wonder, over
a case," James says, "I must begin to believe--to begin to
give out (that is to attend) I must begin to take in, and
to enjoy that profit I must begin to see and hear and feel"
(Prefaces, 254-55). The best way to create the childlike
wonder of the fairy tale is to create the childlike credul-
ity. Romance like Poe's The Narrative _o_f Arthur Gordon 2m,
though it begins with direct representation, becomes dis-
connected from reality, and by lacking that "indispensable
history," fails through destroying the reader's ability to
believe (256-57). On the other hand pure realism, the
case-history approach to obsessions, is not representation
but dry analysis:

The new type indeed, the mere modern 'psychical'

case, washed clean of all queerness as by ex-

posure to a flowing laboratory tap, and equipped

with credentials vouching for this-—the new type

clearly promised little, for the more it was re-

spectably certified the less it seemed of a na—

ture to rouse the dear old sacred terror.

(Prefaces, 169).

Too much documentation destroys the value gained from the
unknown and the uncertain, murdering the romance by dis—
section. Belief and disbelief must be held in careful
suspension. What James wants to produce is "sinister
romance" with the impact of reality: "The exhibition in—
volved is in other words a fairy—tale pure and simple—-
save indeed as to its springing not from an artless and

measureless, but from a conscious and cultivated credulity"

(171). Here is the romancer drawing in the reader as far

 

 

   

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76

as possible, then cutting the cord connected to reality,
hoping not to disturb him. To succeed in this mixing of
reality and romance, the artist must portray "the indis-
pensable history of someone's normal relation to something"
as well as the abnormal relation creating the drama (Prefaces,
256). Consequently the artist needs to show a "human con-
sciousness that entertains and records, that amplifies and
interprets" the unusual experience; more particularly, since
the "safest" means of proceeding with "moving accidents and
mighty mutations and strange encounters" is through showing
"their second" rather than "their first exhibition," the
focus must be on that consciousness experiencing in retro-
spection (256). The events may be pure romance, but the
sense of perception must be real. The ghost tale, then,
shows the past haunting the mind of a central character,
combining the romance of the strange with the realism of
consciousness.21

In addition, of course, the usual conventions of
romance are manipulated for romantic or realistic effects.
"The Turn of the Screw" parallels "The Madonna of the
Future" in its initial use of a narrator figure to objectify
the tale, but once Douglas fulfills that function and also
surrounds his story with mystery, he disappears. He has an
ambiguous relation to the story, but the reader soon forgets
that in the first-person narrative of the governess which
follows the introduction. For most of the tale Douglas is

not the reader's "normal" connection to the strange

 

 

 

 

 

77
happenings. Instead Mrs. Grose and the children, inasmuch
as the reader perceives their interpretation of the events,
form the normal relation to the history of Bly. Peter Quint
and Miss Jessel, 'of course, are the "abnormal agents," and
the reader sees both them and the representatives of normal-
ity through the governess.

The trick in "The Turn of the Screw" is to quiet the
reader's suspicions of the unreal and portray the governess's
consciousness so that the normal and the abnormal are nearly
impossible to extricate. The greatest effect of terror and
the greatest representation of consciousness--in short the
best of both romance and realism-~can be maintained by
achieving this mixture. 80 just as in the "Madonna," James
plays with the conventions of the genre to keep the reader
believing. Douglas's reluctance to tell a story never told
before adds to its credibility even as it heightens the sus-
pense and the expectation of the unusual. The bachelor in
Harley Street is a romantic element, "such a figure as had
never risen, save in a dream or an old novel," but this
image is made real through its connection with the governess's
immature impression. That image arises "before a fluttered
anxious girl out of a Hampshire vicarage" (XII, 153).
Similarly, instead of arriving in a portentous storm (which
James will use later for another purpose), the governess
Pulls up at Bly on a beautiful summer day (150, 158). The
house is not darkly Gothic, but light and airy, and flowers

bloom profusely. But neither is Bly a dream "castle of

 

 

 

 

 

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78
romance"; instead it is a "big ugly antique but convenient
house" (163).

The tale soon revolves around the governess's con—
sciousness in more than the sense that she is the voice
telling the tale: the question of how much that she per—
ceives is real and how much is fantasy begins almost im—
mediately to loom. James now finds a use for that portentous
storm--to reveal the lady's sensitive emotions. She begins
to hear noises with almost preternatural acuteness, sus-
piciously like some of Poe's well-known insane narrators.
At first the governess felt like a Cinderella (159), but her
apprehension soon turns the situation into a Jgng Eyrg or a
"mystery of Udolpho" with a possibly "insane, an unmention—
able relative kept in unsuspected confinement" (179).

James resurrects this old idea just to get it out of the
way. Clearly the thought is meant more to characterize the
governess than to suggest that in fact Bly is an asylum.

The reader seesaws back and forth between the romantic
and the realistic, the ideal and the ugly. Sometimes the
order in which information is presented determines which
Way an event is interpreted. When the governess sees a man
on one of the old towers symbolically "dating . . . from a
romantic revival," she feels that "her imagination had, in
a flash, turned real" (175). The reader, though his sus—
picion may be rising, is still quite ready to accept her
tale. The incident seems authentic enough-—until the next

cahpter ends with the discovery that the man she has allegedly

 

 

 

 

 

79
seen is dead. Other reversals cause the reader to reassess
the situation. The children change from romantically per—
fect to fiendishly evil in the governess's mind, and from
impossible angels to vulnerable human beings in the reader's.
Quint's death goes from a mysterious and perhaps horrible
affair to a sordid and vulgar alcoholic's accident (195,
198). Yet the reader is suspended, unsure of his interpre-
tation, through James's upsetting uses of conventions. When
conventions become unconventional, interpretations grow un-
certain. The old variations oh midnight confrontations with
ghosts alternate with a solitary mid-morning walk through a
graveyard and broad-daylight showdowns with each. Strangely,
the reader accepts most of the account as natural, for he
is fully absorbed in the governess's quest, but he begins to
understand at least intuitively the pattern of her obses-
sion. She wants to be a saviour. A candle blown-out by
Miles in an airtight room makes the governess start as though
a hurricane had gone through (222). Since she wants so badly
to redeem the children, ghosts and danger there shall be.
Mrs. Gross apparently sees no ghosts, and the children never
admit seeing any either. Flora is frightened out of her
wits; Miles is literally scared to death--but by the
governess, not ghosts. In the most interesting reversal
of the novel, the governess begins haunting the Children.
Mrs. Grose steps in to protect Flora (280-81), but Miles—-
who clearly shows that he sees no ghosts by misidentifying

the one the governess perceives and by being unable to

 

 

 

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locate it--Miles is forced into the protective arms of his
tormenter.

This interpretation of the tale is far from universal,
but in a sense the particular interpretation does not
matter.22 As James stresses in the prefaces, he is striving
for an effect, and the particular details of reality are
subordinate to that effect. I have been arguing that the
governess is a distorting narrator, a portrayal of a very
romantic imagination. Her distorted sense of the passage
of time and inability to distinguish the older tower from
the newer one reinforce this interpretation, for an in-
accurate sense of the past and the passage of time in James
is a common index of unreliability. Consider this passage,
for example (and of. 221, 280-85):

I call it time, but how long was it? I can't

speak to the purpose to—day of the duration

of these things. That kind of measure must have

left me: they couldn't have lasted as they

actually appeared to me to last. (185)

The governess enters some kind of trance when she sees a
ghost. After the confrontation with Miss Jessel by the
pond with Flora and Mrs. Grose, she apparently faints and
loses her sense of much of the afternoon. James uses the
tradition of time stopping, of "prodigious palpable hushes"
and "a stillness, a pause of all life" when the ghosts
aPpear, to heighten again both the romance of the super-
natural and the realistic portrayal of the governess's ab—
normal consciousness (245-46; of. 174, 282-83). At least

I think so. The tale is so beautifully complex that

 

 

:eriainty may
of romance a1
smarizing .
scribing "Th
Henry Ja
well. I
conventi
transfer
the exte
adding t
like the
the self
”Iie Turn of
zeie and the
finely difj
so intriguii
fusion of ti
romantic am
Perhap
“on! hOWeV
tore malls

L,
of %

my the a

 

Sinerally q
m" and
“sions, m
“realist;
Wines, 1
Each €me

”We the

i;
.18 works

 

 

 

 

 

 

81
certainty may be impossible; it is the strangest hybrid
of romance and realism James ever produced. Martha Banta,
summarizing James's use of Gothicism, might as well be de-
scribing "The Turn of the Screw":
Henry James knew the tradition of the Gothic novel
well. It was simple for him to take its basic
conventions of character, setting, and plot and to
transform them into something which kept many of
the external trappings of old Gothicism while
adding the terrors of a new Gothicism which—-
like the new psychology of the period-~revealed
the self as victim of its own self-villainy.25
"The Turn of the Screw" is midway between the old ghost
tale and the new case history. Separating the two is ex-

tremely difficult in the work--which is probably why it is

 

so intriguing, and why it is so clear a progression in the
fusion of the past and present, the synthesis of the
romantic and the real.

Perhaps the most impressive manipulation of conven-
tion, however, occurs in those works which are apparently

more realistic. Critics have argued over the verisimili-

 

tude of The Portrait 2; g Lady and The Ambassadors, particu-

 

larly the apprOpriateness of the endings, but what is
generally questioned is the romantic sensibility of Isabel
Archer and Lambert Strether in making their final de-
cisions, not the romanticism of James. The works seem to
be realistic records of characters with romantic sensi-

bilities, not romantic distortions of realistic experience.

 

Each abounds with the conventions of romance, modified to
create the illusion of reality. But James does not deprive

his works of their romantic possibilities just to insure

 

 

ieir verisir
if each.

H. St:
retentic tem
tire iadame i
retell like
ling; after
his in his
treated of f
reality gm
l'lii roman“
Mates to g
“WWII 1:
bill she exl
list like a
like a move

fielerest t

 

emanation
fietiom A
lord warm
tional 0011M

they!“ Ye}

it another
Welling Spi

Seeing him.

 

82

their verisimilitude; he always tries to preserve the most

of each.
R.W. Stallman, among others, spotted Isabel Archer's

romantic tendencies long ago, a defect that makes her mis-
take Madame Merle for a French 33mm; 5;}; m and glorify
a shell like Gilbert Osmond.24 The discovery is not start-
ling; after all, "the idea of the whole thing," James re-

marks in his notebooks, "is that the poor girl, who has

dreamed of freedom and nobleness . . . finds herself in

reality ground in the very mill of the conventional"

(Notebooks, 15). But few have noticed how thoroughly laced

with romantic conventions the novel is, nor how James

manages to get away with them. The early romance with Lord

 

Warburton is a good example. As soon as Isabel hears of

him, she exclaims, "Oh, I hoped there would be a lord; it's

just like a novel!" (III, 18). And it ism-so remarkably

like a novel of the most romantic sort that only the
cleverest technique makes the affair come off as real. Her
expectations are formed almost ex'clusively by English

fiction. Anticipating potential problems in conquering

Lord Warburton, Isabel falls back for protection on a fic-

tional commonplace about Englishmen: "I don't believe

they're very nice to girls; they 're not nice to them in

the novels" (76). Soon after she meets him, she puts him

in another fictional category: "- - - at the end Of an

evening spent in his society she scarce fell short of

seeing him--though quite without luridity-—as a hero of

 

mince" (91
though a as
that he is t
tierecollec
he a highly
sire ingenic
mantle of
for the prey
all by its (
lite Brecht
hie the
its. assur
little in t
temple

fact the st
billed him,
"fifession;
has at f

{it

 

a fancy
eWhore" '
\‘lrburton. :
garden, is
As they be,

“lights;

 

83
romance" (91). Warburton does not have a chance to break
'unmugh a sensibility so prejudiced by literature. Fearing
imat he is turning amorous, Isabel prepares herself with
lme recollection that "she had often heard that the English
are a highly eccentric people, and she had even read in
some ingenious author that they are at bottom the most
Immantic of races" (112). How carefully James is preparing
for the prOposal scene! Just so the reader will not be put
cfif by its conventionality, James gives an explicit warning
like Brecht of what is to come, so the reader's interest
can be directed at something besides the romantic plot:
'Wes, assuredly . . . the English are the most romantic
meple in the world, and Lord Warburton was about to give
aniexample of it" (145). He certainly is. He plays in
imct the standard hero of romance for which Isabel has
lflJled him, beginning with a heartfelt but incredibly trite
mnfibssion: "I lost no time, I fell in love with you.then.
It was at first sight, as the novels say; I know now that's
rmt a fancy-phrase, and I shall think better of novels for
evermore" (147; of. 152). One reason the reader ignores
Mmflmrton's conventional approach, even in the typical
garden, is that the focus is strongly on Isabel's mind.
As they begin their romantic walk, the reader enters her
thoughts:
It suddenly came upon her that her situation was
one which a few weeks ago she would have deemed
deeply romantic: the park of an old English

country-house, with the foreground embellished
by a 'great' (as she supposed) nobleman in the

 

 

act of m
careful
renarkab
was now
seeded s
the outs

in scene he

inventional
if feeling i
senses the 1
sense of die
rajects i‘ar‘
null be a
little (186
scene sense
Isabel's Cc
$1insrigni
In adc‘
lintions 11
this a 1‘(
inhis soc;
so01611 aha
for bting
Maud not
a She con
its politi
arefoliner
iii the is

 

 

 

84
act of making love to a young lady who, on
careful inspection, should be found to present
remarkable analogies with herself. But if she

was now the heroine of the situation she suc-
ceeded scarcely the less in looking at it from

the outside. (146)

The scene hardly seems real to Isabel because it is so
conventional, so much like the novels she has read. Instead
of feeling that what she imagined has turned real, she
senses the real abstracting into her imagination-~thus her
sense of dissociation from the scene. Paradoxically, she
rejects Warburton because he is too romantic; marrying him
would be a romantic escape, and she wants a romantic es-
capade (186-89). All the romance, all the unreality of the
scene consequently is associated for the reader with
Isabel's conceptions, so the literal conventionality of it
slips right by.

In addition, of course, James has broken enough con—

ventions in creating Warburton to make his lapse in the

garden a romantic eccentricity. The lord does not believe

in his social position, favoring disestablishment and marked
social change (98-100), and he criticizes the Touchetts

for being "mediaeval" in holding "ideas that peOple in
England nowadays were ashamed to confess to" (95). So even
as she considers him a romantic, Isabel takes into account
his political leanings as "a nobleman of the newest pattern,
a reformer, a radical, a contemner of ancient ways" (95),
and the fact that the family had been liberal "from the

earliest times" (95, 108). Since Isabel is so "devoted

 

 

:oronantic t
'iery curiou:
hide clerg
istnre" to
lithin,
some of
but as t
trey nil
fretted
affected
legend.
he reader I
isnct typh
l'e'blrton‘s
his brother
ant to be a
“ll one re
heritage of
lien.
Isabel
that has ti
Milly. (
”lie Stro]
“ll 0n in
lining up
my Dense
itiersing
5)? 0f Isa
renalllic s

in girl,

 

 

 

85

to romantic effects," Warburton invites her to see his

"very curious old place" and to meet his sisters and brother
in the clergy (94). Lockleigh is "of course . . . a noble
picture" to Isabel, in spite of alternations:

Within, it had been a good deal modernised—-

some of its best points had lost their purity;

but as they saw it from the garden, a stout

grey pile, of the softest, deepest, most weather—

fretted hue, rising from a broad, still moat, it

affected the oung visitor as a castle in a

legend. (108
The reader less romantically inclined will notice more that
is not typical at Lockleigh. Unlike in most novels,
Warburton's sisters get along beautifully with Isabel, and
his brother holding the "family living" in the church turns
out to be a very unorthodox wrestler (104)! Isabel is the
only one ready "to fight to the death: I mean for the
heritage of the past"-—not the Warburtons (107). They are
modern.

Isabel is surrounded by romance, but it is romance
that has the disturbing habit of turning into disagreeable
reality. Caspar Goodwood, an explicit representative of
'“the strong man in pain'" kind of romance (221), will not
stay on the shelf of memory provided for him; he keeps
turning up at the awkwardest times, and ends in being the
only person with an unfulfilled claim on her (IV, 454).
Reversing another expectation, Osmond likes him better than
any of Isabel's suitors. Everything Isabel thinks is

romantic somehow loses its aura-~for the reader if not for

the girl. Mrs. Touchett's romantic house in Florence, host

 

 

 

to three hurl

idle to the
rich to h
hisvague e
it James cc
hinting out
if the sixte
ties of the
”found comp.
:cdieity of
Furthe
ting the r
"aswift ca
comes over
ness," Hen:
moral not
tiles in It
lr
they Ill
they W1

I

ftithing
hawks 7
l

Wit
1t '8 n

the likes
“is cal
minded l
“is (41
ten, the 1

 

 

_rv.“-—-F—’~fi"—

86
to three murders in its history (III, 35), is a fabulous
home to the girl: "to live in such a place was, for Isabel,
to hold to her ear all day a shell of the sea of the past.
This vague eternal rumour kept her imagination awake."
But James connects this old romance to present reality by
pointing out that "the carven rafters and pompous frescoes
of the sixteenth century looked down on the familiar commodi-
ties of the age of advertisement," and that Mrs. Touchett
"found compensation for the darkness of her frontage in the
modicity of the rent" (354-55).

Furthermore, Henrietta Stackpole keeps dropping in to
bring the romantic back to reality. When Isabel describes
"a swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four
horses over roads that one can't see" as her "idea of happi—
ness," Henrietta remarks that she is "like the heroine of an
immoral novel" (235). And Miss Stackpole is always poking
holes in romantic visions of history, royalty and nobility:

'They try to make us believe in America that
they 're all handsome and magnificent and that
they wear wonderful robes and crowns.‘

'Ah, the robes and crowns are gone out of
fashion,‘ said Lord Warburton, 'like your toma-
hawks and revolvers.’

'I'm sorry for that; I think an aristocracy

ought to be splendid,‘ Henrietta declared. 'If

it's not that, what is it?‘ (181)

She likes Mr. Bantling for his irreverence to the past, as
in his calling Julius Caesar a "'cheeky old boy'," and is
reminded by the chariot ruts in old Home of American trolley

tracks (414). Henrietta is an inveterate advocate of the

new, the present and the future against the romantic past.

 

 

 

Siepronounc
hiashingto
because "the
nut to see
won’t say oi
your future‘
iadiaste, E
gerceiving l
disagreeabll
neat illus.
lltnouncene:
reader than
romnticism
convinced t
311 the non
There

'59 ronanti
the "Irish
generation
the Joke b:
his). He:
"the Rep
the. Nap
hen there
dehoSe

the Fist t
lilh 01d E

 

 

 

I
‘u
I
i

 

 

87

She pronounces St. Peter's dome inferior to the Capitol

in Washington (425), and Lord Nelson does not impress her
because "that's the past—-I don't care about the past; I
want to see some of the leading minds of the present. I
won't say of the future, because I don't believe much in
your future' (199). In spite of her extreme opinions and
bad taste, Henrietta is good for Isabel's romantic haze,
perceiving remarkably of her that "You think we can escape
disagreeable duties by taking romantic views--that's your
great illusion, my dear" (310-11). But of course such
pronouncements create greater reactions in the attentive
reader than in Isabel; for the reader recognizes her
romanticism-«Isabel does not. Consequently the reader is
convinced that the novel is a realistic pertrayal, charging
all the romance to the American girl.

There are several people feeding Isabel's taste for
the romantic and the past in Henrietta's absence, of course.
The Parisian-American Mrs. Luce claims to be "one of the
generation of 1830," which she explains to those not in on
the joke by saying, "Oh yes, I'm one of the romantics"
(303). Her husband is a reactionary who prefers the Empire
to the Republic: "it's no use talking, the style's all
gone. Napoleon knew what the French people want" (305).
Then there is Edward Rosier, whom Isabel knew as a child,
and whose name suggests that he has an even rosier view of
the past than she has. His rooms are incredibly "decorated

with old Spanish altar-lace," and he dislikes London because

 

 

 

 

afits furnit
upire; nothu
Isabel can ig
uspurveyor:
Earle and G1:
gerfect iemm
:ua'u because
‘Sde felt th
:uries, and
mated by t
We comm
cabinets, p1
‘54 ). His
waver, as
“lance away
1 . ' a
and tape
and Tim
Pietori;
hose p1
Potter
9Xhaust
tiles bring

furnitu
for a 1

 

 

 

88
mfits furniture: "no Louis Quinze--nothing of the first

Eupire; nothing but their eternal Queen Anne" (305, 308).

Isabel can ignore Edward for the most part. The most danger-

mnupurveyors of romance, whom she cannot ignore, are Madame
Merle and Gilbert Osmond. Isabel thinks Madame Merle is the
perfect _fggmg _c_1__u w, and she is fascinated by Osmond as
mwfllbecause he is connected with her as for his own merits:
'Tme felt that Madame Merle's ties always somehow had his-
‘MHies, and such an impression was part of the interest
curated by this inordinate woman" (352). Osmond, of course,
is the connoisseur of supposedly "perfect" rooms-~"old
cabinets, pictures, tapestries, surfaces of faded silk"
(348). His villa is not so perfect from James's view,

kmwever, as pejorative adjectives deliberately take the

romance away 3

. . . a variety of those faded hangings of damask
and tapestry, those chests and cabinets of carted
and time-polished oak, those angular specimens of
pictorial art in frames as pedantically primitive,
those perverse-looking relics of mediaeval brass and
pottery, of which Italy has long been the not quite
exhausted storehouse.

James brings this ancient flavor jarringly up to date:

These things kept terms with articles of modern.
furniture in which large allowance had been made
for a lounging generation; it was to be noticed
that all the chairs were deep and well padded and
that much space was occupied by a writing-table
of which the ingenious perfection bore the stamp
of London and the nineteenth century. There were
books in profusion and magazines and neWSpapers,
and a few small, odd, elaborate pictures, chiefly

in water-colour. (327)
Isabel cannot perceive the fault in Osmond's living "by

tumself, in a sorted, sifted, arranged world, thinking about

 

 

 

 

__L__A..-

 

 

 

m and beaui
dc objects“
ulprecious'
'cllity prope:
its 'imposin‘
reveals its
Has 2}
heavy 11
looked a
splendid
noon lig
hand puts
forward-loo}
faces the ol
lltraditiox
not caring ;
ll! external
‘lfirried an
I , . t
listing
terrace
bl the
had no

tone an
pervade

 

Isabel has
still °aptl
33W has

Pansy
WW s]
Fallsl is c:

‘N

 

89
art and beauty and history," with the rooms "full of roman-
tic objects" and "everything . . . in the last degree curious
l and precious" (377-78). She cannot judge the man's sensi-
bility properly, though the construction of his house, with

its "impOsing front" but "somewhat incommunicative character,"

reveals its owner perfectly:

It was a mask, not the face of a house. It had
heavy lids, but no eyes; the house in reality
looked another way-~looked off behind, into
splendid openness and the range of the after-
noon light. (325)

Osmond puts on an imposing front as an aesthete of the most
forward-looking taste; but in reality, like his house, he
faces the other direction, Open only to the afternoon light
of tradition and the past. Similarly, he puts on a mask of
not caring for applause, but behind the pose he works only
for external effect (IX. 144). Unfortunately. Isabel
"carried away an image" of harmony instead of hypocrisy:

. . . the image of a quiet, clever, sensitive,

distinguished man, strolling on a moss-grown

terrace above the sweet Val d'Arno and holding

by the hand a little girl whose bell-like clear-

ness gave a new grace to childhood. The picture

had no flourishes, but she liked its lowness of

tone and the atmosphere of summer twilight that
pervaded it. (III, 399)

Isabel has no yearning for the most gaudy romantic, but is

 

still captivated by the sweet and sentimental, thinking
Osmond has an "old sorrow that sometimes ached today."
Pansy appeals to her romantic inclinations as well.
Although she is an American girl of American parents,
Pansy is created as the epitome of European convention:

"She was like a sheet of blank paper-—the ideal jeune fille

 

 

efforeign f
elduay," a:
always of
Pusy, she :‘
tuth from ‘
laughter of
tales Henri
lug Pansy i
lee (as)?5
Pay for the
James
old convent
llrecordix
3“Home e2
condemn
5"" up the
litter the ‘
5W int
lrlphet,

pal

 

dZZo af
‘30“th SC
llllainous
hesits, e
is carefu]
l

served: I
Mr litt:
babel pr!

 

 

 

90
afibreign fiction" (401). She has been brought up "in the
cfld way," and is the incarnation of Osmond's preference for
cfld ways of doing things. As long as Isabel is charmed by
Innsy, she is charmed by Osmond. She resists hearing the
trufl1from the Countess Gemini, the profanely pragmatic
daughter of a romantic American poetess (IX, 223-24) who
takes Henrietta's place as iconoclast, by deliberately keep-
ing Pansy in the room so the Countess cannot disillusion
rwr (88).25 Before long, however, both she and Pansy will
pay for their romanticism.

James prepares the reader for his version of an age-
cfld convention by making Pansy the perfect jeune fille, and
kw recording Ned Rosier's reaction to the Palazzo RocCanera.
ENeryone else likes it: "But Rosier was haunted by the
conviction that at picturesque periods young girls had been
shut up there to keep them.from.their true loves, and then,
tamer the threat of being thrown into convents, had been
forced into unholy marriages" (101). He is not a bad
Imophet. Pansy is kept always within the bounds of the
palazzo after Rosier proposes, then is sent back to her old
mnwent school (345). Osmond plays the role of the old
villainous father, though "there is to be nothing ascetic,"
km says, about Pansy's confinement (348). The convention
is carefully skirted, yet all its romantic effect is pre-
served: "But all the same the girl had taken fright . . ,
Imor little Pansy became the heroine of a tragedy" (349).

Isabel prevents (after her fashion) any forced and "unholy

 

 

 

 

carriage" t<
he neverthu
slight char:
the amount
at Osmond
out loss of
alien up t
thinking th
eat him as
he time-he
beautiful. <
ls so room
heanul
Isabel, 0;
hotly.
“Triage o:
"auntie b
has delude
581‘ Mother
Ilsabfl is
339 had 1Q
[409). Sr
ltler as E
lsaheps J
Ilike a p]
ht has h

WES in f

 

 

 

 

91
marriage" to Lord Warburton, of course, but Pansy and Rosier
are nevertheless romantic types in a typical predicament,
slight characters but believable due to their contrast with
the surroundings. Conflict as deep as that between Isabel
and Osmond can support any number of romantic subplots with-
out loss of verisimilitude. Ned brings the archetypal sit-
uation up to date by the pathetic sale of his treasures,
thinking that he just is not rich enough for Osmond to ac-
cept him as suitor to Pansy. He so clearly adores Pansy in
the time-honored manner of youth, worshipping her as a
beautiful china doll, that his romanticism seems real. He
is so romantic he becomes credibly pathetic.

Meanwhile other romantic bits of the past are dying for
Isabel. Old romance is becoming disagreeable reality too
quickly. Warburton, who had met Isabel in Rome before her
marriage only to lose once more against the appropriate
romantic backdrop of the "Dying Gladiator" (6-—9), and who
has deluded himself for a time that he loves Pansy and not
her mother, has at last announced a serious marriage:
"Isabel felt as if she had heard of Lord Warburton's death.
She had known him as a suitor, and now that was all over"
(409). She had known him only in a romantic role, that is,
never as a real human being. Ralph Touchett, who had fought
Isabel's romantic disaster by telling her that Osmond looks
"like a prince who has abdicated in a fit of fastidiousness
and has been in a state of disgust ever since" (III, 358),

does in fact die, having left her a romantically secret

 

 

 

heritance
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is lalph’s.
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92
inheritance of thousands and a very real legacy of pain
(IV, 414). At long last Isabel sees the ghost of Garden—
court, the one she could see only after suffering--but it
is Ralph's.26 Again James carries off the romance, includ—
ing a remorseful deathbed scene and sentimental facts such
as the observation that her old room at Gardencourt had not

been slept in since she left (405), by keeping the sentiment

 

attached to the characters instead of the reader; for the
reader has known of Ralph's love and sacrifice for a long
time. Both the tragedy and the reality are reinforced by
tough old Mrs. Touchett's hard grief, as she tells Isabel
who has lost her baby that she should be glad at this mo—
ment she has no son.

Romance dies with ever increasing rapidity. Even
fiercely American Henrietta Stackpole is disappointing, as
she surrenders so easily to the shallow Englishman Bantling
(400-01). Isabel has left far behind the "romantic island"
of her first time in Rome with Osmond (12); has left behind
the adolescent romance of keeping her engagement secret from
her sisters (34); has left behind the baby as dead as her
marriage—-an early touch of hard reality in the romance; and
has discovered that in her romantic delusion she has been
married by a mistress to her lover for the sake of their
illegitimate child. What sounds like bleeding heart romance
0f the dampest type is made real by the focus on the loser
0f the blood. She endures, for she has all Home to uphold
her suffering, in perhaps the most romantic passage in the

novel:

 

 

 

lransf.

& comp:

l0 be 2
"it a mar
to Sit app
103% Past
Three of 1
James can
mange th
add becaus
they endi
them a
will Goods
ml" (434
is determ-
late gene
tiles has
be its ,0!

its lama!“

 

 

 

 

93

. . . in a world of ruins the ruin of her
happiness seemed a less unnatural catastrophe.
She rested her weariness upon things that had
crumbled for centuries and yet were still up-
right, she drapped her secret sadness into the
silence of lonely places, where its very modern
quality detached itself and grew objective, so
that as she sat in a sun-warmed angle on a
winter's day, or stood in a mouldy church to
which no one came, she could almost smile at it
and think of its smallness. Small it was, in

the large Roman record, and her haunting sense

of the continuity of the human lot easily carried
her from the less to the greater. She had become
deeply, tenderly acquainted with Rome; it inter-
fused and moderated her passion. But she had
grown to think of it chiefly as the place where
people had suffered. That was what came to her
in the starved churches, where the marble columns,
transferred from pagan ruins, seemed to offer her
a companionship in endurance and the musty incense
to be a compound of long-unanswered prayers. (327—28)

Idke a martyr she goes to the desolate Colosseum, this time
to sit apprOpriately "in the despoiled arena" (340). The
long past of Rome casts its shadow into the present; the
force of legend touches the suffering of a one-time chit.
James can get away with such romantic symbolism and eloquence
tmcause the progression of the whole novel is behind them,
and because the pain will be resolved not by an unrealistic
happy ending or desperate action but by slow inner recon—
cilatian and renunciation. ENen.a.final passionate scene
vdth Goodwood, who burns "I'm yours for ever—-for ever and
ever" (434), cannot bring about the usual resolution. James
is determined not only to avoid the happy ending, but to
nmke certain the reader notices the contrast. And since
James has prepared the reader for the scene with Goodwood

by its romantic predecessors in the same garden, not even

its romance can deflect the sense of realism; James makes

 

 

 

 

certain by e:
Strange
mes the no
n1 order no
:f'ner unher
nnntic, de
its effects.
laspar Goody
“it," anbig
1ife"(438)
‘111 live i]
igei thirty
wonder how
She will ca
Ghoulfmtic

the best of

he s
Eiase, is E
name in
new a,
the quiet!
We and I
Illusion m
Weeiati
m” are

“We th

 

94

certain by explicitly recalling those scenes (428-29).

Strangely, it is Isabel's consistent romanticism that
makes the novel seem real, as her romantic sense of duty
and order motivate her return. James has raised the record
of her unheroic and limited adventures to the height of the
romantic, depriving romance of its conventions to preserve
its effects. Henrietta Stackpole's "cheap comfort" for
Caspar Goodwood, the lightly romantic advice "just you
wait," ambiguously "added, on the spot, thirty years to his
life" (438). The reader is caught wondering whether Goodwood
will live in romantic hOpe for another thirty years, or has
aged thirty years by recognizing that hOpe is vain. Critics
wonder how long Isabel's decision will last as well, and how
she will carry it out. James intended it so. His mixture
of romantic suspense and realistic probability has captured

the best of both modes.

T_h_e Ambassadors, like its companion works of the major
phase, is surely one of the finest fusions of realism and
romance in the Jamesian canon. The endings of The Wings _o_f
112 13212 and The Golden Bowl surpass in tension and climax
the quiet note ending The Ambassadors, but the Lambinet
scene and its aftermath are brilliant records of romantic
illusion and realistic disillusion battling toward a full
appreciation of experience. Helping produce this rich
effect are myriad modifications of the conventions of

romance throughout the work. Perhaps the most striking is

 

 

 

the use of P
In it}:
abackdrop I
velopnent c<
:_no_n and
value even
nfienice a
ta "The is;
hes can 11
contrasts :
{onion Lift
In city ‘1
hes disc
edition:
one asks"
Selects t]
Character
Pari
t0 Holden
itself me
Shifting
looked a'
'dh
b

9“ you
“t J”vine
its "are

2
wt MOW:

 

95

the use of Paris.

In The Portrait _o_f _a_ Lady Rome and its history become

 

a backdrop reflecting all human suffering, a masterful de-
velopment compared to the presence of Rome in Roderick

m and "Daisy Miller," though the city has some symbolic
value even in these works. Similarly, the romantic qualities
of Venice are well adapted, though in very different ways,

to "The Aspern Papers" and The Wings _o_f the Dove.27 And

 

James can make virtually anything out of London, as the

contrasts in the settings of "A Passionate Pilgrim," "A

 

Londoh Life," The Princess Casamassima, The Wings _g_f_ the

Dove, The Golden Bowl and The Sense _o__f_ the Past amply show.

 

 

The city is a storehouse of settings for the artist, as
James discovers seeking frontispieces for his collected
edition: "London ends by giving one absolutely everything
one asks" (Prefaces, 333-35). No wonder James so often
selects the city when considering the proper milieu for his
characters and themes.

Paris, however, is a different proposition. Writing
to Howells in 1876, James disparagingly remarks, "Paris
itself meanwhile is a sort of painted background which keeps
shifting and changing, and which is always there, to be
looked at when you please, and to be most easily ignored
When you don't" (Letters, I, 48). London is just as shifty,
but James knows what to do with its moods, how to read even
its "great featureless Philistine vista" (Prefaces, 335).

He knows its atmospheres, its nooks and repositories of

 

 

 

«,7 In

notional Ch:
ooootrous no
tenple ever
beauty stil
tivesnand
Set York, 1
to define t
at sea she:
few noveli
criticizes
the action
superficie
notorious
about the
He know u:
experiment
Only Vagu
the Worst
VIiters.
renenge’
l1doubt:
as the on
teacher
Infalloy
tasentia
litmus

its Dre;

 

96
national character. In contrast Paris "strikes me as a
monstrous massive flower of national decadence, the biggest
temple ever built to material joys," though "with a deal of
beauty still in its great expansive symmetries and perspec-
tives--and such a beauty of light."28 Paris reminds him of
New York, both cities having a cosmopolitan air difficult
to define as peculiarly its own.29 Consequently James felt
at sea when setting a major work there, and maintained that
few novelists other than Frenchmen had done it well. He
criticizes Edith Wharton for using Paris in The Egg: because
the action is "unrelated and unreferred save in the most
superficial way to its milieu and background . . . The
notorious wickedness of Paris isn't at all required to bring
about the conditions of the Prologue" (Letters, II, 284).
He knew what he was talking about, for he had tried a similar
experiment, The American, and felt he had produced a work
only vaguely connected with France. Granted, he had avoided
the worst conventions of Parisian romance among Anglo—Saxon
writers. Newman is not jilted, nor does he execute a Gothic
revenge, but only because as James notes in the preface,
"I doubtless even then felt that the conception of Paris
as the concentrated scene of rash infatuations and bold bad
treacheries belongs, in the Anglo-Saxon imagination, to the
infancy of art" (Prefaces, 24). Nevertheless, Paris is not
essential to the story, with neither its history nor its
literary portrait functioning integrally enough to demand

its presence.

 

Toni
snithe t
nmmgm
Janos first
on be has;
anyasth:
inioes to
Initiat-
mmwm
that conpa
in audac
WMdM
hisconve
anally d:

hm Prec:

 

the setti:
the M
5° usual
hiss his
Ncides c
he feels
image of
of the i]
the Prob:
011s
Deop

that
hunt

 

97
To write a proper tale of Paris, then, would be to
avoid the triteness of its literary history yet use its
shifting romantic qualities to the full. In his notebooks
James first considers a story about a married couple who
can be happy only if they stay out of Paris, portraying the
city as the corrupter of marriages (Notebooks, 113). He

decides to develop, however, something even more traditional

 

than that--a variation on the European convention of the
mature woman initiating a younger male into society, some-
what comparable to Winterbourne's "study" in Geneva.30
This audacious flirting with arch-romance, in order to be
carried off as realistic, is filtered through a slightly
less conventional plot, that of a middle-aged man nostal-
gically discovering that he has lost his youth. But even
this precaution does not relieve James's discomfort with
the setting in the early stages: "I don't altogether like
the papal side of the revelation of Paris—-it's so obvious,
so usual to make Paris the vision that opens his eyes,

makes him feel his mistake" (Notebooks, 226). Once James
decides on an American rather than an English hero, however,
he feels the setting "must be Paris" due to the old American
image of the city as a sinner's heaven-~an early convention

31

0f the international theme. Yet that image is precisely

the problem:

There was the dreadful little old tradition,
one of the platitudes of the human comedy, that
people's moral scheme does break down in Paris;
that nothing is more frequently observed; that
hundreds of thousands of more or less cynical

 

 

persons
of the
late in
(as
he situat:
only James
because to
uorld"; it
aiuertised
usrit of s
is used as
list as ti
he reader
West in:
Strether
SO throng:
tion of c
Would be
life than
316). Th
1”th in

\~

View: 1101

W01 e)
Like
sh ho o

behh sen

so SuPiho

 

98

persons annually visit the place for the sake

of the probable catastrophe, and that I came

late in the da to work myself up about it.

(Prefaces, 316
The situation is so surrounded by romantic conventions that
only James would try to rescue it. He succeeds precisely
because the tradition is "one of the vulgarest in the
world"; it is workable "simply because its vulgarity is so
advertised." In fact the legend of Paris "had the great
merit of sparing me preparations," since the notoriety could
be used as a basic presumption to be manipulated.32 And
just as the focus on Isabel Ercher's consciousness diverts
the reader from the romance of the plot, so Strether's
"blest imagination" would create a "drama of discrimination."
Strether would not be vulgarly tempted; rather, he would
go through a period of "intense reflexion" and transforma-
tion of consciousness, so that the "surrounding scene"
would be "a minor matter, a mere symbol" of a‘finer kind of
life than" provincial New. England could imagine (Prefaces,
316). The result, as one critic maintains, is that Paris
in The Ambassadors is "not the wicked city of the popular
view, nor is it the city of reality; it is a great poetic
Slimbol expressing and vivifying the themes of the novel."33

Like a straw man, the legend of Paris as sin city is
set up fairly early in the novel; Chad Newsome, in the
judgment of his relatives in Woollett, Massachusetts, has
been seduced and corrupted by a Parisian $3313.13 _d___u_ m,

so supposedly stalwart Lambert Strether is sent as an

 

 

 

abassaior
tie ronanc
for the re
it only g
35 exposin
helps the
establishe
Iieuis Lao
euto‘oiogrz
the will,
has exerc
little ha
iiue, ere
the Story

hiring hi]

 

huold "j
is Poured
tential de
1 arguing 1
‘ tell, an
hm
15113ng
for his
It
romantic
e°hh‘ecti

1th beg

 

h

99
ambassador to summon the prodigal home. The focus is on
'fimiromance of Strether's adventure, however, not Chad's,
for the reader is introduced first to the older gentleman
znm.only gradually to the alleged situation of the younger.
IW'exposing Chad's state only indirectly and slowly, James
helps the reader swallow its conventionality, and also
establishes Strether as the focal point. With.the name
'Qewis Lambert" (XXI, 14), taken from one of Balzac’s more
autobiographical novels which incorporates his theory of
the will, Strether is pictured in contrast as a man who
has exercised little will power, and to whom comparatively
little has happened. He realizes this lack at age fifty-
five, creating "all the romantic sympathy necessary" for

the story (Notebooks, 374), and concludes deterministically

 

during the crisis in Gloriani's garden that life is just
a mold "into which, a helpless jelly, one's consciousness
is poured" (XXI, 218). Balzac also believed in environ-
nmntal determinism, but when he wrote Louis Lambert he was
arguing for the development of a spiritual force in man as
well, an almost Swedenborgian concept of will power
(volonté). Just as in some of his earlier stories, James
is using Balzac's figure as a suggestive literary analogue
for his hero in Paris.

It is Strether's conception of Paris that forms the
Immantic background of the novel. In no other work is the
connection between the romantic and the past so clear. The

link begins as soon as Strether gets off the boat in Chester,

 

 

 

 

inland, a
sin (in
than, Stri
”in the fa'
spoiling i
:er‘eei his
1it). He
sun, so hi
tells Mari

straining

rather the
fact she i
hihetite i
has floatj
hunal ini
fihhh wall
hhhhfltio]
hhhcessu
last, he ;
hhhe it e
To k
reality,
friend wa
afih‘clnci

Strether!

 

 

100
England, a medieval town with a cathedral and crumbling
walls (XXI, 15). Picked up by an attractive middle-aged
woman, Strether walks romantically by the wall as he had
"in the far-off time, at twenty-five; but that, instead of
spoiling it, only enriched it for present feeling and
marked his renewal as a thing substantial enough to share"
(16). He had been to Europe with his now deceased wife and
son, so his nostalgia is notably thick. In fact, as he
tells Maria Gostrey, "I‘m always considering something else;
something else, I mean, than the thing of the moment" (19-20).
Maria, mysterious in her history, tries to divert Strether

toward a more cappe diem attitude, a sense of the present

 

rather than just a sense of the past (20, 35-36). But in
fact she helps immerse him more in the past, whetting his
appetite for Europe. He feels that a "woman of fashion
was floating him into society," a parody of Chad's conven-
tional initiation through Madame de Vi‘onnet, and that "these
first walks in EurOpe were in fact a kind of finely lurid
intimation of what one might find at the end of that
process" (40-41). Maria has cost Strether his American
Past, he says, "in one great lump"; but she will help re—
place it with the past of Paris (45).34

To keep Strether from floating too far away from
reality, James provides another American, Strether's old
friend Waymarsh, as a companion. He is a foil for Strether-—
a financial success where Strether is a failure, yet making

Strether's failure more attractive; the standard image of

 

 

 

 

"some grea
century,“
eyes and e
herican y
Sirether':
and out o.
irri
playful n
(30), and
lay lose
in). or
sphere.
to be ten
Parody 01
none com:
Serious y
tarials ,
Whig;
hhlue of
h quick
ness, f0
of a Fla
(5}); on
Element
their so
his m

hist’u j

 

 

_ “ea—.w— . ,_ .l.

r______f

101
"some great national worthy of the earlier part of the mid-
century," the charismatic "personal type" with penetrating
eyes and a beard like Abraham Lincoln.35 He makes Strether's
American profile seem very anti-heroic, but emphasizes
Strether's adaptability to Europe by being so uncomfortable
and out of place there (26).

Arriving in Paris, Strether and Maria continue their
playful mock-romance. Maria wears a very low-cut dress
(50), and when Strether explains melodramatically that he
may lose "everything," she promises to be his "till death!"
(75). Clearly the two are intoxicated by the Paris atmo-
sphere. Strether is too flattered and unused to flirting
to be tempted by Maria, so their "affair" becomes a fine
parody of the‘Parisian fling. The situation is made even
more comic-~and thus more realistic through contrast with
serious seduction--by Waymarsh's sober disapproval and
Maria's constant "vision of gold" (66). If she is not a
gold-digger, she is at least well acquainted with the
value of money (of. 119-21). Any unreality in the scene
is quickly attached, in addition, to Strether's conscious-
ness, for he sees a "world of types"; people in the audience
of a play seem "interchangeable with those on the stage"
(53); on the streets "little brisk figures, figures whose
movement was as the tick of the great Paris clock, take
their smooth diagonal from point to point" (79). Again
this vision is subordinated to his sense of the "crowded

past," into which even Waymarsh is immersed as a historic

 

 

indnark (
eiuing, “f
lngsince

Sonnet
inever, s
inolished
hinges, h
ihe a too
ennntic ;
tease of
use“ of y
finishing
ooast-seti

hhsme

hl‘lde:
hard,
ated 1
twink:
What :
depth
hh sorupj
Shmhhhliteu
they” h.
Engage f:
Chad
kfihhua
elite So 1

hhes hri

102
landmark (83), as Strether senses his previous visit re-
viving, "feeling the general stirred life of connexions
long since individually dropped" (86).

Sometimes he is jolted briefly back to the present,
however, such as when he misses the palace that has been
demolished in his absence. Disappointed by such unromantic
changes, his "historical sense" of the city "often winces
like a touched nerve" (79). Nevertheless, enough of the
romantic past remains to create something more serious than
a case of nostalgia. Strether begins to feel the "meagre—
ness" of his personal past, "vague and comprehensive,
stretching back like some unmapped Hinterland from a rough
coast—settlement" (87). Feeling inferior, he is beginning
to be seduced by Paris:

. . . a vast bright Babylon, like some huge

iridescent object, a jewel brilliant and

hard, in which parts were not to be discrimin-

ated nor differences comfortably marked. It

twinkled and trembled and melted together, and

what seemed all surface one moment seemed all

depth the next. (89)
His scruples still keep him from buying all the romance,
symbolized by the gold volumes of unrealistic fiction in the
book—stalls (87, 93-94), but its attraction is beginning to
deceive him like the harlot Babylon. James is getting good
mileage from the romantic image of Paris.

Chad enters the romance indirectly from the traditional
Latin Quarter, the "scene of rather ominous legend," just

'Qike so many young men in fiction as well as in fact" (90).

James brings this romantic milieu into realistic focus by

 

 

 

pointing on
memorial
convention
Francine v
{90. 93).
not, his t
synbolic i
To Si
of brusnin
neeting Ci
initerers‘
he can con
is oonstan
iIli'oolle
nonent:
everntnnn
choice is
East or p
0Moth,
h118111933
with impn
who (
dreary h<
even when
Strether
Ret'

Strether

 

 

103

1minting out its elements of "the usual" as well as "the
immemorial," and by remarking that if Chad took up with the
conventional "Musette and Francine," they were "Musette and
Francine vulgarized by the larger evolution of the type"
(90, 93). And since Chad does not appear on stage in person
yet, his traditional setting melts unobtrusively into the
symbolic background.

To Strether, walking through the Quarter in the hope
(fifbrushing "the wing of the stray spirit of youth" before
nmeting Chad, the old arcade and "shock-headed slouch-hatted
loiterers" with "young intensity of type" are as close as
he can come to a vicarious renewal of his young manhood. He
is constantly thinking of his responsibility to Mrs. Newsome
in Woollett, and cannot fully enjoy the pleasure of the
nmment: "There was youth for Strether at this moment in
ewerything but his own business" (98). More and more his
choice is becoming irresponsible romance or sober reality,
nest or present, Europe or America. He cannot concentrate
on both. Fortunately, since Chad is not back from Nice, the
kmsiness can wait, and he can indulge in a romantic lull
Math impunity in the company of the young man on Chad's
balcony (of. Notebooks, 388). The only alternative is his
dreary hotel, which "expressed the presence of Waymarsh"
even when Waymarsh is not there. With John Little Bilham,
Strether can "escape that alternative" for a while (98-99).

Returning inevitably but ambivalently to Waymarsh,

Strether tells him that "There's no doubt I want you to

 

 

 

cone down
niacrity
social co
its dubio
ianrace's
of the ol
given the
non John
and by th
innisian
by his He
hless he
Ship to A
his predi
You're th
3a), be aw
relineal,
is diffic
For the b
neither a
Latin Qua
World. H
'“amned
never See
sheialty
Well 0

line Paga

 

104

come down on me and squash me," which Waymarsh performs with

 

alacrity (108-O9). Strether is torn, through the clash in
social conventions, between the beauty of Parisian life and
its dubious morality (118). He is attracted by Miss
Imrrace's freedom and familiarity and strange combination

of the old and new (113, 116); by the serenity Europe has
given the American Little Bilham, who serves for Strether

as a John the Baptist kind of forerunner of Chad (125-26);
and by the way Maria meets "boys . . . with the air of old
Parisian practice" (128). But he is continually haunted

by his New England scruples, and has the uneasy feeling that
unless he forces Chad on the boat, he may be burning his own
ship to America behind him (129-33). Maria divines part of

his predicament in getting Chad home: "Oh, I see what

 

you're thinking-~that Paris is an awful place, and that it

may be awfully difficult" (Notebooks, 386). In a fine

 

reversal, however, the task of removing Chad is easy. What
is difficult is believing Chad should go back to America.
Ebr the boy that Strether remembers appears, at long last,
neither as the old immature Chad nor as a rogue from the
latin Quarter, but as a sophisticated young man of the
world. He has apparently been forced to mature by the
"crammed consciousness of Paris" (137, 142); "Strether had
never seen the thing so done before-~it was perhaps a
Specialty of Paris" (150). Strether's scruples are com-
pletely off guard. If Chad is a pagan, W001lett could use

some pagans. With the aid of Maria, who identifies herself

 

 

 

 

 

as the kin
nonith, 5
begins to
neii as an
He i
iioriani’
fore he in
feast, tin
(of. Lot;
"range of
nission,
“onerishe
archetype
iitd an E
and myste
Ennis is
5”letting
311 back.
romantic
ie hem
than her
on he t:
in 011008
tiDical
Charm is
Imien

ComDarin

 

105
as the kind of woman that Mrs. Newsome fears Chad has taken
up with, Strether rejects the New England suSpicions, and
begins to question whether Woollett is morally obtuse as
well as aesthetically deprived.

He is now a pushover for the romantic effects of
Gloriani's garden, for his scruples are undermined even be-
fore he has met the piggg dg_resistance of the Parisian
feast, the incarnation of old Paris, Madame de Vionnet

(cf. Notebooks, 374). The sculptor's garden reveals the

 

"range of the immeasurable town," the "survival, trans-
mission, association" of the thick past still living as a
"cherished remnant" (195-96). Gloriani is himself the
archetypal romantic artist, a "dazzling prodigy of type,"
Math an artist's sensitive face and "penetrating radiance"
sum.mystery (196-99). Strether drinks in talk claiming that
Paris is "always as charming as this; it's as if, by
smmething in the air, our squalor didn't show. It puts us
all back--into the last century" (201). Once again the
romantic is indissolubly linked with the past. Mademoiselle
de Vionnet, whom Strether presumes is Chad's interest rather
than her mother, first strikes him as a type from Woollett,
and he thinks Chad may have shown an "aboriginal loyalty"

in choosing her (213). Like Pansy, however, Jeanne is the

typical igune fille, and Strether soon realizes that her

 

charm is not Woollett's at all, but a foreign note of per-
fection emanating from Madame de Vionnet (222-23); of. 256).

Comparing such elegance to his own.pallor, Strether feels it

 

 

 

 

 

iii,

is “just :
into a to:
scene, thn
potential
enotion f
lanes poi
ton“. m
It we
know,
such
out 0
that,
ventn
and i
the n
possi
not a
only
histc
ill the 1
"illicit
0f Plot l
"Denim
Screens n
Soo:
Vibrate
inside 3
tote wit
interest
that, n

dictate

106
is "just simply too late" for him to be fine, and he bursts

into a torrent of carpe diem advice to Bilham (217). This

 

scene, the germinal one for the novel (Prefaces, 307), is
Imtentially very sentimental and pathetic. To keep Strether‘s
emotion from distorting the reader's perception of the scene,
James points out the incongruity of the cause and the effect
(of. Notebooks, 373-74):

It was nothing new to him, however, as we
know, that a man might have--at all events
such a man as he--an amount of experience
out of any proportion to his adventures; so
that, though it was doubtless no great ad—
venture to sit on there with Miss Gostrey
and hear about Madame de Vionnet, the hour,
the picture, the immediate, the recent, the
possible-—as well as the communication itself,
not a note of which failed to reverberate--
only gave the moments more of the taste of
history. (227-28).

All the romantic effect, carefully preserved, is charged

 

explicitly to Strether's consciousness, not to distortions
of plot or setting. His retrospective temperament filters
experience for the delicate romantic note, but carefully
screens out the gaudy.

Soon, however, his sense of the romantic begins to

vibrate at a high pitch, especially in his impressions of

 

Nbdame de Vionnet, so James must keep the reader constantly
; inside Strether's mind. Not that Strether is tritely in

I love with her; she excites "some more distinctively dis—
interested aesthetic, intellectual, social, even, so to
Speak, historic sense in him" than pure romance would

dictate (Notebooks, 592), Even though Strether‘s mind is

 

 

v.76 P“-

hghly at
th reade
not excl

The h
high
ancie
sonet
nisse
waxed
node]
the n
sessi
oheri

hackg
prosn
glamn
elenn
chai:
head:
alts

Eves
to en
the'
that
youn
urns
snal

hnetner
is being
the sens
inns th
pNViOns
ful hone
in Jame
high in
hi. 244

[the

t

 

 

107
highly stimulated, then, it is emotionally controlled, as
the reader views Madame de Vionnet and her environment al-
nmst exclusively through his eyes:

The house, to his restless sense, was in the

high homely style of an elder day, and the
ancient Paris that he was always looking for-—
sometimes intensely felt, sometimes more acutely
missed-ewes in the immemorial polish of the wide
waxed staircase and in the fine boiseries, the
medallions, mouldings, mirrors . . . He seemed at
the very outset to see her in the midst of pos-
sessions not vulgarly numerous, but hereditary
cherished charming.

. . . he found himself making out, as a
background of the occupant, some glory, some
prosperity of the First Empire, some Napoleonic
glamour, some dim lustre of the great legend;
elements clinging still to all the consular
chairs and mythological brasses and sphinxes‘
heads and faded surfaces of satin striped with
alternate silk.

The place itself went further back--that he
guessed, and how old Paris continued in a manner
to echo there; but the post-revolutionary period,
the world he vaguely thought of as the world of
Chateaubriand, of Madame de Stael, even of the
young Lamartine, had left its stamp of harps and
urns and torches, a stamp impressed on sundr
small objects, ornaments and relics. (243-44

Strether's nostalgic sense of his own past and its lacks

is being supplemented with the romance of French history,
the sense of old families and "private honour," which he
gains through his relation to Madame de Vionnet (246). All
previous romance now pales for Strether, from Chad's taste—
ful home to "Miss Gostrey‘s little museum of bargains,"

and James turns his balanced rhetorical style to a high
nutch in long paragraphs of finely wrought description

(of. 244-46, 249). Even the presence of the "great Revue"

(Revue dg‘Deux Mondes) can be "scarce counted here as a

 

 

 

nodern no
tone, "3
of an anal
that she
herself,
grey iron
on a Rene
“half my
hot
with her
h’ss Bar
struck h
Strether
at this
tool of
01‘Stret
Changes
to begin
for Jean
heal Inon
Strethen
has not
hos Ba:
“heron
hem,
11111810;

he

 

 

108
modern note" (246). Jeanne de Vionnet becomes a romantic
image, "a faint pastel in an oval frame . . . the portrait
of a small old-time princess of whom nothing was known but
that she had died young" (256). And Madame de Vionnet
herself, the very type of the "fgmm§_dg,mggd§" in a silvery
grey dress and collar of emeralds, is like an antique head
on a Renaissance coin, a goddess, a sea-nymph, a Cleopatra
"half mythological and half conventional: (270).

Not even the fact that Maria Gostrey went to school
with her brings Strether bask to reality (272). Nor can
Nhss Barrace, "this picturesque and original lady, who
struck him, so oddly, as both.antique and modern," retrieve
Strether from the romantic past (263). Part of the realism
at this very romantic point depends on James's careful con-
trol of the reader's knowledge, just a step or two ahead
of Strether's own, but not so far that the effects of plot

36 Strether does not see—~but the reader

changes are lost.
is beginning to--that Madame de Vionnet has not raised Chad
for Jeanne but for herself (279); that she cares a good

deal more for Chad than he does for her, which is one reason
Strether is deceived (282-85); nor that even if Miss Gostrey
has not been commissioned to lead him astray, certainly

lfiss Barrace and Little Bilham are deliberately keeping the
dangerous Waymarsh out of the way (263). The reader is
tmginning to have a dual perception~-of Strether‘s romantic

illusion, and of an increasingly unromantic reality.

As in most of James‘s long novels, the romantic peak

 

 

cones nus
reality h
reader's
hoher hi
the never
“touched
resisting
Penis. f
and eyes
fact to

yielding
the joy

nolnne s
”height"
corheoti
shows St
and once
"remind,
of his (
imaths
Story, :
lady, 0:
illheed ,
She Was
hinged
lingo f0
hid the

 

 

 

 

109
comes just after the midpoint. From this mark disagreeable
reality begins to penetrate the main character, though the
reader's sense of it may accelerate faster than his. Isabel
Archer hits the zenith in Rome with Osmond; Strether, using
the reverse metaphor due to his scruples, feels he has
"touched bottom" in buying the yellow volumes he has been
resisting.37 Once again James is parodying the myth of
Ieris. Strether's great mistake is "trying with head back
and eyes aloft, to reconstitute a past, to reduce it in
fact to the convenient terms of Victor Hugo," and his great
yielding to temptation, "giving rein for once in a way to
the joy of life," is the extravagant purchase of a seventy—
volume set of Hugo's works (7)! He has, symbolically,
"bought" the whole romance of Paris. Shortly afterward,
connecting the-symbol more directly with the reality, James
shows Strether sitting in Notre Dame. He notices a woman,
and once again a convention of romance is at work. She
"reminded our friend-~since it was the way of nine tenths
of his current impressions to act as recalls of things
imagined-—of some fine firm concentrated heroine of an old
story, something he had heard, read . . ." (6-7). The
lady, of course, is Madame de Vionnet, and "our friend had
indeed at this hour a kind of revelation of her heritage.
She was romantic for him far beyond what she could have
guessed" (9). Meeting her in Notre Dame connects her with
Hugo for Strether, so he speaks to her of "the great romancer

and the great romance, and of what, to his imagination, they

 

 

or none
to Hugo's
the fifte
far off 1
W
is the on
teacher.
t'ith sue
nonantie
ing ohur
rather t

Per
ht real
ready t<
heard, 1
still m
Sllethe:
the rig

 

 

 

 

110

had done for the whole" (10). He is referring, of course,
1m Hugo's Notre-Dame d9 Pagig, the famous romance set in
the fifteenth—century--an allusion that not only shows how
far off the deep end Strether has gone, but makes Th;
Ambassadors seem ultra-realistic in comparison. The work
is the epitome of those "rash infatuations and bold bad
treacheries" that James is trying to avoid (Prefaces, 24).
With such a background Madame de Vionnet's upholding of her
romantic image by saying she will end as an old woman haunt-
ing churches, becomes a portentous hint of her condition
rather than the light touch of fancy it would be alone (8).

Paris is now "more than ever penetrating" to Strether.
But reality is looming over him like thunderheads. Chad is
ready to give up the fling and head back to the drawing-
board, but Strether is enjoying a vicarious adolescence (34).
Still under the illusion that Chad and Jeanne are in love,
Strether reveals that "They're my youth; since somehow at
the right time nothing else ever was," and he does not want
that youth to end too soon like the first (51). Mrs.
Newsome has sent him an ultimatum (36); Waymarsh is uneasy
and uncertain; but Strether is as controlled in his excite—
ment as Chad has been (63-65). While Strether grows more
and more convinced that Chad is innocent, the folks at home
grow more certain that Strether has been seduced, until
finally Mrs. Newsome sends in the reserve troops.

When the Pococks arrive, they bring the standard image

of Paris with them. Jim Pocock ribs Strether about having

 

ailing,
vulgar to
rare 'fat
sens givi
enhodies‘
shallownn
tie, and
affair"
intimacy
By their
loeocks
But
as well,
the lite
0f Perl:
Nsugees
atenpl
Poeheirs
It is n
”(than
actual
see,1 c
"he "6
Date, t
her as
Fr

hnoble

 

 

lll

 

a fling, but is himself "an example, in characteristically
vulgar form, and with all due humourous effect, of the

same 'fatal' effect of European opportunities on charac-
ters giving way too freely, which Strether more subtly
embodies" (Notebooks, 400; cf. XXII, 84-86). Jim's comic
shallowness makes his conventional dissipation seem realis-
tic, and the irony of the arch-Americans having "a 'European'
affair" carries off Waymarsh's "romance" and "fine, free
intimacy" with Sarah Pocock (Notebooks, 401; XXII, 136—37).
By their conventional American reaction to Paris, the
Pococks make the main plot more real.

But the impression of Paris changes with their arrival
as well. From Sarah's incredible "glazed and gilded room,"
the little touch of the Tuileries and "far-spreading presence
of Paris" that eventually filters through to the windows
"suggested some parade of the circus" (97). Paris is indeed
a temple of pleasure to the moral ranks of Woollett. The
Pococks have a more vulgar fling than Chad or Strether.

It is no accident that Waymarsh, spending money freely on
a woman in the old American way, takes Sarah to see an
actual circus (137). She has come to Paris primarily to
see a circus. So even though Madame de Vionnet wears the
same "discreet and delicate dress" she had worn to Notre
Dame, she is unable to break through Sarah's perception of
her as just another role-player in the show.

For Strether, however, Madame de Vionnet and her

"noble old apartment" are still the same, "full, once more,

 

 

of the di
roar of 1
It we
but i
parqn
clas:
redo
the 3
for 1
By now t.
Strether
himself
other th
has bein
seen “he
the "nee
the inn
Wine, 5
The read
engage,“
and to (
StTehhe:
behind ‘
lahie p,
in Penn
huge 00
hatter
sheen"
We a

r.___—_* _

112

of the dim historic shades, of the faint far-away cannon-
roar of the great Empire":

It was doubtless half the projection of his mind,

but his mind was a thing that, among old waxed

parquets, pale shades of pink and green, pseudo-

classic candelabra, he had always needfully to

reckon with . . . The oddity, the originality,

the poetry . . . of Chad's connexion reaffirmed

for him its romantic side. (125)
lh'now the attentive reader is diverging considerably from
Strether, having reckoned with his mind more than Strether
himself has. Jeanne de Viennet's engagement to someone

other than Chad destroys Strether's naive idea that Chad

 

was being groomed for Jeanne. To Strether the arrangements
seem "deep and dim," and although he appreciates them as

the "real thing," there is "something ancient and cold" in
the tradition (129). Perhaps Strether is beginning to per-
ceive, at least subconsciously, what has been going on.

The reader certainly perceives more fully Chad's role in the
engagement, apparently arranged to repay Madame de Vionnet

and to demonstrate to Sarah their friendship (137-38).

 

Strether is not certain what has happened, but feels left

 

hmhind by the movement of events. Sarah's room, with only
meie Pocock in it, "looked empty as only a room can look
in Paris, of a fine afternoon, when the faint murmur of the
huge collective life, carried on out of doors, strays among
scattered objects even as a summer air idles in a lonely
garden" (143). In this setting Mamie gives "sharpness,
above all, to his sense of the flight of time"; he knows

the romance is ending (148). More important, Mamie has

 

 

 

the real
makes it

is "real

eontenti
(166-68,
senses s
ing and
meant no
taro).
toleiul-
hnee non
rather .
escape;
Sarah P,
tion (2
hi
soiousn
the Ines
let 00,,
hints

113
the real "manner of Woollett," the "true inwardness" that
makes it "a loveable thing again to Strether" (153). She
is "real" and "right" (172). Yet Strether is working to
match her with Little Bilham in order to take her out of
contention for Chad, whom she also has come to "save"
(166-68, 171). He does not know what is wrong, but he
senses something. Everyone seems to be "knowing and watch-
ing and waiting" (179). "All voices had grown thicker and

nmant more things; they crowded on him as he moved about"

 

(210). Waymarsh is enjoying himself now, but Strether is
doleful--an uncomfortable and ominous reversal (183-85).
Once more the sense of Paris is the pang of lost youth
rather than the joy of its recovery (211). The past is no
escape; and all too real, "the great sponge of the future,"
Sarah Pocock, is cutting off all escape in the other direc—
tion (232).

With this preparation of malaise in Strether's con—
sciousness, James is ready for the scenes that are at once

the most romantic and realistic, most colored by the past

 

yet contemporary, in the entire novel. Since Paris's

 

I romantic qualities are so deeply shaken, he MUSt 89? away
from the city to rural France:

It had been as yet for the most part but a
land of fancy for him--the background of
fiction, the medium of art, the nursery of
letters; practically as distant as Greece,
but practically also well-nigh as conse-
crated. (245)

Romance can still "weave itself, for Strether's sense, out

of elements mild enough" (245). He remembers a landscape

 

 

 

which 1
bad the r
for fear
words, h
idealize
have the
remember
at the n
(246).
escape.
that be;
living j
was Lam
ting wi
stream,
could s
time mg
less a
Scene 1
is set
hint
' boat
Madame
the on
"Unix
comills

hhthh

 

114
painted by Lambinet, one that he would have bought if he had
had the money, but that he has never wished to see again
for fear of disappointment (246). He doubts, in other
words, his romantic sense of the past, fearing that it has
idealized reality. He thinks, though, that he can stand to
have the whole romantic landscape made real, "to see the
remembered mixture resolved back into its elements——to assist
at the restoration to nature of the whole far-away hour"
(246). In fact, however, all Strether wants is romantic
escape. He finds the scene in rural France, and it links
that day he saw the painting in the Boston shop with the
living present: "it was Tremont Street; it was France; it
was Lambinet" (246). Not wanting to spoil an idyllic set-
ting with too much reality, he does not ask the name of the
stream, for "such a river set one afloat almost before one
could take up the cars" (246, 255)--just as the stream of .E

time moves him inevitably on. He has a book to read, doubt—

less a romance, but there is a portentous reminder in the

scene of the more realistic Maupassant (247-48). The stage

is set for the most ironic turn in the novel. At this high

point of romance, a woman and a man appear on the stream in

r Mrgflfiaxng

a boat, making the picture perfect. But it is Chad and

Madame de Vionnet; his ideal romantic escape and theirs are

the same: "it was as queer as fiction, as farce, that their
country could happen to be exactly his" (256). Strether is '
completely disoriented, so unprepared that he has almost

nothing to say. A stark reality has appeared right in the

 

middle 0
the idea
intimacy
the eye
Madame d
on an aw
were, in
Str
im the n
of Paris
together
Yemtion
sober re
follow,
ted assi
toBethe:

He 1
one
”all?
moti
lees
Spec
5“ the:
‘0 Stmet
he full
hardy (
tions, n
romantic

The

 

 

115
middle of the highest romance. He knows now that Chad and
the ideal woman of old France are "intimate with the last
intimacy" (Notebooks, 409). All are shocked "out there in
the eye of nature," with all the romantic aura gone (257-58).
Madame de Vionnet babbles in.idiomatic French and Chad puts
on.an awkward attempt at a suave front; "fiction and fable
were, inevitably, in the air" (261-62).
Strether realizes now, the finest use of the convention
in the novel, that "He was mixed up with the typical tale
of Paris, and so were they, poor things--how could they all
together help being?" (271). James uses the romantic con-
vention directly, unadorned, but has turned it into the
sober realism of disillusion. Strether wants punishment to
follow, having regressed to his Puritan state. He has not
yet assimilated the shock, and does not like "all floating
together on the silver stream of impunity" (272):
He reverted in thought to his old tradition, the
one he had been brought up on and which even so
many years of life had but little worn away; the
notion that the state of the wrongdoer, or at
least this person's happiness, presented some
special difficulty.
IMt there is no bolt of lightning, no apocalypse; curiously,
to Strether, there is not even any apparent guilt. Not know-
ing fully why, he goes to madame de Vionnet's apartment,
Imrtly because he wants to see her "in her own best condi-
tions,” to round off the "typical tale" in some typical

romantic way;

The "vague voice of Paris" is still there. As if one

 

 

 

consumed
comfronta
im Madame
th highe
ofthe hi

Thus
date:
sound
broke
the
the

he WI
shoui
less
had}
host
it f
just
simp
dash
Role
like
blac

 

116
consummate scene were not enough, James follows the Lambinet
confrontation with a splendid fusion of romance and realism
in.Madame de Vionnet. First Strether renews the romance to
the highest pitch of its tension, through his "odd starts
of the historic sense, with.no warrant but their intensity":

Thus and so, on the eve of the great recorded
dates, the days and nights of revolution,the
sounds had come in, the omens, the beginnings
broken out. They were the smell of revolution,
the smell of the public temper-~or perhaps simply
the smell of blood.

It was at present queer beyond words, 'subtle,‘
he would have risked saying, that such suggestions
should keep crossing the scene; but it was doubt-
less the effect of the thunder in the air, which
had hung about all day without release. His
hostess was dressed as for thunderous times, and
it fell in with the kind of imagination we have
just attributed to him that she should be in
simplest coolest white, of a character so old-
fashioned, if he were not mistaken, that Madame
Roland must on the scaffold have worn something
like it. This effect was enhanced by a small
black fichu or scarf, of crape or gauze, disposed
quaintly round her bosom and now completing as by
a mystic touch the pathetic, the noble analogy. (274-75)

tfith.all the old history and romance and the new threatening
thunder, the.most romantic of all figures, a woman in dis-
tress, holds center stage:
The associations of the place, all felt again;
the gleam here and there, in the subdued light,
of glass and gilt and parquet, with the quietness
of her own note as the center~~these things were
at first as delicate as if they had been ghostly,
and he was sure in a moment that, whatever he
should find he had come for, it wouldn't be for
an impression that had previously failed him. (275)
The romance of the past is concentrated for Strether in this
livingzmoment; all his old sense renewed, he is clearly pre-

Pering for an intense experience, knowing it must ”subside

 

 

' . '...-.

qmchly
supreme

She

heyo
from
type
sion
eupr
real
occe

hhe shi
mason,"

fitted t

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

117
quickly into memory. Madame de Vionnet's Opportunity for
supreme romance is at hand:
She might intend what she would, but this was
beyond anything she could intend, with things
from far back-~tyrannies of history, facts of
type, values, as the painters said, of expres-
sion--all working for her and giving her the
supreme chance, the chance of the happy, the
really luxurious few, the chance, on a great
occasion, to be natural and simple. (275)
like shifting Paris, Madame de Vionnet is now a "mild deep
person," whereas the night before she was "a person com-
mitted to movement and surface and abounding in them" (276;
(m3 XXI, 89). The romantic and the real are so mixed that
Strether cannot tell whether she is perfectly natural or
"the perfection of art" (275). Soon it is apparent that
she is totally natural, crying all too sincerely; but that
only enhances the romance:
She was older for him to-night, visibly less
exempt from the touch of time; but she was as
much as ever the finest and subtlest creature,
the happiest apparition, it had been given him,
in all his years, to meet; and yet he could see
her there as vulgarly troubled, in very truth,
as a maidservant crying for her young man. (286)
Just as Madame de Vionnet could put her elbows on a table
with grace, the most trivial action, so she could be the
nmst human with the greatest romance.38
Like the great lady, Strether now feels old (288, 507).
The illusion of youth has passed. Lesser romances, such
as escape with Maria Gostrey, now seem tame; and anyway his
old scruples have returned (293-94). A drama awaits him
in Woollett, a "great difference," but after Paris that can

only‘be anticlimactic (525). Strether must now be "real"

 

 

amd "rig
questing
romance:

Ee :
hiS'

 

 

 

 

 

118
and "right" like Mamie Pocock, be himself instead of'the

questing knight, return to reality now having had his

romanc e 3

He found on the spot the image of his recent
history; he was like one of the figures of the
old clock at Berne. They came out, on one side,
at their hour, jigged along their little course
in the public eye, and went in on the other side.
He too had jigged his little course-—him too a

modest retreat awaited. (522)

As one critic notes, "the action is of course fictitious;

. . it has something of the fable or fairy tale" about it.39

But at the same time "the mark of the real never ceases to

show" in Strether (Notebooks, 414). The conventional romance

of the plot is continually diverted; the past always merges

with the present; the old convention is always made new.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes

lSee Stone, p. 26, and compare Letters, 11, p. 227,
on George Sand and France.

2Prefaces, pp. 212, 261; of. Letters, II, p. 61.
3See D.W. Jefferson, Henry James and the Modern Reader

(New York, 1964), p. 46, on James's English Hours and
Italian Hours.

40f. The American Scene, pp. 154-55, 266. Hereafter
again cited as A8,

 

 

 

 

5Quoted by Lewis, The American Adam, p. 80.

6See The Pilgrimage 3; Henry James (New York, 1925),
pp. 10, 21, 45, 69, 78—79, and passim.

 

 

 

7Henry James: The Major Phase, p. 40.

 

 

68Watch and Ward (London, 1925), p. 95, quoted by Stone,
p. 7 . .

 

90f. Prefaces, p. 28, in which James recalls the same
Nmison Vauquer as similar to the hotel in which he wrote
The American.

10Of. the allusion in The American, II, p. 588, to "Les
Idaisons Dangereuses," and the reference in "The Madonna of
the Future," XIII, p. 461, to a "terrible little tale of
' Balzac's" about a painter.

11

12On James and Hawthorne, see Bewley, Thg_§gmpl§§_§§tg,

pp. Stand passim, and on Hawthorne's sense of novelty see
see Lewis, The American Adam, p. 43.

13Of. "Master Eustace," The Complete Tales g£_Henry
James (Philadelphia, 1962-6573 ed- IJeon Edel, II. p. 341.
and "Guest's Confession," II, pp. 404-05. TO distinguish
references to the tales from references to the New York
Ehition, the designation "Tales" will precede the volume
and page number cited.

14See I, pp. 123, 259 f., and 486 f. These references
and those following are once more, of course, to the New
York Edition.

See Letters, II, p. 130: III. p- l

 

119_

 

 

 

17C
which th
conseque
dame, bu
fortune
ii 184-
the exp]
hooks, r
oTtEe r
arable i
were, a

167
and cat

17
James,"

18
the “it

19
elem

2C
h165I
dream;
0f tree
Chapter

 

 

120

15Compare, for example, his projection of a story in
which there is not the usual "woman of the people, who in
consequence of a stroke of fortune has to play the grande
dame, but a grande dame who in consequence of a stroke of
fortune has to play a woman of the people" (Notebooks,
pp. 184-85). Likewise in The Awkward Age he plans to use
the explicit opposite of the typical leune fille (Note-
books, p. 192), and in "The Next Time" projects a reversal
of the usual author's fate--that of a fine author who is
unable to write badly enough to be popular, "to make, as it
were, a sow's ear out of a silk pure" (Notebooks, p. 180).

l6Until, of course, James revises the work into a play
and caters to the audience's desire for a happy ending.

 

 

 

l7John Paterson, "The Language of 'Adventure' in Henry
James," American Literature, XXXII (1960), pp. 292-93.

l8Pointed out by Matthiessen and Murdock, editors of
the Notebooks, p. 73.

 

l93am s. Baskett, "The Sense of the Presentdin Th:
££22£2,§§E§§§ " Publications g§_the Michigan Agaggmy_g_
§giences, Arts and Letters, XLIV (1959), pp. 384-85.

2OSee Wegelin, The Image 2£_Europe in Henry James.
Po 165, on the likelihood of Graham Fielder marrying
Rosanna Gaw, a possibility which fits Wegelin's theory .
of growing social fusion in James, but which I question in
Chapter III, part 5, pp. 541-47.

2le. Martha Banta, "The House of the Seven Ushers and
How They Grew: A Look at Jamesian Gothicism," Yale ReView,

22For a few of the many "Another Turn of the Screw"
tYPe articles, see Gerald Willen, ed., A Casebook 2n Henry
isa2§L§ "The Turn of the Screw" (New YorkT"I53677 Every—

one has his own interpretation.
23

 

 

Banta, p. 65.

24The Houses that James Built (East Lansing, Mich.,
1961), p. 17.

25All page references following are to volume IV
unless otherwise designated.

26Cfo III, pp. 64—65, t0 IV, p. 418'

27See James's remarks in Edel, Letters, p. 59.

ir mimic
dong w
32
see Lit
and see
Paris.
37

Seven,

 

 

121

281n a letter by James quoted by Oscar Cargill, The
Novels 9; Henry James, p. 334, n. 46.

290f. Edel, Letters, p. 99.

30The convention has been Americanized in such
characters as Mrs. Robinson of The Graduate (New York, 1964),
by Charles Webb, among other characters.

31Notebooks, p. 227; of. "An International Episode,"
in which the conventional American view of Paris is satirized
along with several other conventions.

32On the value of conventions as preparation savers,
see Letters, II, p. 521, on the conventions of French drama;
and see Notebooks, p. 151, on The Golden Bowl, once set in
Paris.

33Edwin T. Bowden, The Themes pf Henry James (New
Haven, 1956), p. 99, quoted by Cargill, pp. 527-28.

 

 

 

34See Stone, pp. 127-50, especially p. 129.
35Cf. Notebooks, p. 527; see XXI, pp. 25, 44, 151.

36"But though in The Ambassadors the point of view is
primarily Strether's, and though it appears to be his
throughout the book, there is in fact an insidious shifting
of it, so artfully contrived that the reader may arrive at
the end without suspecting the trick. The reader, all
unawares, is placed in a better position for an understand-
ing of Strether's history, better than the position of
Strether himself."—-Percy Lubbock, The Craft 2; Fiction
(New York, 1921, 1954). p. 162. See Watt's analysis—3f
the introductory page of the novel again, pp. 269-70.

 

37XXII, p. 7. Unless otherwise designated, all follow-
ing page references are to volume XXII.

380f. Notebooks, p. 415, for James's description of
this scene as the climactic one.

 

39Wegelin, p. 88, in a vague statement that neverthe-
less describes fairly accurately the reader's suspicion
that James is turning realism into myth.

 

 

 

Th
earlies
the pre
acters
"i Pas:
throng)
Tracing
tides a
Past 1;

,,
genera
defini
only a
ithe t
tenelo
mt it
gets j

“their

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER III

THE INTERNATIONAL THEME: SEARCH FOR A
RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE PAST
AND THE PRESENT

Introduction

The so-called "international theme" is part of James's
earliest and latest formulations of the relationship between
the present and the past. It is a growing complex of char-
acters and ideas taking important shape as early as
"A Passionate Pilgrim" (1871) and continuing to develop
through his last, unfinished work, The Sense 9;“: g Pagt.
Tracing the changes in the international theme, then, pro-
vides a good outline of the changes in the sense of the
Past in James's thought and fiction.

"International theme" is one of those terms that is so
generally used by readers of James that it seems to need no
definition-awhich is convenient, since it can be defined
only approximately, with various qualifications inserted to
make the definition valid for different periods in James's
development. In some stages the "international theme" is
only nominally international and barely a theme at all. It
gets its name, of course, from the early mixture of national

settings and characters in James's fiction-—Ita1y, France,

122

 

 

 

Germany ,
as well
from one
treats a
gain tht
combine
on what
the com
the Etir
princip
are exo
his int
can cor
Europe;
Anemia:
30 the:

“‘0 in;

if the

and th

fine 8

him

its ee

h

“We;

001n1:

123
Germany, England and America, each peopled with eXpa-triates

as well as natives, or visited by representative tourists

 

t from one or more of the other nations. The resulting con-

1 treats and confrontations of customs, manners and morals

i gain the status of a "theme" through the virtuosity of the

i combinations James is able to permute, in his improvisations
on what he calls the "international chord," without losing
the central melody: the American experience of Europe and
the European reaction to Americans. For experiments with a
principally European cast, like The Princess Casamassima,

are exceptions which eventually prove to James the rule that.

 

 

his international dramas perform best with a sizeable Ameri-
can contingent. Reversals like Thg_Europeans, which brings
Europeans to America, are far outnumbered by travelogues of
Americans making the essential pilgrimage to the Old World;
so American protagonists and European settings become the
two inseparable sides of the international coin. The sense
of the past, then, becomes the American's sense of Europe,
and the international theme records James's attempt to de-
fine and develop the American character by charting its re-
letion to Europe and by refining, among other capabilities,
its sense of the past.

Marius Bewley formulates the increasingly complex
issues of the emerging international theme as a set of
conflicts:

The problem is basically the problem of Europe

versus America, and conjointly with that, the
probIem of past versus present, and both the

 

 

 

past 1
prohlt
89°81“

these pro
generally
Clement E
futures :
conflict
oi natio‘
typical
philosop
embodimc
present
list an
the pro
Hutches
dinning
ment.
lichen
instea
income
in for
datum

that

 

124

past and present versus the future, the time

problem being only another aspect of the

geographical one.
These problems are conspicuously American ones, and are
generally centered in the predicaments of Americans like
Clement Searle or Isabel Archer, who see their pasts or
futures intimately connected with Europe. But the list of
conflicts is incomplete. Through developing conventions
of national contrasts, James makes his characters allegedly
typical representatives of the conflicting moral and social
philosophies of their respective countries; anachronistic
embodiments of past cultures, ultra-modern mannequins of
present ones, or Adamic consciousnesses torn between the
past and the present; and archetypal figures dramatizing
the process of initiation and other confrontations of in—
nocence and experience. Bewley's formulation is only a be—
ginning, and is valid mainly for the early stages of develop-
ment. The contrasts between Europe and America, past and
present persist in some form throughout James's work; but
instead of being pitted against one another, they eventually
become complementary, and the best parts of each are fused
to form the ideal society prefigured in the novels of his
mature period.2

The international theme is so complex, in other words,

that it can best be treated in stages. No division is
Perfect, and each period overlaps or predicts later ones,
but these five major stages of develoPment will structure

my discussion of the sense of the past at work in the

 

 

 

internatii
to 1883,
with J are
includes
hrherina
from that
on both 1
produced ,
Papers,"
1904), 03
national
Present
stature ,
use
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inch cr
oi the i
is n
Corners
in uhici
itstalg
Artiste
ii
that go
if in.
this,

luteinc

 

125

international theme: (1) the early period, roughly 1860
to 1885, in which the attempt to unite past and present ends
with James's decision to live permanently in Europe, and
includes fiction from "A Passionate Pilgrim" up to "Lady
Barbarina"; (2) the "English period" in his work resulting
from that decision (1885-1901), with its tremendous effect
on both the quantity and the type of international story
produced, particularly in The Reverberator, "The Aspern
Papers," and "A London Life"; (5), the "major phase" (1901-
1904), christened by F.O. Matthiessen, during which inter-
national conflicts move toward a "sublime consensus" of the
present and the past and characters take on archetypal
stature, in The Wings 9__i_‘_ the Dove, The Ambassadors, and T_h_g
£93433 M; (4) the period of reassessment (1904-1914)
following his first visit to America in twenty years, in
which the incongruity between the present and James's sense
of the past results in the strong criticism of The American
£29.32 and in such almost anti-American stories as "The Jolly
Corner" and "Julia Bride"; and (5) the war era (1914-1916).
in which James's struggle with the horrible present and the
nostalgic past is reflected in intermittent work on his un-
finished novels, The Ivory Towe; and The Sense _o_f _t__i_i_e_ 32%.

Within each period the sense of the past-—meaning both
what constitutes the past and what is a proper perception
0f it--has its own form, and depends a good deal on the
Shifts taking place in the international theme. For the

international theme has at its center a major form of the

 

 

 

 

sense of ‘
heir per
cultural

particula
then, sit
the progr
these chi
termatior
the devei
Stooges :‘
n his it

PM as c

 

 

 

 

 

 

126
sense of the past, the American sense of EuroPe, as increas-
ingly perceptive American characters attempt to relate the
cultural and historical past of the Old World to their own
particular social present. The sense of the past changes,
then, with the development of James's Americans and with
the progress of his techniques in writing fiction. Most of
these changes are at least reflected in the developing in-
ternational theme, if not central to it. In short, tracing
the development of the international theme records the
changes in James's personal sense of the past, the changes
in his thought on it, and the development of the sense of the

past as a theme and as a set of techniques in his fiction.

 

 

Fro
a volume
intemai
interna1
increase
“Daisy 1
supposec
to a P01
story 1;}
write.
Hurdock
certain
forming
interna
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figllres
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each 0‘
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tempos
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J:
the ep:

 

127
l. The Early Period (1860-1883)

From far back, as James reminisces in the preface to
a.vclume of the 1907 New York Edition of his works, the
international had been his fortune. Tales based mainly in
international contrasts appear very early in his work, and
increase rapidly from 1871 to 1884. The comedy of manners
"Daisy Miller" (1878), for all the furor it raised as a
supposed slur on American girlhood, was his nearest approach
to a popular success, and was the kind of short international
story that William Dean Howells repeatedly urged him to
write. The advice was not lost on James. Matthiessen and
Murdock, editors of his notebooks, point to evidence in
certain entries that James exploits this success by trans-
fbrming "English material so that it will involve one of the
international contrasts that he knew to be his most dis-
tinctive vein."3 James does not, however, simply dress his
figures in peculiarly national clothing to make them better
selling dolls on the knick-knack market. He is seriously
concerned about the relationship of European countries to
each other and to America, as exhibited in the relations be-
tween representative individuals. Although local color
stimulates James's individualism and his sense of the past,
temporary international contrasts are not nearly so im-
rmrtant as the forces working toward a cohesive world society.

James is one of the first men of his age to transcend

the epidemic of nationalism. Early in his career he begins

 

 

to hope
his hope
perhaps
James 1
ready "
represe
em),
The end
his lat
greater
redeemi
mgland
eventue
natura]
not the
differ:
tempt 1
the Um:
does m
0f rig]
H1
ery
trace
The hm
itrope
indeed

50mm

128
to hope for a union of at least the Anglo-Saxon world, and

his hope soon turns to eXpectation. By the major phase,

perhaps mirroring the optimism of the turn of the century,

 

James is producing novels based on a certain degree of al—
ready "achieved social fusion" among the most perceptive
representatives of America and England (Th§_ying§ g; thg
13.2.18): France (The Ambassadors), and Italy (T_hg Golden Bowl).
The endings of these works and the projected resolutions of
his later unfinished novels testify to his desire for even
greater unity. Even the war has its bright side. Its main
redeeming feature to James is the resulting closeness of
England and France, and the apparent inevitability of the
eventual union of American and British interests. His
naturalization as a British citizen in 1915, finally, is

not the act of a nationalist nor an admission of irrevocable
differences between him and his native land, but is an at-
tempt to accelerate the process of unification by providing

the United States an example of proper commitment. James

 

 

does not give up the dream even when he sees the possibility
of nightmare.

He is, to be sure, hesitant to affirm a utopian vision
early in his career. At first, perhaps, he hopes just to
trace the origin of Americans and their messianic claims.
The.kmerican is after all a startling social phenomenon in
EMrope. Where has he come from? Where is he going? Where,
indeed, is he? Clearly the American must have developed

somehow from European roots, but his manners seem to have

 

 

almost
the one
hnropee
of it-
the hrs
senses
detect
social

nature

r______f

129

 

almost as much in common with the Indians. Comparisons of

the uncultured, innocent American and the SOphisticated

Emropean indicate more erasure of heritage than developMent

of it--particularly to EurOpean observers. James senses
t the break with the past that America has made, yet he also
senses her underlying continuity with it, and he tries to
detect the fine Old World threads still clinging to the
social fabric which will provide meaningful clues to the
nature of American experience.

For several years he feels that his scrutiny reveals

little. In one of his early essays on Turgenieff, which

often seem as applicable to himself as to the Russian,

 

n James remarks:

Turgenieff gives us a peculiar sense of being

out of harmony with his time-~of having what one
may call a poet's quarrel with it. He loves the
old, and he is unable to see where the new is
drifting. American readers will peculiarly ap-
preciate this state of mind; if they had a native
novelist of a large pattern, it would probably
be, in a degree, his own.

 

James, of course, fits his projection of the American
artist perfectly. In this early period he not only feels
somewhat out of step with his era and prefers some facets
of the old order, like Henry Adams, but he also is not yet
able to chart the new social drift. Even as late as 1873
he is ready to disclaim any tracing of history:

I don't pretend in the least to understand our

national destinies--or those of any portion of

the world. My philosophy is no match for them,

and I regard the march of history very much as a

man placed astride of a locomotive, without
knowledge or help, would regard the progress of

 

the

to

of
But su<
sooner:
the pro
he rep
of he
some (1
brothe
native
tmeric
I

when t
their

become

 

130

that vehicle. To stick on, somehow, and even

to enjoy the scenery as we pass, is the sum

of my aspirations.
But such modesty is misleading. His appreciation of the
scenery and the ride includes an acute testing to determine
the prevailing historical wind. An earlier letter, in which
he reports that he has decided to let the western breeze
of America blow freely through him, indicates that he finds
some direction. "I know what I am about," he reassures his
brother William in 1878, "and I have always my eyes on my
native land" (Letters, I, 60). For several years he sees
America better from abroad than many see her from home.

But he perceives both Americans and Europeans best
when they clash with one another. From his earliest ac—
quaintance with Europe James perceives those contrasts which
become the main colors on the international canvas. Europeans
are too dulled by their constant exposure to the beauty of
the past to appreciate their own heritage; only fresh Ameri-
cans like himself seem to sense it properly:

Never from a single Englishman of them all

have I heard the first word of appreciation

and enjoyment of the things here that I find

delightful. To a certain extent this is

natural: but not to the extent to which they

carry it. (Letters, I, 26)
Even English literature is better appreciated by Americans:
"English readers may fancy they enjoy the 'atmosphere' of

Middlemarch; but we maintain that to relish its inner essence

 

we must—-for reasons too numerous to detail--be an American"

(Egg House of Fiction, 266). European boys are slower in

 

 

Alreac'
emetic
been 1
Lambs
More:
belle
Women
trace

to on

flakes
Benet

“Sm

131
wit and general perception than American boys the same age,
to judge from James's classmates in Geneva, though they
excel in social polish:

They are almost a different race from boys of
their own age at home. They have, if I may
judge from these five specimens, more book
learning, but less general knowledge which
comes from unrestrained reading and less of
the quality we call smartness. . . . They
seldom make any jokes themselves, though if
you tell them one they do not seem incapable
of enjoying it. . . . But if, on an average,
these little fellows are not so acute or clever
as their brothers at home, I think that they
are infinitely more comely mannered.

(Edel, Letters, 42-43)

Already (1860) the seeds of perceptive but socially Adamic
Americans like Christopher Newman and Isabel Archer have
been sown, and the prototypes of dull Mr. Bantling and Lord
Lambeth have been cut. American ladies in Geneva, fore-
runners of the pretty Daisy Millers and more sophisticated
belles, are like angels compared to the "hideous German
women," and for many years James considers the "intellectual
grace" and "moral spontaneity" of American women superior
to the character of British women as well.6
But these are far from the highest claims that James

makes for Americans in the sixties. Comparing Saints
Beuve to the new breed, James glorifies Americans' alleged
disadvantages:

One feels--I feel at least, that he is a man of

the past, of a dead generation; and that we young

Americans are (without cant) men of the future.

I feel that my only chance for success as a critic

is to let all the breezes of the west blow through

me at their will. We are Americans born--il faut 22

prendre son arti. I look upon it as a great bles-
sing; and I tEink that to be an American is an

 

 

132

excellent preparation for culture. We have
exquisite qualities as a race, and it seems to
me that we are ahead of the European races in
the fact that more than either of them we can
deal freely with forms of civilization not our
own, can pick and choose and assimilate and in
short (aesthetically &c) claim our property
wherever we find it. To have no national stamp
has hitherto been a regret and a drawback, but

I think it not unlikely that American writers
may yet indicate that a vast intellectual fusion
and synthesis of the various National tendencies
of the world is the condition of more important
achievements than any we have seen. We must of
course have something of our own--something dis-
tinctive and homogeneous-~and I take it that we
shall find it in our moral consciousness, our
unprecedented spiritual lightness and vigour.

In this sense at least we shall have a national
cachet.—-I expect nothing great during your life-
time or mine perhaps; but my instincts quite
agree with yours in looking to see something
original and beautiful disengage itself from our
ceaseless fermentation and turmoil. You see I
am willing to leave it a matter of instinct.

God speed the day. (Edel, Letters, pp. 52-53)

This extremely significant statement shows how early James
thinks in terms of an intellectually and morally superior
American as the figure demonstrating to the world the value
of an "intellectual fusion and synthesis" of the best na-
tional traits from each land. Stimulating the creation of
such figures as Christopher Newman and Isabel Archer, and
culminating in characters like Lambert Strether, Milly
Theale, Maggie Verver, and Ralph Pendrel, this manifesto
declares the emerging American to be the best judge of the
past and creator of the future likely to evolve, setting

up one of the major conventions of the international theme.
In addition it provides a measure of James's early reaction

to the nationalistic idea of an American Adam, a morally

 

 

-5.» '

nprigh
horse:
the fu
incorp
vast s
hecomi
svmthe
grows
societ
have t
second
to 010

scribe

s 133
upright figure who can create a new world.7 Unlike
Emersonian versions, the Jamesian Messiah cannot create
v the future by cutting himself off from the past, but must
incorporate the best of all nations and times into that
vast synthesis. As James realizes that Americans are not
becoming as cosmopolitan as he hopes they will become in
synthesizing the national traits of the melting pot, he
grows less and less willing to leave the salvation of
society "a matter of instinct." The Adamic American may
have the potential to be a Messiah for James, but this
second Adam must have the decent leaves of a proper heritage
to clothe his forming character. The problem is to pre-
scribe and insure his training.

James's Americans, of course, do not develop a perfect
sense of the past--or of anything else--very quickly. To a
degree they follow James's own development. Nationalism is

a strong force in the sixties, and there is a marked dose

 

of the nationalistic "passionless pilgrim" of some early
tales in the Henry James who can throw cool water on the
romance of Paris:

When a man has seen Paris somewhat attentively,

he has seen (I suppose) the biggest achievement

of civilization in a certain direction and he

will always carry with him a certain little

reflet of its splendour. (Edel, Letters, 49)
As usual in a Jamesian sentence, those qualifying words
"I suppose," "somewhat" and "certain" carry the main attitude.

Perhaps this reaction to Paris is not so flat as Mr. Dosson‘s

 

in Egg Reverberator, but it comes perilously close to the

L_ m-

 

 

 

 

 

debhlir
percept
abroad,
London,

later 3

For a t
James ' s
torld 1'
Br
nations
Clearer
some.
illtelle
taking
an
eating
tenses:

adds a;

 

134

dabblings of ChristOpher Newman, and only hints at the fine
perceptions of Lambert Strether. James is no innocent
abroad, but neither is he the ripest observer yet. Even
Irndon, which alternately enthralls and appalls James in
later years, is only beginning to be the siren she becomes:

The truth is that the face of things here throws

a sensitive American back on himself-~back on his

prejudices and national passions, and benumbs for

a while the faculty of appreciation and the sense
of justice. (Letters, I, 19)

Fbr a time these "national passions" play a strong role in
James's developing sense of Europe, his loyalty to the New

Wbrld inhibiting his pleasure in the old.

 

 

But not for long. It is fascinating to watch James's

 

nationalism decline. The longer he stays in England, the

clearer the relative merits of Englishmen and Americans be-

come. If Americans have character, "energy, capacity, and

 

intellectual stuff,“ Englishmen have ”manners and a language,"
making the Yankees look and sound vulgar by comparison
(Letters, I, 22). But James is still so sensitive about
saying anything negative on Americans, who are very self-
conscious due to nagging feelings of inferiority, that he
adds apologetically to his mother in the same letter, "1
Eggs seen some nice Americans and I still love my country."
He is reassuring himself as much as his family, for clearly
as James's opinion of England rises, his evaluation of
America falls. ‘He develops a powerful ambivalence toward
the United States, accompanied by a guilt that shows in the

denial that his criticisms are treason. Increasingly,

 

 

noreov
even a
he get
how

he was
he was
have f
sentat

1
nor tt
he pic
Cooker
enters:
intric
that 1
displ;
delay
Jones
Win

1
wtot 1
a(”Aims
hates

the e<

 

135

moreover, he is estranged from America as a place to live
even as he glorifies the possibilities of its people. When
he gets home, he writes to Grace Norton that he does not
know

what, now that I have got America again, I am

going to do with it. Like it enormously ggng

gggte: they say there is nothing like beginning

with a little aversion. My only fear is that

mine is too old to end in a grand passion.

(Edel, Letters, 66)

He was right. He knew better what to do with America when
he was abroad. The only grand passion that James was to
have for his country was in idealizing its finest repre-
sentatives and its future--from a safe distance.

For nationalism was not to be James's major problem,
nor that of his characters, in spite of the number of times
he pictured it in the Henrietta Stackpoles, Marcellus
Cookerels, George Flacks, and other ugly-named American
ambassadors like the Pococks. The problem would be more
intricate. The "complex fate, being an American," includes
just the opposite of nationalism, or rather nationalism
displaced from the nation itself to its origins—~the ten-
dency to accept a ”superstitious valuation of Europe."
James fought this aberration as fiercely as he fought other
provincial qualities in his countrymen.

According to critics like Vernon Parrington and Van
Wyck Brooks, no one can doubt that James lost the fight
against over-pricing European artifacts. But their inter-

pretations are too simple, too difficult to reconcile with

the acutenegs of a man who could perceive the stupidity of

 

 

 

 

 

 

conser
provin
of the
ripest
see ti
the in
were 1
in
Europe
secure
t
these
world
torts
that
excel
iron
Dictu
trtin
his 0
tests

 

136
conservative French politics (Edel, Letters, 70), the
provincialism of French artists (78), and the "flatness"
of the English country house even while appreciating "the
ripest fruits of time" in each nation (83). James could
see that the English aristocracy was as ripe for a fall as
the French had been, and while he felt that the English
were the greatest race, he was often exasperated with them
(Letters, 124, 114). James's early evaluation of both
Europe and America is, I think, balanced and essentially
accurate.

What is inaccurate is his prophecy of the future of
these cultures. His desire for a union of the civilized
world, particularly England and the United States, dis-
torts his assessment of the probability of that union.
That is, James's perception of contemporary conditions is
excellent, but his projections for the future developing
from these conditions is over-optimistic. For while he
pictures beautifully in this era the problems of Americans
trying to break into European society, and recognizes in
his own social problems the fact that he has a "much less
factitious and artifical relation" to America than to
Europe (Letters, I, 36), his great hope for an Anglo-American
union begins to override the frustration of the actual
situations he is witnessing. What could be more natural
than combining loyalty to America with a love of Europe,
forming the conviction that the two cultures are inevitably

merging?

James
shame
about
comma
iette
one 0
error

vho v

(0-de cred-z

Ironi
inert
re‘vie
“in

iatic

 

 

137

Again, however, the full utopian vision develops slowly.
James quickly enters a period of objective evaluation of the
chances for unification among so many differences, and places
about equal blame on each side for barriers to complete
communication. At the height of this objectivity, in a
letter to a reviewer of "An International Episode" (1878),
one of the most balanced of his works in revealing the
errors of both sides, James gives a clear warning to those
who would tie him down to any partisan position:

Nothing is my last word about anything-~I am

interminably subtle and analytic--and with the

blessing of heaven, I shall live to make all

sorts of representations of all sorts of things.

It will take a much cleverer person than myself

to discover my last im ression--among all these

things--of anything. Edel, Letters, 106)
Ironically, since he is so often accused of being anti-
American, James is trying to defend himself against the
reviewer's charge that he is anti-British. He is truly
trying to remain in suspension about the future of inter-
national relations at this time.8

But his predilections have already shown, and will show
again. Even his earliest international story, "A Passionate
Pilgrim” (1871), ends on a note of hope for the union of
England and America after an ironic treatment of the prej-
udices blinding each side. By the "English period" his
concern for union is paramount. In 1885 he writes to James
Russell Lowell, American minister in London who has just

returned to Washington, "Don't forget that you have produced

a relation between England and the U.S. which is really a

 

 

 

 

 

 

138

gain to civilization and that you must come back to look
after your work" (Lettersj 119). Soon James will be pro-
dncing his own ambassadors of good relations. For by 1888,
if'I may skip ahead to show where his thought is going,
James has tired of the portrayal of contrast and conflict
with no resolution in sight, and has definitely made up his
mind about the direction of the future:

I am deadly weary of the whole "international"

state of mind—-so that I ache, at times, with

fatigue at the way it is constantly forced upon

me as a sort of virtue or obligation. I can't

look at the English-American world, or feel about

them, any more, save as a big Anglo-Saxon total,

destined to such an amount of melting together

that an insistence on their differences becomes

more and more idle and pedantic; and that melting

together will come the faster the more one takes

it for granted and treats the life of the two

countries as continuous and more or less conver-

tible, or at any rate as different chapters of

the same general subject. (Letters, 141-42)
This attitude becomes a prescription for illusion in the
nmjor phasew-and eventually disillusion, with James's
visit to America in 1904 and the coming of World War I.
James has decided just to take for granted a growing uni-
fication, and by so doing to accelerate its progress. Pre-
tend there is concord, and union shall come to pass; ignore
disharmony, and differences shall go away. The critic who
had used a social microscope to demonstrate a division now
looks through a telescope and sees only continuity.

The fiction James writes in the seventies and eighties
reflects the development of his thought in the early period.
Nationalism and a love of the past alternately attract and

repel James to and from both America and Europe, forming a

 

complv
sonil:
oosmo;
storie:
fault:
thesis
for us
early
air oi
than I
prefer
“inter
liveli
as a I
after
H mos
Storie
liadin
severe
teekin
latch t
°f mhr:
Mom

01
it ha:
emline

tale”I

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

139

complex force field of ambivalence. Fairly early these
conflicting feelings neutralize each other to form a fine
cosmopolitan analytical balance, so that his international
shades become deliberately weighted presentations of the
faults and merits of each side. Barriers to social syn-
thesis abound as subjects for dramatization. But the hope
fbr union also pokes its nose into the tales. Even the
early social comedies based primarily on conflicts have an
air of testing the possibilities of social fusion rather
than negating them forever. As James notes in the 1907
preface to a volume of early international tales, the
"international relation" first presented itself "after the
liveliest fashion a quarter of a century ago and earlier,
as a relation of intermarrying" (Prefaces, 203); and marriage,
after all, is the very symbol and essence of social union.
If most of the tests of union do not succeed in the early
stories, sometimes failing to produce marriage, other times
leading to less-than-perfect childless alliances, there is
nevertheless a clear improvement in some of the characters
seeking union. So when external social conditions begin to
match the internal growth already advancing, the catalyst
of marriage may begin, couple by couple, the social chain
reaction.

Only a fraction of the two dozen international tales
and half dozen novels James wrote during this period may be
examined as evidence, of course, but I shall outline briefly

relevant elements of tales in the same categories as those

 

1 disc
select
lar to
secure
v
inclut
(1871]
Mauve:
a pro:
at

Ct

d;

t

al

couts
these

uni]

 

 

 

 

 

140
I discuss at length, to avoid the great distortions of
selectivity. Wherever possible James's comments on particu-
lar tales are included as additional evidence of the general
accuracy of the points being made.

The earliest international tales James sees fit to
include in the New York Edition are "A Passionate Pilgrim"
(1871), "The Madonna of the Future" (1873), and "Madame de
Mauves" (1874). These three tales struck James in writing
a preface for them

as sops instinctively thrown to the international
Cerberus formidably posted where I doubtless then
did n't quite make him out, yet from whose capacity
to loom larger and larger with the years there must
already have sprung some chilling portent. Cerberus
would have been, thus, to one's younger artistic
conscience, the keeper of the international "books';
the hovering disembodied critical spirit with a dis-
engaged eye upon sneaking attempts to substitute the
American romantic for the American real.
(Prefaces, 194)
In other words, James found the peculiarly American reality
that he intended in these tales gobbled up by romance. This
Cerberus, as James hints here, was to bother him more and
more in later years as he realized how much of what he had
written under the guise of "realism" was in fact pure romance.
At this stage the romance takes somewhat different forms than
later, but I hope to demonstrate eventually the continuity
Of his early international romances with the later illusions.

”A Passionate Pilgrim” is a striking example of this

continuity, so I am using it as the main representative of

these early years. For the situation of the tale is very

similar to that of later works, particularly James's last

 

 

novel
of an
new
State,
recov‘
thougj
pose

famil'
Merit
nativ
Drop
inter.
World
princ

are m

_=moap;—a-

tie a,

nor, I

“em

tiOn ;

r_.

141

novel, The Sense 9; the Past: a dispossessed American heir
of an English country house goes to England in the hope of
recovering the estate. This relationship between the united
States and England, especially with an American trying to
recover his past, occupies an important place in James's
thought and fiction. As Christof Wegelin points out, the
pose of the dispossessed American relative of an old English
family is an established convention of nostalgia for many
American writers (3?). so James is dealing with a major
native strain. Caught by the "nostalgic passion" for
Ehrope, James describes his personal position during this
interim of living in America after a grand tour of the Old
WOrld, as "a romantic analogy with the state of dispossessed
princes and wandering heirs" (Prefaces, 195). His feelings
are very similar to Clement Searle's:

I had in the spring of 1869, and again in that

of 1870, spent several weeks in England, renew-

ing and extending, with infinite zest, an acquaint-

ance with the country that had previously been but

an uneffaced little chapter of boyish, or--putting

it again far enough back for the dimmest dawn of

sensibility-~of infinite experience; and had, per-

ceptively and aesthetically speaking, taken the

adventure of my twenty-sixth year "hard," as

"A Passionate Pilgrim" quite sufficiently attests.

(Prefaces, 194)

This visit to England was to leave in him a lasting roman—
tic desire for its synthesis with American culture.

But James is not the morbidly nostalgic Clement Searle;
nor, contrary to Wegelin (34), is he to be confused with the
nmddlesome narrator, who triggers the devastating confronta-

tion by informing the British household that its menacing

Ameri
cultu
howev

tuall

Hmnmb‘mD—l-H-I‘xlme

Jame:
of it
tras1
Same
Syste
impo]
lite]
0f fl

Jame:

3118M

°u1h

or 111

 

 

142

American cousin is there. James is struck with the marked
cultural relationship between the American and England,
however, so in at least a few speeches his viewpoint vir—
tually coincides with the narrator's:

The latent preparedness of the American mind

even for the most characteristic features of

English life was a matter I meanwhile failed

to get to the bottom of. The roots of it are

indeed so deeply buried in the soil of our

early culture that, without some great up-

heaval of feeling, we are at a loss to say

exactly when and where and how it begins. It

makes an American's enjoyment of England an

emotion more searching than anything Con—

tinental. (XIII, 335-36)

To the searching American eye there is no tint

of association with which the great grimy face

of London doesn't flush. (348)
James is clearly emphasizing the underlying similarities
of English and American culture as much.asthe external con-
trasts. The two pe0ples have most of the same history, the
same common law as the basis for jurisprudence, political
systems emerging from similar philosophical bases, and most
important to the writer, virtually the same language and
literary heritage. On the other hand, the contrast in tone

of the speech of the Americans in the Red Lion "may in

English air be called alien in spite of coincidences" (339).

James is holding the question of cultural compatibility in
suspension: just how closely related to the English is the
American?

The tale is therefore a fable on English and American
cultural identity, and the crux of the fable is whether
or not the fresh American, not dulled to the beauty of the

 

past
cepti
Searl
extra
is cc
Latex
breal
appre
of t]

has

unde
over
Fret
all

Plea

~ 143
past by overexposure, is in.fact a finer instrument of per-
ception than the native. "Suppose I should turn out a better
Searle than you--better than you nursed here in romance and
extravagance?" Clement Searle asks his female cousin, who
is completely ignorant of the family heritage (379f80).
Later, when Richard Searle is also present, Clement again
breaks out in a discourse that the narrator calls "a divine
apprehension, a romantic vision free as the flight of Ariel,
of the poetry of his companions' situation and their con-
trasted general irresponsiveness" (393).

But if the British branch of the family is normally
undersensitive to the Anglo-Saxon tradition, Clement is an
oversensitive receptor of the past, having developed his
preternaturally acute sense in order to be able to feed at
all upon the sparse American scene. In the continuation
of the conversation with Miss Searle mentioned above, he
pleads:

Ceme don't disappoint me. You've some history

among you all, you've some poetry, you've some

accumulation of legend. I've been famished all

my days for these things. Don't you understand?

Ah you can't understand! (380)
If the American is more sensitive than his British cousin,
he runs the risk of being too sensitive. In London Clement
has an orgy, as the narrator partly perceives:

We were as conscious one as the other of that

deeper mystic appeal made by London to those

superstitious pilgrims who feel it the mother-

city of their race, the distributing heart of

their traditional life. Certain characteris-

tics of the dusky Babylon, phases, features,
”say" more to the American spiritual ear than

 

pen. ..‘—on

low,
her,
The ‘
tial
atit
for

seen

 

 

144 ,
anything else in Europe. The influence of these
things on Searle it charmed me to note. His ob-
servation I soon saw to be, as I pronounced it to
him, searching and caressing. His almost morbid
appetite for any overscoring of time, well-nigh
extinct from long inanition, threw the flush of
its revival into his face and his talk. (361)

wa, James is not repudiating the latent cultural unity of
America and England in such passages, nor the sense of past.
The American narrator's appreciation of England is essen-
tially valid. But James is decrying any morbid or "super-
stitious valuation of Europe" like Searle's. It is fine
for the two men to sense "the noble friendliness of the
scenery, its latent old-friendliness, the way we scarcely
knew whether we were looking at it for the first or the
last time" (362). But when Searle sees a "rook haunted
churchyard . . . a grey, grey tower, a huge black yew, a
cluster of village-graves with crooked headstones and pro-
trusions that had settled and sunk," and almost literally
dies to be buried there, his unhealthy necrophilia is un-
mistakable (365). It is no accident that Clement looks like
his eighteenth-century ancestor. He is anachronistic; he
has allowed his sense of the past to deprive him of any
modern identity, and hence any use or relevance in the

world of his contemporaries. Not equipped to live, he is
ready to die. He is, as he grotesquely fancies, very much
like a reincarnation of his ancestor, whose spirit within
him ”has rattled about these forty years, beating its wings
against its rickety cage, begging to be taken home again.

. . . Now at last the bruised spirit can escape" (371-72).

 

 

is he

his
born
the
on I
here

has:

145
As he correctly insists, "I gm a ghost!" (391).

Unlike James's later American Adams, Searle does not
make enough of a virtue from his lack of a personal history.
He just laments "my name is Clement Searle. I was born in
New York, and that's the beginning and the end of me"
(356). Somehow--and this is pure romance--Searle deve10ps
his extraordinary sense of the past in a vacuum.9 He is
born old: "I entered upon life a perfect gentleman. I had
the love of old forms and pleasant rites," though nothing
on which to exercise this love. "I should have been born *
here and not there; here my makeshift distinctions would
have found things they'd have been true of" (357). Instead
he is considered pseudo-English among his American friends,
having none of the position and heritage, but only "nice
tastes, as they call them, and fine sympathies and senti-
ments" (356).

Within Searle's predicament is the central problem of
American identity and its relationship to England, neatly
reversed in setting in "The Jolly Corner" and taken up again

in The Sense 3f the Past. Facing the fine old estate,

 

Searle questions and the narrator replies:

"I know what I am, but what might I have
been? What do such places make of a man?"

"I dare say he gets stupidly used to them,"
I said. "But I dare say too, even then, that
when you scratch the mere owner you find the
perfect lover." (367)

Richard Searle, then, the British cousin, is the test of

what Clement might have been, and the narrator's speculations

 

I 2:,“ ,

about
"mere
reset
by tl
irrit
his a
info:
tion
he tl
cups
one

love

the

onl;
but

tro‘

146
about such a man are partly fulfilled. For Richard, the
"mere owner" of Lackley (a suggestive name), is in fact a
reserved old clam. But once the grit of sand is inserted
by the American--the fragile claim to the estate which
irritates Richard so intensely--the stodgy franklin shows

his appreciation of Lackley with an exquisitely well-

informed tour of the place: "He knew his house to perfec
tion. He touched upon a hundred traditions and memories,
he threw off a cloud of rich reference to its earlier oc-
cupants" (395). Continuing to rise to the occasion, the
owner is finally scratched enough for the intensely jealous
lover to emerge:
"Let him, with his high-flown parade of loyalty,
imagine a tithe of what T_feel! I love my estate;
it's my passion, my conscience, my life! Am I to
divide it up at this time of day with a beggarly
foreigner-~a man without means, without appearance,
without proof, a pretender, an adventurer, a
chattering mountebank? I thought America boasted
having lands for all men! Upon my soul sir, I've
never been so shocked in my life." (401)
Apparently, then, the American claim to an English heritage
and identity is exposed as a pretentious presumption.

Or is it? Is Richard Searle the only judge of manners
and heritage? I think both characters are ridiculed; not
only Clement's assumption of complete interchangeability,
but Richard's assumption of absolute separation is ludi-
crous:

He spoke of it [America] as of some fabled planet,
alien to the British orbit, lately proclaimed to
have the admixture of atmospheric gases required
to support animal life, but not, save under cover

of a liberal afterthought, to be admitted into
one's regular conception of things. I, for my part,

his
Ole!

com}

 

147

felt nothing but regret that the spheric smooth-

ness of his universe should be disfigured by the

extrusion even of such inconsiderable particles

as ourselves. (388)
More eloquent satire can hardly be imagined. Richard
Searle is an anachronism as bad as his cousin. James is
bursting not only the romantic, conventional American il—
lusion of England, but the narrowness of those British
reactionaries who could assume of the American that "so
provincial a parasite would hardly have good manners"
(387). Richard does not see even the possibility of union
represented in the romance between Clement and Miss Searle.

The end of the fable is perhaps most revealing. After
his rude expulsion from Lackley, there is nothing left for
Clement Searle but to live his illusion to the hilt, to
complete his imaginative exchange of identity with his
ancestor (415), just as Ralph Pendrel does in Egg §g§§g g;
IE2 Eggt. So he reverts to the good old days of "rank abuses,
of distinctions and privileges the most delicious and in-
vidious"-—but perceives that "some of the foundation—stones
are loosened, some of the breaches will have to be re-
Paired" (415). If he lives a "delightful lie," as he calls
it, "the happy faith that life is all a green old English
garden and time an endless summer afternoon" (417): he
transcends the lie by perceiving it- NOW a worthy kin to
the later American Adams of James, he has "positively turned

rhapsodist and seer." The narrator describes the change:

 

affe
labs
abon
Seat

men

it:

148

I was particularly struck with his having laid

aside the diffidence and self—consciousness of

the first days of our acquaintance. He had be-

come by this time a disembodied observer and critic;
the shell of sense, growing daily thinner and more
transparent, transmitted the tremor of his quickened
spirit. (420)

In this state Searle reveals the deep ambivalence that
affected James during this period: "You English are really
fabulous! I don't know whether I most admire or most
abominate you!" And during this interim of lucidity,
Searle pontificates on the relation of Americans and English-
men to the Anglo-Saxon tradition:

We're nursed at the opposite pole. Naked come

we into a naked world. There's a certain .

grandeur in the lack of decorations, a certain

heroic strain in that young imagination of ours

which finds nothing made to its hands, which.

has to invent its own traditions and raise high

into our morning-air, with a ringing hammer and

nails, the castles in which we dwell. Noblesse

oblige--Oxford must damnably do so. What a

horrible thing not to rise to such examples!

If you pay the pious debt to the last farthing

of interest you may go through life With her

blessing; but if you let it stand unhonoured

you're a worse barbarian than we! (418)
His ancestor, dispossessed of any estate by the law of
primogeniture, and ruining the young woman he is not allowed
to marry, is part of the barbaric fruit of English culture.
Searle is giving a warning as well as an appreciation. If
the Richard Searles continue to foster such injustices,
there will be American cousins to take up the dishonoured
heritage!

Although the marriage of old Miss Searle and her Amer-

ican relative is cheated of its poetic jUStice by the touch

of rt
pred
as s
by c
"tbi
tiou

bis

149
of reality still holding James, future unions are clearly
predicted. Searle himself is a fusion of the two peOples,
as shown in the ambiguity of his anguish for "my country,
my country, my country!" (429). Which country? Presumably
"this awful England," since Searle gives up his supersti-
tious sense of the past and sells his "battered relics,"
his "gifts and mementoes" of the past, to give an English—
man the chance to become a good American. But Searle is
never more American than in this action, when he gives a
man out off from the past a chance for a future. There are
other symbols of synthesis. The union made possible by
Richard's death is left unfulfilled by Clement's own death.
He learned too late. But Miss Searle is not long clad in
black for the dead Richard; perhaps with an ambiguous motive,
she soon wears "colours" again according to Clement's
request-~dedicated to life and the future instead of death
and the past.

James did not write another international story set in
England until after his decision to live in EurOpe. Conse-
quently few of his stories in the early period deal as
directly with cultural closeness as "A Passionate Pilgrim."
But his best American figures nevertheless develop finer and
finer character and in some cases a discriminating sense of
the Past, both of which will aid them in merging with
Eurcpean society. Just as often, however, James writes
fables on pathological senses of the past--such as "A

Passionate Pilgrim" or "The Madonna of the Future," on a

Amer

abob

as '
bar]
Burl
eve:

I86

 

150

sterile American artist, and "The Last of the Valerii"
(1874), about an anachronistically pagan Italian count—~so
his warnings about "superstitious valuations" of Europe
and the past are evidently important enough to be repeated.
Americans must overcome such illusions in order to bring
about a viable consensus.

"The Madonna of the Future" is not as broad a fable
as “A Passionate Pilgrim,“ for its main character has a
narrower form of the American disease, a slavery to old
European art. Once again, however, the tale shows how an
overdeveloped sense of the past in a member of "the famished
race" (XIII, 441) can mislead him into a sterile life. The
American narrator and the poor American artist study
Fflorence's early paintings, particularly the madonnas,
rather than "the full-fruited knowledge of the later works"
(455). As an art critic, much like Clement Searle in
judging landscape, the artist seems to the narrator to be
"inclined more than I approved to the sentimental proposi-
tion, was too fond, I thought, of superfine shades and of
discovering subtle intentions and extracting quintessences."
(446). His aesthetic sense is overdeveloped in a single
direction, a reaction to his American background, just as
his abhorrence of the commercial is a clear sign of rebel-
lious Americanism (456). The problem is that he has rebelled
too much. Listen to him rave:

We're the disinherited of Art! We're condemned
to be superficial! We're excluded from the magic

circle! The soil of American perception is a
poor little barren artificial deposit! Yes, we're

The

men

151

wedded to imperfection! An American, to excel,

has just ten times as much to learn as a European!

We lack the deeper sense! We have neither taste

nor tact nor force! How should we have them?

Our crude and garish climate, our silent past, our

deafening present, the constant pressure about us

of unlovely conditions, are as void of all that

nourishes and prompts and inspires the artist as

my sad heart is void of bitterness in saying so!

We poor aspirants must live in perpetual exile. (442)
The artists tirade sounds like a parody of James's own com-
ments on America, especially the famous passage in his
biography of Hawthorne on the artistically nude qualities
of the American scene. And it is a parody, showing that the
artist has "all our native mistrust for intellectual dis-
cretion and our native relish for sonorous superlatives"
(456). America and the present must not be underrated.
The artist is so beguiled by the beauty of the past, embodied
in his once beautiful model, that he never perceives the old
fading in the light of cumulative aesthetic development.
One of James's earliest aphorisms for artists, "Madonna" is
interesting here primarily as a demonstration of the in-
separability of taste, creativity, and a proper sense of the
past.

The heroine of "Madame de Mauves" also has a faulty
sense of the past. Her error is a "romantic belief that the
enjoyment of inherited and transmitted consideration, con—
sideration attached to the fact of birth, would be the
direct guarantee of an ideal delicacy of feeling" (224);
but eventually, almost like Isabel Archer, she regrets

thinking that "a needy nobleman was the ripest fruit of

 

 

 

"Th

bl:

lht

152
time" (261). She has a feature redeeming her romanticism,
though, one important in James's conception of the developing
American character. Her "moral imagination," which her
husband lacks, makes her "a model to all the inferior matrons
of his line" (251). That this trait is not Euphemia's
alone, but is shared with all her countrymen, is clear from
Hrs. Draper's contrast of American and EurOpean character:
"The lightest of g§.have a ballast that they don't imagine,
and the poorest a moral imagination that they don't re-
quire" (222). Unfortunately Madame de Mauves does not
redeem her husband through her virtue. He is cured of the
philandering that is the national pastime and falls in love
with his wife, but her "outraged virtue" refuses to forgive
him-~so he commits suicide! (531). Reflecting James's am-
bivalence toward America just as earlier stories reveal his
mixed feelings about Europe, the story presents both sides
of the Puritan American woman--her capacity for virtue, and
the corresponding capacity for exercising that virtue with
a vengeance.

In "The Last of the Valerii," however, written the
dame year, the softer side of the American woman prevails.
Count Valerii's American wife Martha, "a more perfect ex-
periment of nature, a riper fruit of time, than those prim.
itive persons for whom Juno was a terror and Venus an

example,"10

is her husband's'pledge to the present," an
"incontrovertible modern" who saves the Count from the cold
beguiling beauty of the past. Like Clement Searle, Count

Valerii has a tendency to prefer the dead to the living,

 

 

 

153
and combines this necrophilia with a distorted aesthetic
sense comparable to that of the artist of the madonnas.
To be sure, the Count "never became, if you will, a thoroughly
modern man" (122), but his wife is able to rescue him from
those "evil germs which history had implanted in his line,"
from the "heavy heritage" of that "interminable ancestry"
that stretches "back through all the darkness of history"
(107). Martha is "a riper fruit of time" than the Count

 

because she has a more balanced perspective on life and
death, the present and the past.
Although a number of insensitive "passionless pilgrims"

and expatriates people the international scene, the main

 

stream of Jamesian characters leading from the early period
to the major phase is his most perceptive group of native
Americans. And as the character of James's finest Americans
develops in the early period-~or his English men and women

in the middle period, or men and women of various nation-
alities in the major phase-—the sense of the past is re—
fined inseparably from moral and aesthetic senses. Ultimately
the sensibilities of the best characters are a fusion of
exquisite taste, impeccable conscience, and a finely dis-
criminating historical sense. If one or more of these senses
is undeveloped or overdeveloped, the result is a distorted
personality like Gilbert Osmond or Mrs. Newsome. But in
general the three develop together: the person with the

best taste is the most moral, and properly distinguishes

the influence of the past on the present. In Americans the

 

"sub

ate

the

pas

act

154
"superstitious valuation" of the past carried by "passion-
ate pilgrims" or the irreverence toward the old that marks
the "passionless" ones is represented as an immature plateau
in the movement toward a more mature perception.

The contrast that Wegelin sees between the sense of the
past in James and in earlier American writers is also ap-
parent as an early stage in the development of his char-
acters:

For the sense of the past was no less strong in
him than in the earlier Americans. But it was
different. American writers of the first half of
the century had seen the lingering past of Europe
primarily as a matter either of the material

"mementos"--the ruins, the monuments, the moss,

and the ivy—-or of political and social conserva—

tism (the so-called feudal institutions) with its

concomitant polish of manners. In James the

lingering past became part of a stream of time ex-

tending into the present and accounting for it;

in him the past lives, not only in outdated

political institutions which ought to be dead or,

vaguely, in the sentiments which romantic pilgrims

allow themselves in the presence of its "mementos,"

but in the texture of society and of the active

lives of individual men and women. (22)
The early Clement Searle pays attention to the mementos
and the ivy. Daisy Miller visits monuments just to say she
has been there. But those with any saving intelligence do
notperceive the past and present in terms of buildings and
monuments, quaint customs and clothes alone. To Isabel
Archer, for example, the Roman ruins become the tangible
evidence of vast human suffering. Nick Dormer sees poli-
tics in terms of outdated "rotten" boroughs, his father,
oPportunistic Julia Dallow, and the ancient Carteret. Such

knowledge and capability do not come easily, and only a few

sta

per

0rd
tor
evi
evi
he
be!

svl

155

of James's early Americans get far beyond the opening
stages. Searle goes as far as most, but he dies. Isabel
perhaps learns more than any, but she too is trapped. There
is a great potential for tragedy in becoming mature, for in
order to deveIOp a fine sense of the past, of art, and of
morality, these characters often must be able to discover
evil and deal successfully with it even as the knowledge of
evil helps create the consciousness needed to master it.
Their task is to obtain the knowledge and the sensibility
before the evil destroys them. Quite often the past harbors
evil, as in "The Last of the Valerii." But there is an evil
in the amoral or innocent present as well. The international
theme records many of the tragedies and comedies of Adamic
Americans as they try to develop this total sense of life,
past and present, flowing through the people around them.

James's first major novel, Roderick Hudson (1875). shows
more the potential of Americans than the achievement. For
Roderick is an artistic and moral failure, and his case is a
variation of the aesthetic fable in "The Madonna of the
Future" and the moral fable in "Madame de Mauves." Roderick
is most successful, symbolically enough, when he creates a
statue of Adam, but instead of developing his pure instincts,
he bankers after forbidden fruit. He is unable to tell a
genuine product of the past from a veneered substitute, the
superficial social beauty that glosses the Americano-
Ehropean Christina Light, and his resulting moral and
aesthetic decline is symptomatic of this deficiency in his

he
But

art
can

let

156

sensibility. Similarly, Mary Garland, as Rowland Mallet
tells her, was made to appreciate Europe. If she and
Roderick had united as planned, their combined qualities--
aesthetic and moral--might have reversed the failure. But
she is too much the relative of the New England Puritans
to be a very passionate pilgrim, too bound in moral hide to
be penetrated enough by Italy to help Roderick.

The American (1876), true to its title, defines the

 

American character and relation to Europe in a similar manner.
But its protagonist is less corruptible than Roderick. For
ChristOpher Newman, while he is not yet much of a judge of
art or tradition, and is betrayed by the romantic urge that
causes him to choose an anachronism like Claire de Cintre--
Newman is nevertheless "nature's nobleman," both intelligent
and highly moral, and he almost pulls off a grand alliance.
Unlike Roderick, at least, he chooses a genuine article.
Instinctively moral (II, 102), Newman also claims to "have
the instincts-~have them deeply--if I haven't the forms of

a high old civilization" (45). He thinks too highly of
himself, perhaps, and has a very strange attitude toward
a'wife as an article to be found in a marketplace, but his
character is essentially sound.

His character is the major item to be tested. As James
explains in the preface, he is trying to portray "some
cruelly wronged compatriot" who should "suffer at the hands
0f persons pretending to represent the highest possible

civilization and to be of an order in every way superior to

157
his own" (Prefaces, 21-22). As every reader of the novel
knows, Newman proves instead to be the superior social
specimen in both manners and morals.

But there is another test in the novel, one marking an
important phase in the international theme. For Newman's
proposed marriage is a test of the possibility of social
fusion--literally an experiment of Mrs. Tristram's. Much
like James in intent, she wants to see what will happen to
Newman and to an old family with a daughter who is the
"skim of the milk of the old noblesse" (54) when the ques-
tion is social integration. The only way James can insure
any revealing friction is to anachronize the Bellegardes
back to a Napoleonic stage, since as he well knew contempor-
ary European society had compromised and mellowed enough
for a rich American to be pounced upon by any financially
pinched noble family. Newman himself is one of the best
articles in the market, and would not be shunned just be-
cause he-is a bargain. The result is a partly false test
with artificial barriers. James writes to Howells the year
following publication that it was the "insuperable diffi-
culties" of the case that attracted him, and that "We are
each the product of circumstances and there are tall stone
walls which fatally divide us." Such deterministic state-
ments make the case sound impossible. But look at the ex-
ample James gives of the supposedly "insuperable difficulties"

that the couple would face if they married:

Th!

011!

 

158

For instance-—to speak very materially—awhere would
they have lived? It was all very well for Newman
to talk of giving her the whole world to choose
from? but Asia and Africa being counted out, what
would EurOpe and America have offered? Mme. de C.
couldn't have lived in New York; depend upon it;
and Newman, after his marriage, (or rather Egg,
after it) couldn't have dwelt in France. There 11
would have been nothing left but a farm out West.

 

These are not "material" barriers; they are psychological
ones--or, rather, external social barriers that prevent
union by exerting psychological pressure on the lovers. As
James clearly sees later when he writes the preface to the
work, Newman and Claire are both victims (Prefaces, 24).
The barriers to their happiness are mainly outside them;
even Madame de Cintre's reservations have been imposed on
her by her family and her society. When James removes some
of the external hurdles, the result is marked progress, as
in "Lady Barbarina": when some of the internal reservations
fall, as in the case of Gaston Probert of The Reverberator,
the chances for a fruitful union are even better. James
seems to be implying that not only his Americans, but in-

flexible Europeans like Lady Barb and the Bellegardes must

 

sharpen their perceptions and revise conventions in order
to create a more perfect union.

The phase of the international theme that The American
most strongly deve10ps, in addition to the nature of Ameri-
can character, then, is the possibility of a synthesis of
old and new, the reconciliation of EurOpe and America.
Picking up the thread of "A Passionate Pilgrim" and "Eugene

Pickering," The American marks the high tide of European

 

 

 

 

159

intransigence. After this the faults are more equally
shared,and the stories are more hopeful tests of the con—
ditions for union. Americans abroad are mistaken for
Englishmen by other Americans, instead of for Russians or
Germans.12 Comedy and romance prevail, and a few interna-
tional engagements even make it to the altar. Some may not
survive much longer, as in the ultra-romantic "Longstaff's
Marriage" (1878), but many are the typically happy marri- '
ages that resolve social differences at the end of comedies.

There is nevertheless a paradoxical quality in these
international comedies: the more intelligent, moral, higher
elements of each society cannot get together, much as James
wants them to; but the less perceptive, more common couples
get along swimmingly. Poor Jackson Lemon has trouble keep—
ing Lady Barb even in New York, but Herman Longstraw can
carry Lady Agnes all the way to the Pacific. Daisy Miller
could have married Giovanelli at the drop of a parasol,
and Winterbourne can have his pick of clever foreign ladies
to "study" under-«but neither Daisy nor Winterbourne can
communicate genuine feelings to the other. The Bantlings
can fitly marry the Stackpoles, and Osmond's sister gets
the brutal Count Gemini she deserves, but can Lord Warburton
attract Isabel Archer? If Isabel must marry an expatriate,
Why not Ralph Touchett instead of Gilbert Osmond? Ralph,
like some of Cooper's figures, seems killed by a blow aimed
by the author. The Nancy Headways can dupe the Sir Arthur

Demesnes ("The Siege of London"), and Felix can lead

 

 

160
Gertrude Wentworth to the altar; why can't the Baroness
Eugenia bait the trap well enough for Robert Acton (Th2
Europeans)? After a time I think that James is yielding to
a certain perversity, refusing to produce happy endings
just because romances have them, and realism must always
differ from romance. "Daisy Miller," with its abrupt and
far from inevitable disposal of Daisy through "Roman fever,"
especially left me with this feeling.

But James does not want to be unreal by painting an
all-black picture either. The marriages that do come off
seem deliberate pledges that all is not lost, that union is
possible-~a comic balance to the main failure of union.
Anything bordering on the naturalism that is realistic to
the French is unreal for Americans, Howells argues, and
James recognizes similar differences in the cultural heri—
tages of the two nations. Some balance, the happy marriage
of the secondary couple (almost like a control group in a
scientific experiment), must be allowed to offset the dis-
juncture of the central figures.

Such balanced, deliberately weighted presentation
reaches a high point in "An International Episode" (1878~79),
"Diary of a Man of Fifty" (1879). "A Bundle 0f Letters"
(1880), "The Point of View" and "The Siege of London" (1882).
As Wegelin so well demonstrates, "An International Episode"
is "the classic example of James's dramatization of the
mutual misunderstanding of Americans and Europeans" (48).

Characters on both sides make silly errors based on the

161

reigning American conventions of how Europeans act and are
motivated, or the European assumptions about American be-
havior and intentions. Percy Beaumont and the British
ladies assume that all American girls are out to marry
English lords, and the pseudo-sophisticated American Mrs.
Westgate falls for the established rumor that the English
reply to hospitality with snobbery. Both conventions are
undercut, of course, by Lord Lambeth's proposal and Bessie
Alden's refusal of it. Lord Lambeth is no snob, and Bessie
is no social gold-digger. Furthermore, the air is filled
with cliches that are ironically undermined by the story.
James's main point seems to be that the conventions and
cliches are false, and get in the way of social harmony and
union.13

Most of these stories, I claim, set up such conventions
as the main hindrances to social integration. After a time,
as in "Diary of a Man of Fifty" and "A Bundle of Letters,"
union or isolation is determined primarily by attitude-~or
as James calls it in a third tale, "The Point of View."
In the "Diary" mistrust keeps a retired British general
from marrying an Italian widow, and he warns the young
Edmund Stanmer not to marry this widow's daughter. When
Stanmer marries anyway and is apparently happy, and tells
the general he was wrong about the older countess, it is
presumably the general's attitude that is the main barrier
preventing his own happy marriage. Likewise in "A Bundle

of Letters" everything depends on whose eyes are judging.

 

Each charact
elity, in hi
but the read
beats; the n
are inherent
Consequentl;
is apparent
James can b!
ofliew“ it;
Episode." ‘
present--Am
rationalist;
larliamenta
thing most
herican we
think marri
best to fin
Just a
Bessie Alde
inter'lfittior
shill inpos,
would.be SI
llicting p]
he “must!
boweler, !
and Europe;
Dress“, t

162
Each character measures the others, most of different nation-
ality, in his own way. The result is a complex of relativity,
but the reader does not have to decipher conflicting assess—
ments; the main contrasts, indeed the main characterizations,
are inherent in the viewpoints rather than the descriptions.
Consequently the main source of antagonism or compatibility
is apparently the attitude each maintains. Just how ironic
James can be in juxtaposing attitudes is shown in "The Point
of View" itself, to add an example to "An International
Episode." The whole range of viewpoints is once again
present--Americans like Louis Leverett who are pro-European,
nationalistic Americans like Marcellus Cockerel, a British
Parliamentarian, and a Parisian. The irony is that the only
thing most of these men can agree on is the beauty of
American women like Aurora Church—-yet she and her mother
think marriage prospects are so bad that they have to go
west to find her a husband!

Just as in "An International Episode" Lord Lambeth and
Bessie Alden are "victims of a world so deeply entangled in
international prejudice as to make a simple human relation-
ship impossible" (Wegelin, 51), so Aurora Church and any
would-be suitors fail to get together primarily due to con-
flicting prejudices that fail to allow genuine feelings to
be communicated. The conclusion is an optimistic one,
however. When Americans develop a proper sense of the past,
and Europeans conceive a reasonable perspective of the
present, the two can meet somewhere in between in an intelli-

gent combination of the old and new;

 

 

 

 

Introductic
in: s
2m". \

ms.IV-VI

Part 1:
3%

4Quot
Stories 9;
p' “1 l

5Ede]
with no at
volumes.

0‘
Brooks in
10Tal
Last of]
llEd

the 0108e
Barbal‘ine

12 E
narrator
wiflterbm
"my M:
Pension ;
1mglismm

”We

Notes

Introduction:

1The Complex Fate, p. 56.
2Cf. Wegelin, The Image 9; Europe ig Henry James,
chs. IV-VI.

Part 1:

 

3Notebooks, p. xv; cf. pp. 77, 167 as examples.

4Quoted by n.0, Matthiessen, The American Novels and
Stories 9f Henry James (New York, 1947), Introduction,
p. xvi.

5Edel, Letters, p. 73. Again, references to Letters
with no author preceding the citation refer to Lubbock's
volumes.

6Edel, Letters, p. 47; Lubbock, Letters, pp. 26, 120.

7See Lewis, The American Adam, Prologue and pp. 62,
152—55.

80f. Wegelin, pp. 48-51.

9A criticism of James's Americans leveled by Van Wyck
Brooks in The Pilgrimage 2; Henry James, p. 94.

lOTales, vol. III, p. 117. All references to "The
Last of the Valerii" are to this volume.

llEdel, Letters, pp. 98—99. Compare my discussion of
the close relationship between this quotation and Lady
Barbarina," in Chapter III, Part 2, pp. 170-71.

l2Clement Searle is mistaken for a Russian by the
narrator of "A Passionate Pilgrim," XIII, p. 338, and
Winterbourne is mistaken for a German by the heroine of
"Daisy Miller," XVIII, p. 12, but the narrator of The
Pension Beaurepas" is more accurately mistaken for an
Englishman by Ruck, XIV, p. 401.

 

lBWegelin, pp. 48—51.

163

.27. ”,7

After
which I sh
closely re
considered
theme as a
as well as
as his fix
to he saii
given the
be Popula
ElirOpe we

Of them 1:

His chOic
time in c
tuliiihg 1
for tom

one
begins *5.
big Angl
illenoe J

164
2. The English Period (1883—1901)

After he had finished Th3 Portrait 2; g Lgdy (1881),
which I shall discuss in the next section since it is so
closely related to the novels of the major phase, James
considered any serious formulation of the international

theme as a heavy burden. The Portrait had been difficult

 

as well as exciting, and he had expected it to be received
as his finest work to date, though he knew much more needed
to be said. But the novel was only a mild success. So
given the failure of his most serious international work to
be popular and the difficulty of knowing both America and
Europe well, James saw the necessity of choosing only one
of them to be his main field of operation:

One can't do both-—one must choose. No European

writer is called upon to assume that terrible

burden, and it seems hard that I should be. The

burden is necessarily greater for an American--

for he must deal, more or less, even if only by

implication, with Europe; whereas no European is
obliged to deal in the least With America.

 

His choice was not long in coming. He could not waste his

 

time in crossing and recrossing the Atlantic. After re-
turning to London in 1883, James was to remain in Europe
for twenty years without visiting the United States.

Once permanently in Europe, as quoted earlier, he
begins to envision England and the United States as "a
As a conse-

big Anglo-Saxon total" destined to converge.

quence James hopes to be able to fuse the two cultures in

his creations:

I aspii
he impc
am at g
Euglant
(dealii
far frt
should‘
would
lot surpri
in the ton
English pe
fusion exp
the haokgr
After
feels the
"One thing
0T half (it
“day, am
Consequen‘
tit Tragiw
internati
best "in
one of th
Americans
selectint
eonflitt:

idea of 1

lion (1111':

165

I aspire to write in such a way that it would

be impossible to an outsider to say whether I

am at a given moment an American writing about

England or an Englishman writing about America

(dealing as I do with both countries) and so

far from being ashamed of such an ambiguity I

should be exceedingly proud of it, for

would be highly civilised. (Letters, I, l141—42)
Not surprisingly, then, there is a growing cosmopolitanism
in the tone and viewpoint of the international tales of the
English period, and a treatment of the question of social
fusion explicitly as the subject or implicitly as part of
the background of these tales.

After finishing The Tragic Muse in 1890, however, James
feels the need to concentrate more on England than America:
"One thing only is clear," he writes to Howells, "I must do,
or half do, England in fiction--as the place I see most
today, and, in a sort of way, know best" (Lgttgrg, I, 166).
Consequently the number of wholly English works, such as
The Tragic Muse itself, increases at the expense of his
international tales, resulting in the "EngliSh period."

The uncertainty in his "half" doing England and knowing it
best "in a sort of way" reflects James's losing battle With
one of the principles of realism——a battle which: as I Shall
argue later, has a profound effect on the portrayal 0f

Americans during this era. But his main jUStification for

selecting England as his field is that ignoring the Old

conflicts will promote social integration. so it is the
idea of Anglo-Saxon unity that deserves initial considera-

tion during this stage of the international theme.

if”?

 

then
American-
Edition, h
national 1
years of t
internatic
to the vol
that all i
applicati<
greatest <
the distii
years" an
and unatto
the major
altogetlre:
nationaliw
to drop"
propositi
elsewhere.
"to propo

the prone

Just afte
he had fi
11%
of the We
sell“ (2

hi” to th

 

 

 

 

166

When James looks back over "the classic years of the
Americana-European legend" in the prefaces to the New York
Edition, he outlines the major difference between the inter-
national theme in its early days, extending through the first
years of the English period, and the formulations of the
international theme in the major phase. In the preface
to the volume containing "Lady Barbarina," James notes
that all the tales in that volume depend upon "the narrower
application of international terms" (Prefaces, 200), on the
greatest contrast "between the distinctively American and
the distinctively European outlook" (198). The "classic
years" are "years of limited communication, of monstrous
and unattenuated contrast" (152). But the fine novels of
the major phase are based on "a new scale of relations
altogether, a state of things from which emphasised inter-
nationalism has either quite dropped or is well on its way
to drop" (199). "The emphasis of the international
proposition has indeed had time, as I say, to place itself
elsewhere-~if, for that matter, there be any emphasis or
any proposition left at all . . ." (Prefaces, 211). Since
the prefaces were written in the optimistic years 1906-07,
just after the three novels of the major phase and before
he had finished evaluating his cultural shock in Egg
Aherican Scene, James is surprised to see the "inveteracy"
of the way the conflicts in his earlier works shape them-
selves (200). For the subject changes more and more for

him to the question of the natural mixture of the cultures.

 

 

,..=«

lhetensio
mums
mreevide
site of i
For the 'h
nurse on
retain thw
consensus
(Ia-meals I‘w
antivalen
Half
feren
would
I hav
feel
fore
Barbe
of po
other
Hecan se
Oiled" 8.!
flicto ht
Many of t
have that
and its 1
aHHaTCh
finish"

based on

that fus
then, do

167

The tension between the attraction of conflict and the de-
sire for a "sublime consensus of the educated" is nowhere
more evident than in the preface to "Lady Barbarina," in
spite of its overwhelming emphasis on social synthesis.
For the "dramatic side of human situations subsists of
course on contrast" (199); James must discover a way to
retain the drama of conflict yet fulfill the desire for
consensus. The schiZOphrenic quality of the split makes
James's renewed acquaintance with "Lady Barbarina" a very
ambivalent experience:

Half our instincts work for the maintained dif-

ferences; without them, for instance, what

would have been the point of poor Lady Barbarina?

I have but to put that question, I must add, to

feel it beautifully large; for there looms be-

fore me at its touch the vision of a Lady

Barbarina reconciled, domesticated, developed,

of possibly greater vividness than the uite
other vision expressed in these pages. 202-203)

 

He can see Lady Barb either as intransigent or as "recon-
ciled" and "domesticated." By writing the story as a con-
flict, he makes it nearly obsolete when published, for "so
many of the perceived conditions in which it took birth
.have changed that the account of them embodied in that tale
and its associates will already pass for ancient history,”
an "archaic subject treated by a 'primitive' master of high
finish" (206). Four years earlier James had written a work
based on a good deal more "achieved social fusion," Egg
Portrait gg‘g ngy.(1880), and he was increasingly to see
that fusion "as a portent and an Opportunity" (199). why,

then, does he write "Lady Barbarina," whose explicit theme

 

168
is social fusion, as an irreconcilable conflict?

Part of the answer of course is that James continues
to perceive the differences even as he believes in the grow-
ing synthesis. In addition "Lady Barbarina" is largely
humorous, and James probably was not up to another serious
work on the subject yet. Conflict makes better humor than
reconciliation. But the major reason is that a work on
growing social fusion would be "less easily formulated"
because it would have to loom "beautifully large" (202).
Painting a believable reconciliation of the most perceptive
representatives of American and European culture, if deep
differences are presumed to exist, would require much more
canvas. The intelligent cannot simply gloss over differ-
ences, but must work them out carefully at length. As long
as James is trying to write short fiction, contrasts must
unavoidably form the core. Consequently when the failure
of The Tragic Muse influences James to write nothing but
short tales and plays (Letters, I, 232), he is going to
write stories of international conflict even though firmly
committed to the concept of inevitable social fusion. So
James writes occasional international tales based on the
old conflicts all through the English period. "Pandora"
and "A New England Winter" follow "Lady Barbarina" in 1884;
"Mrs. Temperly" takes shape in 1887; "Louisa Pallant,"
"The Modern Warning," and "The Patagonia" are fairly con-
ventional international tales of 1888; and other scattered

sisters of these tales--"The Solution" (1889-90). "The

 

 

169

Pupil" (1891), "Lord Beaupre" (1893), "Covering End" (1898),
"'Europe'" (1899), "Miss Gunton of Poughkeepsie" (1900),
"Mrs. Medwin" and "The Beldonald Holbein" (1901), "Flicker-
bridge" (1902) and "Fordham Castle" (1904), for example-—
remind James of "stray spark(s) of the old 'international'
flame" still trying to glow with life (Prefaces, 280).
Not until he decides to write long novels again, leading to
the finest fiction of his career, will the social synthesis
that he predicts form the central background of his inter-
national theme.

Meanwhile, however, the international tales of the
English period at least hint at the social fusion to come
and the kind of American character that will make synthesis

possible. "Lady Barbarina," "Covering End," "Miss Gunton

 

of Poughkeepsie," "Mrs. Medwin" and "The Beldonald Holbein,"
as I shall discuss in their turn, provide good predictions
of the future if only by their negation and reversal of
James‘s conventions. And those more extensive international
products of the long-fiction phase of the English period,
falling between The Princess Casamassima and Egg Tragic EEES:
predict interesting deve10pments in James's portrayal of
American character: The Reverberator and "The Aspern
Papers" show a loss of identity among American figures re~
sulting in a blurring of national type toward archetype,
while "A London Life" demonstrates the virtual interchange~
ability of nationality in James's characters, which will be

the hallmark of social fusion in the novels of the major phase.

 

170
"Lady Barbarina" is an excellent example of James's

interest in social synthesis showing through the conflicts
that prevent it. For just as The American is Mrs. Tristram's
experiment in pouring new wine into old bottles, so "Lady
Barbarina" is Lady Marmaduke's test of social compatibility-—
but one showing at least a touch of progress. If no marriage
at all takes place in The American, two take place in "Lady
Barbarina"; and if the Lemons have a Slightly sour union,
at least it is ambiguously sweetened with Anglo-Saxon
children--and the second marriage, though of inferior com-
ponents, shows how well the lower orders can combine. There
are very interesting parallels between the two works. Both
Christopher Newman and Jackson Lemon choose a European wife
as the finest available. Both Claire de Cintre and Lady
Barbarina are slightly archaic models, reflecting the slight
defect in American taste also evident in Clement Searle's
desire for an old-fashioned wife. And there is a striking
similarity between those alternatives James lists for the
residence of Mr. and Mrs. Newman if they had married, and
the actual alternatives worked out in "Lady Barbarina":

Mme de C. couldn't have lived in New York; depend

upon it; and Newman after his marriage, (or

rather she,after it) couldn‘t have dwelt in

France.__There would have been nothing left but a

farm out West. (Edel, Letters, 98-99)
As Jackson Lemon finds out, Lady Barb cannot live in New
York, and he cannot research well in London; and the only

choice left for Lady Agnes and Herman Longstraw, until the

Cantervilles recover from their elopement, is to flee to

 

 

 

171

the emancipated West. At least both marriages are holding
together, however, and the Longstraws make quite a social
hit when they return to England. The incredible lanky
Imngstraw is a delightfully comic caricature of tall
Christopher Newman, from his cowboyish Western origins
right down to his hilarious moustache (XIV, 102, 115).
Apparently James is reworking the earlier romantic novel
into a comic--if not satiric--parody on the question of
social fusion.

The idea of merging British and American society runs
comically throughout the work. Lady Marmaduke is the con-
ventional American girl who has landed a British lord while
he was in the States:

She wished to add an arch or two to the bridge

on which she had effected her transit from

America; and it was her belief that Doctor Lemon

might furnish the materials. This bridge, as

yet a somewhat sketchy and rickety structure,

she saw-~in the future-~boldly stretch from one

solid pier to another. It could but serve both

ways, for reciprocity was the keynote of Lady

Marmaduke's plan. It was her belief that an

ultimate fusion was inevitable and that those

who were the first to understand the situation

would enjoy the biggest returns from it. (XIV, 30)
Lady Barb picks up the idea from Lady Marmaduke and her own
sister Lady Beauchemin, who are matchmakers much like Mrs.
Tristram, but Barb just parrots the words rather stupidly
in short blurbs: "I think English and American society
ought to be but one. I mean the best of each. A great
whole" (34). Even Lord Canterville has been indoctrinated,

but at least he reworks the theme with the rhetoric of a

British politician:

 

 

 

172

. . . he thought it a capital thing the two

countries should become more united, and

there was nothing that would bring it about

better than a few of the best people on both

sides pairing-off together. The English in-

deed had begun it; a lot of fellows had

brought over a lot of pretty girls, and it

was quite fair play that the Americans should

take their pick. They were all one race,

after all; and why shouldn't they make one

society--the best of both sides of course? (61)
Lady Marmaduke must have been persuasive indeed.

That "best of both sides" becomes a very ironic refrain.
When Lady Barb continues to emphasize "just the best in each
country" (35) as eligible for such unions, the irony is
wonderfully tart, for she is far from the best herself.
Like one of Matthew Arnold's aristocratic Barbarians
(Barbarina), she sounds like a parrot on the Anglo-American
question because she "for the most part was incapable of
imagining a thing she hadn't seen" (125). Barb cannot even
vaguely picture American society (it "must be odd"), let
alone conceive anything so comprehensive as its union with
British society. At parties she appears "dazzingly indif-
ferent, looking about her as if she saw very little"--and
she doesn't see much (42). She has a statuesque figure
(39) and "sculptured eyes," but no one can miss the irony
in the fact that those eyes "were as beautiful as if they
had been blank, like those of antique busts" (128—29). She
is simply not intelligent (137). Although Barb is immiti-
gably English (Prefaces, 200), and has all the signs of

"race" (XIV. 39),

 

 

 

173

Striking cleverness wasn't one of the signs,

nor a mark of the English complexion in general;

it was associated with the modern simper, which

was a result of modern nerves. If Jackson had

wanted a wife all fiddlestrings of course he could

have found her at home: but this tall fair girl,
whose character, like her figure, appeared mainly
to have been formed by riding across country, was
differently put together. (40)

One can see Lady Barb riding on her broad character!

The creation of an American male who would be attracted
to such a woman and could attract her as well is James's
main problem. For the case of an American man even desiring
a European mate, let alone sufficiently attracting one to
coax her across the Atlantic without having to club her and
drag her to his cave by the hair, was so unusual at the
time that James felt he had to "forge the very documents"
of the story (Prefaces, 204). With American girls the
hottest article on the European marriage market, why should
a virile American look at anything else? To "get my young
man right," says James, is the greatest difficulty, and
therefore the greatest artistic interest; so "Jackson Lemon
and his shades, comparatively, and his comparative sense of
shades" become the focal point of the story (205). Lemon
becomes one more progression in the development of an Ameri-
can connoisseur of English life which culminates in such
figures as Milly Theale and Ralph Pendrel.

"Lady Barbarina" is a transitional work connecting the
early period with the English period, written just after

James‘s decision to remain in England, so Jackson Lemon has

as many connections with the earlier time as with the later.

 

 

 

174
When he is subjected to "the imaginative test" of social
compatibility, he is bound to see the "experiment come so

near failure" that only comparison with The American makes

 

the test seem optimistic (Prefaces, 205). For realism de—
mands that the rare case cannot be an exception to the likely
rule that would govern such cases; that is, if few such
marriages take place, the likelihood of one being perfect

is extremely small. Furthermore, James's low opinion of the
standard American male will not allow him to create in
Jackson Lemon the finest of Americans, who are usually

women in his fiction.2 The best that is available is not
likely to be good enough.

Nevertheless it is interesting to see just how good
Jackson Lemon is. Compared to Lady Barb, in a fine reversal
of the reader‘s expectations, he is tremendous. He is at
least fully aware of "his inward drama," while Barb's "goes
on in comparatively close darkness" (Prefaces, 205). And
he avoids several pitfalls of the American male. Like
Newman he escapes the taint of the business world yet retains
the advantages of its money, by inheriting a fortune from his
father's business but substituting medicine for commerce as
a career. In order for the British prejudice against phy-
sicians to be less supportable, Lemon is described as a
medical researcher rather than a practitioner who makes
house calls. His unimpeachable humanitarian position and
dignity undercut the social stiffness of the British, who

are primitively behind the times in sniffing at a mere

 

 

175

"medical man." As Mrs. Freer justly remarks, the British
"use much the same term as the Choctaws" in referring to
physicians (23). If Lemon had to have an occupation--and
since America recognized no leisure class until after
Thorstein Veblen, Americans had to have occupations—-then
James could not come up with a better one for his suitor.

Lemon's medical training also explains his interest in
Lady Barb, a crucial motivation in the story. The dector
has an acute awareness of physiognomy, a sense of "race"
that is unfortunately an incomplete and inadequate sense of

the past. "Jackson Lemon was no Anglomaniac, but he took

 

particular pleasure in certain physical facts of the English--
their complexion, their temperament, their tissue." Lady

Barb is an exquisite physical specimen of the race, which
Jackson perceives as aesthetic evidence of her nobility:

There was something simple and robust in her
beauty; it had the quietness of an old Greek
statue, without the vulgarity of the modern
simper or of contemporary prettiness. Her
head was antique, and though her conversation
was quite of the present period Jackson told
himself that some primitive sincerity of soul
couldn't but match with the cast of her brow,
of her bosom, of the back of her neck, and with
the high carriage of her head, which was at
once so noble and so easy. (39)

 

Lemon's judgment of English character is obviously super-
ficial, based mostly on external qualities. He does not
perceive the nature of English temperament. For the most
part he marries Barb to insure the physical beauty of his
children--a very incomplete reason for marriage.

But if Lemon's early perceptions are inadequate, they

 

176

are far better than anyone else’s. Barb and Lord Canter-
ville are examples of English peeple dulled to their own
qualities and heritage by overexposure. When Lemon remarks
that Barb is a "very rare type," Lord Canterville does not
understand him in the least (54). Barb is unconscious of
"her own finest points"; but her husband is "intensely aware
of all of them; nothing could excel the minuteness of his
appreciation of his wife" (98). And Jackson's perceptions
grow. Neither Barb nor Lady Beauchemin can fathom him (35—
36), but he learns to probe Barb's rather shallow waters to
the bottom.

Lemon is, in fact, explicitly an early version of the
American "heir of all the ages" (86):

He had the best education the age could offer

. . . He had devoted himself to one of the

noblest of professions—~a profession recognized

as such everywhere but in England--and had in-

herited a fortune far beyond the expectation of

his early years . . . He was one of the most

fortunate inhabitants of an immense fresh rich

country, a country whose future was admitted to

be incalculable, and he moved with perfect ease

in a society in which he was not overshadowed by

others. (87)
This passage, however, is primarily Lemon’s estimate of
himself. No Englishmen look at him the way Merton Dansher
eventually looks at the later heiress of all the ages,
Milly Theale. Like the other New Yorkers in the succes-
sion-~Milly, Clement Searle, and Ralph Pendrel, for
example--"Jackson believed in the New York mind-~not so much
indeed in its literary artistic philosophic or political

achievements as in its general quickness and nascent

 

 

177
adaptability" (124). He is heir to the ages because he can
sense their value better than others. He has no past, not
even the "fabulous antiquity" of Mrs. Vanderdecken, which
stretches ironically all the way back to the last century
(125, 134). Like Adam he has only a future, and this facet
of time is not recognized very well by the Cantervilles.

To be sure, Lemon is Adamic in other ways, lacking for
example a truly discriminating aesthetic sense. He never
reads contemporary novels (94), but appreciates Lady Barb's
letters for their "fine by-gone quality, an old-fashioned,

a last-century freshness that might have flowed, a little
thinly, from the pen of Clarissa or Sophia" (75). Such
freshness flows from a stale fount. Nevertheless he is able
to synthesize past and present tolerably well: "His in-
genious mind could appreciate this hereditary assumption
[Bf a financial settlement for a marriaggY at the very same
time that, to light his own footsteps, it remained entirely
modern" (76). He feels that "customs were all very well,
but that really intelligent people recognized at sight,

and then quite enjoyed, the right occasion for departing
from them" (77). In fact the only major problem with his
temperament is that "anything he had once indiscussably
made up his mind to acquired in three minutes the force,
and with that the due dignity of a tradition" (75); even
when he finally relents to the demands of the Cantervilles
for a financial settlement, he does so hastily in irrita~

tion at the Freers' comments on his lack of progress.

 

 

178

This flexibility of Lemon's in agreeing to a settle-
ment, though a hasty reaction, is the major force that works
toward social unity in the story. The marriage takes place
as a result of his pragmatism, and it holds together later
only because Jackson is perceptive and adaptable. He has
very "high tone" about the incompatibility of Barb and New
York, "but he began to perceive that the highest tone in
the world could n't change the nature of things" (136)--
meaning the nature of Lady Barb, who is a force for disunion
through her denseness and inflexibility. Her obsession with
returning to London is a "dumb insuperable ineradicable
purpose," and Lemon knows that "if she should plant herself
firm no power on earth would move her." Barb's "blooming
antique beauty and the general loftiness of her breeding"
soon appear to Jackson to be "but the magnificent eXpres-
sion of a dense patient ponderous power to resist" (137).

For it is essentially Barb's fault that the union does
not work in.America; or rather it is her identity that makes
compatibility impossible: "no one else in New York had
made any difficulties; the difficulties had sprung from the
very, the consummate, make of her" (137). She is almost
idiotically imperceptive. Barb can see no social distinc~
tions in America (93, 107); "she confounded and transposed
American attributes in the most extraordinary way. She had
a way of calling every one Doctor." She is like the stereo-
typical foreigner who thinks everyone looks alike, for "in

New York there was nothing to know people by, their names

 

 

 

Ern- :—

179

were so very monotonous" (108). The only American (except
her husband) that Barb likes is old Mrs. Lemon, who is to
American provincialism what Barb is to British. As Doctor
Feeder sees, Barb "would neither assimilate nor be assim-
ilated" (130); she never looks at him-—or anything else.

Barb's sister Agnes, on the other hand, takes to
America as a land of social emancipation, and understands
the country fairly well (131). Of course Agatha and
Longstraw "had not a perception of shades" (112), so they
are unaware of any cultural clash. Only Lemon, and per-
haps the Freers (whom I shall discuss in another context),
appreciate the English heritage and the American promise.
They perceive the problems of synthesis more deeply than
the others, so they will also perceive the solutions sooner.
As for the less perceptive proponents of union, "Lady
Beauchemin and Lady Marmaduke are much disconcerted; the
international project has not, in their view, received an
impetus" (141). The reader will perceive the improvement
in the chances for union more readily; Americans are be—
coming more and more perceptive candidates for social inte~
gration. When James has more space and a sharper Lady Barb,
or a European gentleman fit for the blossoming American

girl, the synthesis will begin.

The seed for "Lady Barbarina," of course, is a reversal
of the conventional international marriage of the American
girl to a European lord.3 If there is any characteristic

that runs through nearly all the international tales of the

 

 

 

h
in
de1

811'

180

English period, it is the reversal of old conventions of the
international theme. Matthiessen and Murdock comment on the
deve10pment of "Mrs. Medwin" (1901) in the Notebooks as just
such a playing with conventions:

The 'international' note was introduced by

making Mamie and her brother Americans, and

Mrs. Medwin and the others British. Possibly

James was amused by thus reversing the usual

situation of the American who buys her way into

English society under British sponsorship. (280)
Likewise in "The Great Condition" (1899) Mrs. Damerel, an
American widow, hints that she has a scandalous past just

like the typical European lady. She does not have a "past,"

 

it turns out, so the convention is doubly reversed--much . a
as the tradition of Paris as the city of moral disintegra-

tion is toyed with in The Ambassadors. A tale like "The

Beldonald Holbein" (1901) is made of reversals. The age-

lessly beautiful may be a hard glossy surface, less in-

 

teresting artistically than an ugliness which reveals the
wear of time. Beauty and aesthetic interest are in the
eye of the beholder; much depends, as in the early period,
on the point of view. When James makes his "Holbein"
figure of attractive ugliness an American widow, ignored
and unrecognized in her own country, the antithesis takes
on another dimension. The point is made by a reversal of
the reader's expectations that artistic interest would re-
side in the beautiful and the EurOpean. James is turning
around his earlier charge that nothing aesthetically

”good" can come out of the great American desert.4

181
Not all the reversals of conventions in this period
are related to the international theme, of course. The
heart of The Awkward Age is the creation of a "little girl
who is conscious and aware" rather than the typical jggng
fille (Notebooks, 192). James delights in breaking con-
ventions throughout his career, as argued in the previous
chapter. But a number of reversals in this period indi-
cate the breakdown of the conventional barriers and con-
flicts of the international theme, a preparation for
James's later depictions of social fusion. If any conven-
tion of the international theme can be reversed, the impli-
cation is that American characters may be interchangeable
with European ones, a sign of growing social unity. And
Americans are the major beneficiaries of the broken conven-
tions, becoming more perceptive and in some cases more
European than the Europeans.
Perhaps the main convention James is breaking is his
, own picture of the American as a "passionless pilgrim."
For a number of Americans in the early tales are not the
"passionate pilgrims" that I have been tracing, not the
intelligent Americans developing their capabilities through
the enlightening experience of Europe. Like little
Randolph Miller, such passionless Americans do not care
much for ancient monuments, except as they provide play—
grounds for tourists. Daisy Miller was probably James's
.best known passionless pilgrim, the popular picture of what
he supposedly thought of American girls. Not only Daisy
but Mr. Tristram of _T_h_g American (1876-77), the Bucks of

 

 

fry-_mww“ , W

182

"The Pension Beaurepas" (1879), the heroine of "Pandora
Day" (1884), the Dossons of The Reverberator (1888), and
Jim Pocock and Chad Newsome of The Ambassadors (1903) are
among the variations on the type. They are important in
tracing the development of the sense of the past in Ameri-
cans because they generally have none. The Colosseum is as
romantic to Daisy as the Castle of Chillon (Cf. XVIII, 41,
42), which she also fails to appreciate,and Mr. Dosson
does not know one past war from another (XIII, 85). Dosson
is in fact the supreme example of an American with abso-
lutely no sense of the past, lounging in the court of a
French hotel:

But Mr. Dosson had no sense of waste: that came

to him much more when he was confronted with

historical monuments or beauties of art, which

affected him as the talk of people naming others,

naming friends of theirs, whom he had never heard

of: then he was aware of a degree of waste for

the others, as if somebody lost something--but

never when he lounged in that simplifying yet so

comprehensive way in the court. It wanted but a

quarter of an hour to dinner-~that historic fact
was not beyond his measure . . . (XIII, 24)

 

 

Such characters function best as examples of what happens
to those without a sense of the past: some are victimized
by their innocence, like Daisy Miller and--very nearly—-
Francie Dosson; others become amoral, exploitative souvenir
hunters like Chad. These are the figures showing the under—
developed side of the American tree of knowledge, the green
rather than the ripe fruits of time.

Their companions are often from another group of Amer—

icans or one-time Americans, the broad range of expatriates

foun
colc

form

sup<
pass‘

in

sim
ide

WOI

183
found in James, from the eternal nomads to the established
colonists. Sometimes these are nearly villains, having the
forms of civilization but not the moral essence, such as
Christina Light, Gilbert Osmond and Madame Merle. Like the
superstitious pilgrims, they have a distorted sense of the-
past and its values; Osmond is so captured by the image of
tradition that he is described as being convention itself.
Mhlder forms like Winterbourne and Gaston Probert have
simply lost some of their American moral innocence and
identity, and have picked up a EurOpean shell. At their
worst such characters are more European than the Europeans,
and like the American colonists in Rome and Paris, they
follow European social conventions more strictly than the
natives.

These two groups, the passionless pilgrims and the
Americano-Europeans, form an implicit contrast to his most
perceptive Americans, establish a set of conventions of
common American behaviour in Europe against which James
can project more intelligent attitudes and actions. Instead
of irreverence toward the past and inane innocence made up
primarily of ignorance, James's finest compatriots have an
intelligently fresh and flexible perception of the past;
instead of being more European than the natives by follow-
ing the local social customs more strictly, these Americans
exceed European standards by becoming more perceptive con-
noisseurs of the past. Such figures generally have Euro-

Pean counterparts; they can in fact be portrayed as Europeans

 

 

\V.... ..‘-"4‘
. (W

 

 

 

184

when James so chooses. But they retain their American
identity, as James defines it, by refining the same inno—
cence and morality that characterize their more vulgar
countrymen. Their reversals of the conventions of American
behaviour and character, that is, are contrasts in develop-
ment rather than essence. James projects a story, for ex-
ample, based on American chivalry and generosity:
It might be something to dg--as very character—
istically American. Do the old grand seigneur
in a 'new bottle'--Frank H.'s cabling his eloping
wife,£lO0,000, a case in point: the sort of
thing which a 1000 French pens would have com-
memorated of the Due de Richelieu. (Notebooks, 233)
The American trait underlying such an act takes a very
European turn, reversing the situation in which an Ameri-
can would normally exercise such chivalry. The French are
famous for such acts-~perhaps because, as James suggests,
a thousand pens turn them into mythical conventions through
publicity. Nevertheless an American combining the gener-
osity of Christopher Newman and old Mr. Dosson might do the
job quite credibly.

The problem with clothing an American in European
conventions, or to use James's reversed metaphor, of pour-
ing old wine into a new bottle, however, is that the label
may be the only clue to the identity of the resulting mix-
ture. The essence may be difficult to distill and recog-
nize. Morality and innocence, the two supposedly American

characteristics James usually depends on, are fairly slender

threads from which to weave an identity. If conventions

 

 

 

 

185

are reversed often enough, if the American and the European
can change positions almost at will, the result is not only
social synthesis but the fusion or confusion of national
identities. Consequently when Milly Theale performs an act
of chivalry even more startling than the one James projects
here for his new grand seigneur, her innocence and fine
morality impress the reader less as the essence of a national
type than as defining characteristics of an archetype.

James is very aware of the problem reversals of con-
ventions present to the maintenance of national identity in
his characters. He defines the difficulty most explicitly

in his discussion of the germinal idea of "Covering End"
(1898):

The idea of the comedy must reside in the fact of
the renversement, the alteration of the relations
of certain elements of intercourse; the reversal
of what the parties traditionally represent. . . .
What my American woman must represent, at any rate,
is the idea of attachment to the past, of romance,
of history, continuity and conservatism. She
represents it from a fresh sense, from an individual
conviction, but she represents it none the less
. . . In other words, she, intensely American in
temperament-~with her freedoms, her immunity from
traditions, superstitions, fears and riguardi,
but with an imagination kindling with her new
contact with the presence of a past, a continuity,
etc., represents the conservative element among a
cluster of persons (an old house, family, race,
society) already in course of becoming demoralized,
vulgarized, and (from their own point of view),
Americanized. . . . charming and interesting, it
seems to me, should be the problem of representing
the combination of this function of hers, this
work, this office, this part she plays, and the
intensity, the vividness, the unmistakableness and
individuality of her American character.
(Notebooks, 128)

 

 

 

186
Mrs. Gracedew, the American whom James is projecting, must
somehow become more English than the English yet retain her
American identity. How does she do it? The reader's ex-
pectations, based on the long-standing conventions of the
international theme, are reversed at nearly every turn. To
be sure, the estate of Covering End is saved by Mrs. Grace-
dew's Wealth, a standard use of American money from Egg
American to The Golden Bowl. But she saves it from "some
vulgar English peOple, very new and very dreadful," who can—
not appreciate the English heritage, rather than from crass

Americans (Notebooks, 185). Even more unconventionally,

 

Mbs. Gracedew is more discriminating as a tourist at Cover-
ing End than Clement Yule is as the owner. Unlike "A
Passionate Pilgrim," in which owner Richard Searle is the
consummate guide, in "Covering End" James conceives the new-
comer Mrs. Gracedew, "the charming woman showing the gauge
herself, showing it better than any of thgm_can"(Notebooks,
185). In spite of his name the owner has little apprecia-
tion for the English hearth, until "Mrs. Gracedew argues
Yule into a love for the house and the ancient tradition

it represents" (Notebooks, 186). The question of whether

 

the Briton who may be dulled by overexposure, or the Amer~
ican who may be perceptive through freshness, is in fact
the better sensor of the past-~Clement Searle's old
dilemma-~13 now clearly resolved in favor of the American.

And the right kind of American identity, the proper

 

 

 

187
development of native gifts, becomes the key to Anglo—
Saxon unity. What, then, preserves Mrs. Gracedew's identity
as an American? I submit that it is in part the American
sense of the past, the no longer pathological but still very
sensitive faculty which accompanies intelligent American
innocence and freshness. When combined with the most dis-
criminating morality, this sense of the past is the greatest
dowry an American can bring to the social fusion. Granted
the total is not an impressively particular identity. But
neither is Milly Theale's nor Maggie Verver's--as we shall

see in the major phase.

In addition to the stories of perceptive Americans,
those of less perceptive and even "passionless pilgrims"
in the English period predict elements that will be important
in the major phase. "Miss Gunton of Poughkeepsie" (1900)
is one of these, supporting part of what I have argued on
the basis of "Covering End." Wegelin judges the story as
"a flicker of the 91d international flame" in its treatment
of the question of contrasting manners, but more importantly
"What gives it the color of the later period is the emphasis
on the puzzle of Americanism. For more and more James's
concern with Europe became a function of his preoccupation
with the American character" (54). As early as 1892, though
he has left the early surge of international tales behind
him, James reads an article in the Revue des Deux Mondes
that makes him "want to do something more with the American

character" (Notebooks, 125). "Miss Gunton" touches on the

 

 

 

 

 

 

188
development of American character in a manner similar to
"Covering End," though its heroine is not so perceptive, and
provides interesting parallels to the deve10pment of Ameri-

cans in The Golden Bowl.

 

Christina Light introduced readers of James long ago
to the sport of hooking Italian princes, so the exploits
of Miss Gunton with her prince, who is caught and let go,
are not in themselves that new; but they do parallel a
portion of Maggie Verver's relation to Prince Amerigo. In
spite of her insistence that the prince's mother break with
European tradition by writing first to welcome her into the

family, Lily Gunton is attracted to the prince mainly by

 

such traditions (cf. Matthiessen and Murdock, Notebooks,
190). The sense of the past that draws Lily to her prince
will also attract Maggie to Prince Amerigo. The parallel

 

grows stronger when the reader discovers that the prince is
partly attracted to Lily by her expectations of a fortune;
for the Ververs certainly interest Amerigo because they can
help him bail out his patrimony. Finally, Miss Gunton
throws over her prince for Adam P. Bransby, just as Maggie
has the choice between Amerigo and her Adam. But of course
Maggie chooses the Prince and the Prince chooses Maggie.
Their romance is the epitome of social fusion. For just as
Maggie learns to appreciate the Prince as a human being
formed by a magnificent heritage, so Amerigo learns to ap-
preciate Maggie—- even though, as Lady Champer tells the

other prince in "Miss Gunton," the American character is

 

189
all that Americans have, and "if you marry anything you
marry that."5 If nothing else, "Miss Gunton of Poughkeepsie"
is a good example of how situations and characters similar
to ones treated in the major phase must be dealt with in a
much different manner in the English period to produce a

short comedy (of. Notebooks, 189).

 

But there is another technique used in "Miss Gunton"
which has interesting parallels in works of the later period.
The fact that the tale is told from the English vieWpoint
of Lady Champer adds a fine perspective to the story, juxta-
posing or overlaying national perceptions. Similarly "The
Path of Duty" is a story which has an American providing
the perspective on a story of British manners and morals.
Such viewpoints direct the reader toward a cosmopolitan
angle, for the overlaying of American and English perspec-
tives acts as an ironic corrective of each. The synthesis
of American and English viewpoints is taking place within
James just as he had planned in 1888, for he can pose as an
Englishman looking at American behaviour or as an American
looking at English behaviour (cf. Letters, 1, 141-42), and
the reader is nudged toward a similar perspective. This
technique will be broadened by alternating English and
American viewpoints in The Wings g§_th§ 2312, which hints
at the gradual coalescence of Densher's and Milly's out-
looks. Likewise The Golden Bowl is made up of alternating
"overlaid" national viewpoints, the first half containing

the Prince's view of the action, the second half switching

 

 

 

190
to Maggie's American perception of the situation. The
two viewpoints become one at the end of the novel, with
the Prince looking at Maggie and Maggie looking at the
Prince in a steady equal gaze of perfect harmony. "I see
nothing but 123," the Prince explains, and Maggie can tell
by the light in his eyes that what he says is true (of.
Wegelin, 137).

But as Wegelin notes, the major characteristic that
places stories like "Miss Gunton of Poughkeepsie" in the

later phase of the international theme is the centrality

 

of the question of American identity. What is an American?
James asks this question many times during his career-—
certainly in "A Passionate Pilgrim" and The American, to
.some degree in "Daisy Miller," and predominantly in Th3

Reverberator and the novels of the major phase. The ques-

 

 

 

tion takes on a special poignancy during the English period
and the major phase because James is trying to answer it
from a distance, through observing samples of Americans
abroad, and the evidence is more tantalizing than satisfy-
ing. Finally the issue becomes sharp enough to prick James
into his long overdue visit to America to study the animal
in its native lair. But by then his major fiction is behind
him, and the result of answering the question solely from
abroad has clearly left its mark. James realizes that even
some of his early Americans like Daisy Miller are the "stuff
of pure romance" (cf. Prefaces, 270), and that his finest

Americans are idealizations woven as much from strands of

 

 

 

191

 

myth and literature as from basic threads in the social
fabric.

In the early years of the English period, of course,
James feels he knows American character more fully than
English character. He may have qualms about "half" doing
England, but when he makes that half the settings, he can

populate a scene he knows with the American characters he

 

knows and feel perfectly safe. Thus in 1888, for example,
he decides to write "Louisa Pallant" as a story of Ameri-
cans in Eur0pe because "Howells writes to me that I do the

'international' far better than anything else" (Notebooks,

 

73). Yet as early as 1885 he had written The Bostonians as
a deliberate "attempt to show that I can write an American

story" (Notebooks, 47). .Such vulnerability to the criti-

 

cism of his allegedly un-American sensibility may reveal

a disturbing uncertainty of his American identity. He

 

watches very hopefully the ministry of James Russell Lowell
from 1885 to 1890 working toward good British-American re-

lations in London, a positive evidence of increasing social
unity among the educated of both nations. But a disturbing

observation intrudes: "Strange was his double existence--

 

the American and English sides of his medal, which had yet
so much in common. That is, I don't know how English he

was at home, but he was conspicuously American here"
(Letters, 1, 184). James must have wondered whether or not
he too seemed neither fish nor fowl. That uncertainty grows.

He tries hard to hold on to his sense of America. But

     

 

 

192
A as time goes on an intermittent alienation from all things
American gnaws away at his sense of communion, and at his
hopes for an ultimate synthesis of the most cultured in
America and England. Disgusted by the monotony of news
from the States, he writes to Charles Eliot Norton in 1892
that the only American products are "railway-smashes and
young ladies for lords" (Letters, 1, 194). And after more
than a dozen years abroad, in 1896, James admits that he
no longer understands America and its jingoism; like Winter-
bourne in "Daisy Miller," he says he has been away too long,
and he fears his optimistic Anglo-Americanism may be an un-
equal yoking together of two civilizations--"or rather one
civilization and a barbarism."6 In a projected story he
fears the "age of Mrs. Jack . . . the American, the night-
mare," with her fellow "Americans looming up--dim, vast,
portentous-~in their millions--like gathering waves-~the
barbarians of the Roman Empire" (Notebooks, 207). He feels
"out of it," as he writes to Howells, for "A new generation,
that I know not, and mainly prize not, has taken universal
possession" of the Anglo-Saxon world (Letters, I, 230).
With such a sense of alienation from common Americans,
James more and more relies on almost wholly English mate-
rials, and limits his presentation of Americans to such
"stray spark(s) of the old 'international' flame" as he is
still able to strike. So Wegelin's explanation of his con-
centration on English materials as a result of his assumption

of the cultural unity of England and the United States is

 

 

 

 

 

the

193
therefore only half an explanation:

As prolonged residence abroad made the super-
ficial differences between American and Euro-
pean manners familiar and therefore less absorb-
ing to him, he turned for a time from the inter-
national scene to purely English subjects, gradually
lowering his sights at the same time from the
surface of the world of manners to more hidden
currents of ethical feeling--a focus which he
retained when toward the turn of the century his
native interest in the American character re-
asserted itself. (47)

This assessment is correct in outlining the original impetus
for James's turning from international works to English ones,
and in tracing part of the results through the major phase.
The problems of ethics and consciousness obviously grow in

importance through The Spoils g£_Poynton (1896), What

 

W m (1897), "In the Cage" (1898), "The Turn of the
Screw" (1898), The Awkward_Ag§ (1898-99), The Sacred Bonn}.
(1901), and the novels of the major phase. But surely
James's sense of increasing distance from the main current
of American life must also have influenced him to choose
English subjects. If the sense of social unity alone
governed his choice of subjects, he would create more fine
Americans in the English period. The biggest paradox is
that his alienation from America continues to grow up to the
turn of the century, when his Americans in fact become the
finest and his hopes for social fusion so clearly flower--
but this problem is reserved for the major phase.

More immediate is the question of the influence of
such feelings about America on the creation of American

characters in the international tales of the English period.

194
If James is becoming alienated from Americans or at least
getting out of touch with them, there should be evidence
of that gap in his depiction of them. Such evidence is
clearest, naturally, when James specifically treats the
problem of American identity. As the Freers of "Lady
Barbarina," the Americans and Americano-Europeans in Thg

Reverberator, and the Bordereaux of "The Aspern Papers"

 

amply demonstrate, that problem becomes one of giving Amer-
icans any identity at all.

From the first, of course, James had difficulty making
his Americans full and round. The fact that readers accept
the Daisy Millers and Christopher Newmans so readily as
individuals is a fine tribute to James's ability to make
a little dialogue and a very few selected details go a
long way. Christopher Newman's face, for example, "had
that paucity of detail which is yet not emptiness, that
blankness which is not simplicity, that look of being com-
mitted to nothing in particular, of standing in a posture
of general hospitality to the chances of life, of being very
much at one's own disposal, characteristic of American faces
of the clear strain" (I, 3-4). Such faces are beautifully
American-~but they have the identity only of a type and are
delineated primarily by characteristics which they do 223
possess. Compare'also the famous description of Miss
Birdseye in The Bostonians, James's most unp0pular attempt

to describe an American since "Daisy Miller":

195

She had a sad, soft, pale face which . . .

looked as if it had been soaked, blurred, and

made vague by exposure to some slow dissolvent.

The long practice of philanthropy had not given

accent to her features; it had rubbed out their

transitions, their meanings. The waves of sym-

pathy, of enthusiasm, had wrought upon them in

the same way in which waves of time finally

modify the surface of old marble busts, gradually

washing away their sharpness, their details.
Those "American faces of the clear strain" get much clearer,
much blanker than Newman's ingeniously described countenance
or even Miss Birdseye's erased visage, until the passionless
pilgrims in particular and even the more perceptive Ameri-
cans are faceless. The problem of describing and defining
American figures in the absence of positive characteristics
grows more and more acute, and while James often makes this
paucity of personality very comic, it is nevertheless a
severe problem for him as a professing realist, a novelist
supposed to thrive on concrete detail.

Granville Hicks argues that the works of this period

are less than wholly English because James is never fully
assimilated by English society (115-16); Van wyck Brooks
argues that a similar fault shows in his creation of Amer-
icans during this period (104 f.), since James is also out
of touch with his native land. With adjustments made for
the exaggeration that always accompanies debate on contro-
versial points, their arguments have considerable validity.
For James is caught somewhere between the two cultures,

being more sophisticated than either the average Briton or

the average American and out of touch with both to some

 

 

196
degree.9 But whether his decision to live abroad is con-
sidered as an acceptance of the challenge of treating Europe
which he never quite succeeds in mastering, or as an at-
tempt to save himself as an artist at the cost of diminishing
his immediate sense of America, or whether a more generous
interpretation of his gains and losses is maintained—~the
fact remains that the artistic consequences of the decision
are tremendous. The resultingmalleable if nearly"colorless
nature of Americans portrayed in the English period helps
explain why James's later Americans take on increasingly
archetypal roles. For if James discovers that he can make
virtually anything out of an American, he also finds that
characters without a past, innocent and with a world to
make or to learn, are the staple fare of fairy tales, the
"pure stuff" of romance.

In describing the shift from James's early period of
objectivity and nearly equal emphasis on American and Euro-
pean foibles in his international tales, to the paradoxi-
cally greater concern with American identity in the interna-
tional tales of the English period, Wegelin characterizes
the change in the international theme as primarily a switch
in the type of characters portrayed:

The shift to James's more pronounced concern
with its American aspects soon showed itself
in the frequency with which Europeanized
Americans replaced Eur0peans in his interna-
tional dramas. This happened particularly
when the scene was not England but another

European country, since James's reason for the
shift was, in the first place, quite simply

 

 

 

 

 

197

the kind of doubt expressed in Portraits 2;
Places, the doubt of his ability to render
foreign characters with anything but worth-
less approximation. (54)

 

What Wegelin apparently has not noticed is that James's
Americans and Europeanized Americans are approximations as
well. His Americans become more and more blank, and his
Europeanized compatriots become less and less American--
or any other specific nationality. Just as James's most
perceptive Americans move toward archetypes by having only
characteristics which define their general sensibility or
which simply separate them from the ordinary by reversing
the conventions governing such types, so his passionless
pilgrims approximate archetypes by becoming nonentities de-
fined by their roles, and his Europeanized Americans are
effectively freed from the restrictions of national charac—
ter for broader dramatic purposes. James is emancipated
from the provincialisms of national characters. He learns
to use or reverse "national" characteristics established

by his international conventions to save him "preparations"
in the portrayal of figures with archetypal roles in psy-
chological dramas.

Winterbourne's loss of his American identity in "Daisy
Miller" through staying abroad too long has already been
mentioned. The narrator of "The Pension Beaurepas" (1879)
has lost much of his American quality as well, especially
when compared with the Bucks (cf. XIV, 401). But even when

there is little question of loss of American identity,

 

 

198
James is hard put in the English period to define exactly
what an American identity is. The best examples of his
difficulty are the Freers of "Lady Barbarina" and George
Flack and the Dossons of The Reverberator.

Mr. and Mrs. Dexter Freer are just that--more free than
Europeans. But freedom.is not an identity in itself, in
spite of its role in characterizing such figures as ChristOpher
Newman, Isabel Archer and Milly Theale. There must be more.
The Freers are a special brand of Americans, almost but not
quite expatriates, nomads of Europe but socialites of
Cincinnati. They are extremely adaptable, in deliberate
contrast to inflexible English people like Lady Barb. The
problem is to identify and define such people through some
meaningful frame of reference. What is their exact cul-
tural identity? The Freers are fairly perceptive, but they
are very difficult to perceive in the culture they are ob-
serving. Their protective coloration, or lack of all color,
makes them nearly invisible:

. . . they were of that nationality for which

Hyde Park at the height of the season is most
completely illustrative. They were native aliens,
so to speak, peOple at once so initiated and so
detached could only be Americans. This reflexion
indeed you would have made only after some delay;
for it must be allowed that they bristled with
none of those modern signs that carry out the
tradition of the old indigenous war-paint and
feathers. They had the American turn of mind, but
that was very secret; and to your eye-~if your eye
had cared about it--they might have been either
intimately British or remotely foreign. It was as
if they studied, for convenience, to be super-
ficially colourless; their colour was all in their

talk. They were not in the least verdant; they
were grey rather, of monotonous hue. If they were

199

interested in the riders, the horses, the

walkers, the great exhibition of English

wealth and health, beauty, luxury, and leisure,

it was because all this referred itself to

other impressions, because they had the key

to almost everything that needed an answer--

because, in a word, they were able to compare.

They had not arrived, they had only returned;

and recognition much more than surprise was

expressed in their quiet eyes. Dexter Freer

and his wife belonged in fine to that great

company of Americans who are constantly "passing

through" London. (XIV, 4)
Lady Barb is not the only one who has trouble Spotting
Americans like these. Almost all external American colora—
tion has come off. The only thing American left is their
"turn of mind," and that is revealed only in dialogue, which
is fairly sparse. Again, as with Mrs. Gracedew, their main
defining mental capacity is the perception of contrasts for
comparative purposes, including of course a sense of the
past. They are more discriminating and less worshipful than
Clement Searle or even Jackson Lemon, and in their paradoxi-
cal synthetic state as "native aliens" both "initiated" and
"detached," the Freers are very objective observers. While
their curiosity and meddlesomeness are mildly ridiculed in
the story, they nevertheless act as a chorus commenting on
the action. They tip the reader off to the fact that James
is writing a Thackerayan satire (22-23), and quite correctly
advise Lemon that being an American with an English wife will
not be simple (84, 136)~

The problem is that such characters tend to lose all
identity, or at least become very much alike. Their color-

lessness, already emphasized, fades toward invisibility.

 

200
Mrs. Freer, a "small plump person, rather polished than
naturally fresh, with a white face and hair still evenly
black, smiled perpetually, but had never laughed since the
death of a son whom she had lost ten years after her
marriage" (5-6). Her dress is always "black or dark grey,"
and "harmoniously simple." The touch about her being
"rather polished than naturally fresh" is a fine distinction
as ingenious as the description of Christopher Newman, but
is essentially a camouflage for her blankness. The hint
about her son gives her the depth of a past, but only in the
vaguest manner, and the point is not very important in the
story. Just as vague, Doctor Feeder has a "delightful face,
which was both simple and clever and, as if this weren't
enough, showed a really tasteless overheaping of the car-
dinal virtues. . . . he was clearly a person who would shine
at sea with an almost intolerable blandness" (14—15).
Americans, with only their simplicity, morality, and intel-
ligence, are faceless.

When James's Americans are not intelligent, their lack
of identity is even more obvious. Consider, for example,
the all—Americans of Th9 Reverberator. Delia Dosson, ap~
propriately named Fidelia for her virtues, has a "large
white face": "She always looked the same; all the contriv-
ances of Paris couldn't fill out that blank" (XIII, 11).
Another American visage of the clear strain, hers is "a
plain clean round pattern face . . . a china plate"; it is

like "a room kept dusted and aired for candid earnest

 

 

 

201
occasions" (11). Her sister Francie, though her shred of
intelligence suggests What James will do with a truly intel-

ligent tabula rasa in the major phase, has little more

 

identity. Her "unaffirmative chin" and "inconceivabilities
of ignorance" are joined by‘a nondescript figure:

Rather tall than short, fine slender erect,

with an airy lightness of hand and foot, she

yet gave no impression of quick movement, of

abundant chatter, of excitable nerves and ir-

repressible life—~no hint of arriving at her

typical American grace in the most usual way.

She was pretty without emphasis and as might

almost have been said without point . . . (16)
That is, Francis has no distinguishing marks. James de-
fines her primarily by negating characteristics of his
other typical American girls. But negation does not result
in a positive personality. The fact that "there was nothing
in her . . . to confirm the implication that she had rushed
about the deck of a Cunarder with a newspaper-man" is not
sufficient to separate her from the Pandora Days and Daisy
Millers. Her Opinion of herself also shows how little
identity she has: "She was not to be counted on; she was
a vague soft negative being who had never decided anything
and never would, who had not even the merit of knowing how
to flirt and who only asked to be let alone" (58; of. 172,
195-96). Her perverse certainty of failure might easily
be developed into a fine neurosis, but even this possi-
bility is not exploited.

George Flack, more than Francis or even Delia, however,

is the epitome of this brand of nondescript American. Given

_James's low opinion of the American man, the best example

 

 

 

 

202

would have to be male. Observers feel "they had seen him
before":

And, oddly enough, this recognition carried

with it no ability to remember--that is to

recall—-him; you couldn't conveniently have

prefigured him, and it was only when you were

conscious of him that you knew you had already

somehow paid for it. . . . He was not a specific

person, but had beyond even Delia Dosson, in

whom we have facially noted it, the quality of the

sample or advertisement, the air of representing

a line of goods for which there is a steady pop—

ular demand. (14)
A reporter less striking than Henrietta Stackpole, Flack
could be designated by "a number," like a newspaper, and
"adequately marked as 'young commercial American'" (14).
James mocks Flack's comic lack of identity by noting that
he has "in his right forefinger a curious natural crook
which might have availed, under pressure, to identify him.
But for the convenience of society he ought always to have
worn something conspicuous--a green hat or a yellow neck-
tie" (15).

Such characters are symptoms of James's limited range
of experience with American character. He never fully
understands the "down-town" world of business in—New York
City, and there are few types (particularly of males)
"up-town" for him to deal with (Prefaces, 193)- Consequently
Christopher Newman has only the vaguest background in
business, and a man like Mr. Dosson carries on activities
in banks "in a manner best known to himself" (83):

Mr. Dosson, it may further be noted, was a

person of the simplest composition, a charac~
ter as cipherable as a sum of two figures.

 

 

 

 

203

He had a native financial faculty of the

finest order, a gift as direct as a beautiful

tenor voice, which had enabled him, without

the aid of particular strength of will or

keenness of ambition, to build up a large

fortune while he was still of middle age. (21)
Such a description derives too much from the myth of the
easy fortunes to be made in America, a myth which Lady
Canterville so ludicrously misunderstands in "Lady Barbarina"
that she thinks such fortunes may vanish as magically as
they appear (XIV, 68, 78). Dosson's only distinguishing
feature is that he is not the ravenous Dreiserian titan;
he is just defined as a negation of such figures. James
does not comprehend the "financial faculty," so he must
explain it in terms of "gifts" and miracles.

This increasing restriction in James's apprehension
of American character changes the international theme tre—
mendously. As he explains in the preface to The Reverber—
gfigg, "the finer comparative interest" in the story, the
old contrast of cultures, all but drops out in favor of the
phenomenon of "the extraordinary amount of native innocence"
that such "passionless pilgrims" as Francis Dosson and her
family must have (Prefaces, 186, 189). The story reveals
next to nothing about Europe, says James, but "in its in—
direct way, flooded 'American society' with light, became
on that side in the highest degree documentary" (186).

But what does Francis Dosson document? The only light she

can shed across the Atlantic illuminates just that "extra-

ordinary state 9f innocence" which James makes famous.

 

 

204
And as he clearly sees, American innocence is a rather blank
social document:

I had indeed early to recognize that I was in
a manner shut up to the contemplation of it--
really to the point . . . of appearing to
wander, as under some uncanny spell, amid the
level sands and across the patchless desert
of a single and of a not especially rich or
fruitful aspect. . . . if I hadn't, on behalf
of the American character, the negative aspects
to deal with, I should practically, and given
the limits of my range, have had no aspects at
all. . . .

Given, after this fashion, my condition of
knowledge, the most general appearance of the
American (of those days) in Europe, that of
being almost incredibly unaware 2f 1ife--as the
European order expressed life--had to represent
for me the whole exhibitional range; the par-
ticular initiation on my own part that would
have helped me to other apprehensions being
absolutely bolted and barred to me. (Prefaces, 187)

Francis Dosson is documentary of a certain social condition,
but she is also an innocent fated to play an age-old role—-
the low-born girl who makes the faux pas that breaks the
charm and hence endangers the dream of a high marriage.

She fluctuates between the social and the mythic roles be-
cause the story is a transitional one, but later dramas

and fairy tales will come in which social documentation
serves more as staging than as subject. What else could
James do but move toward myth? He has "the clear sense

that if I didn't see the Francis Dossons . . . as always

and at any cost-- at whatever cost of repetition, that
is--worth saving, I might as well shut up my international
department" (192). His so-called "international" tales
therefore become variations on the eXploits of the innocent,

which is almost by definition the heart of the romance and

205
the fairy tale.

Rather than shut up shep, James also turns to another
type of character--the Europeanized American--and once more
produces neither American nor European figures, but struc-
turally and thematically useful hybrids. The Proberts are

selected for The Reverberator because they make the central

 

situation believable, and save James the difficulty of test-
ing his knowledge of a European society sensitive to pub-
licity. The problem, as James explains in his notebooks,
is to find people who would be shocked enough to contrast
strongly with Francie's unshocked innocence of wrongdoing;
that is,

where to find people today in Europe who would

really be so shocked as that comes to--shocked

enough for my dramatic opposition. I don't in

the least see them in England, where publicity

is far too much, by this time, in the manners

of society for my representation to have any

verisimilitude here. (Notebooks, 84)
Likewise the notoriously unshockable French society, near
which James decides ironically to set the tale, would not
react enough to the newspaper article. The event on which
the story is based had happened years before in a city of
southern Europe (Prefaces, 183), a time and place too re-
mote for James to reproduce. He therefore creates a condi-
tion similar to the one in "Daisy Miller," in which the
American colony in a major EurOpean city is more sensitive
to shocks from American girls than the native society is:

So I found my solution where, with the help of

Heaven, I hope to find many others in work to

come; viz, in the idea of the Europeanized American.
And it is that that represents not simply an easier

 

206

way, but a greater reality. . . . They would
really be the peOple most detached and most
scandalized . . . (Notebookg, 85)

 

James is right. Such Americans would be less secure in
their place within the society, and would therefore be most
likely to over-react. But James also uses Europeanized
Americans because they are in fact "an easier way"; for
they need be neither American nor European, but just a com-
bination that follows strict conventions. And such figures,
again, derive as much from types in literature as from any
nation.

The Proberts have a social history which explains their
condition, of course, but like that of the Bordereaux in
"The Aspern Papers," their family history is the servant
of dramatic convenience. That is, the history serves more
as a rationale for the Probert mentality than as the sub-
ject in its own right. Likewise the sense of the past in
these characters and the theme of social synthesis add to
the dramatic situation without taking it over. There is a
balance between the old sociological elements of the inter—
national theme and the portrayals of psychology and dramas
of consciousness which will predominate in the major phase.

Gaston Probert's father, "a Carolinian and a Catholic,
was a Gallomaniac of the old American type" (X111, 39).
Given the love of France that the American Revolution had
fostered, and the South's ties to Europe during the Civil
War, Probert's aristocratic appreciation of France is quite

credible. But the story is as much a fable on expatriation

 

 

 

207
and social synthesis as a portrait of forgotten Americans.
The Proberts seem more important for what they represent,
the American absorbed by EurOpe, than for what they are as
a particular case. James is very interested in the changes
in American character which are wrought by expatriation.
Does Gallomania or Anglophilia, the result of a particular
kind of love of the past, result in the best form of social
synthesis? As in the early international tales, in which
the passionate pilgrims are pathological cases of nostalgia,
so the expatriate Americans of the English period are victims
of a faulty sense of the past, and therefore make neither
good Americans nor good Europeans.

If the Dossons have no sense of the past at all, the
Proberts have an anachronistic love of it. Neither family
has a balanced perspective, a proper sense of the relation
of past and present. If Francis thinks the Proberts go
back "a thousand years" (135) and George Flack mistakes
the American colony for "the real 'grand' old mgndg" (121),
M. Probert reads only books on the origins of things and
understands nothing but "13 vieux jeu," as Gaston calls it
(131). The rest of the Proberts are just as anachronistic.
Old Mme. d'Outreville "belonged to the old-fashioned school
and held a pretty person sufficiently catalogued when it
had been said she had a dazzling complexion or the finest
eyes in the world" (76). Mme. de Cliche is adequately
identified by her name. Mme. de Brecourt and her husband

have an apartment in an old family mansion, "under the roof

 

 

 

 

 

 

208
that covered in associations as the door of a linen—closet
preserves herbaceous scents," so she can recall "her
mother's life and her young days and her dead brother and
the feelings connected with her first going into the world"
(94). She is perceptive and sympathetic to Gaston and
Francis, so she is only gently ridiculed. Her sense of the
past is more balanced. But to make certain that his ironic
intention toward the Probert clan is not mistaken, James
adds the devastating picture of M. and Mme. de Douves:

M. de Douves was the person who took the family,
all round, most seriously and who most deprecated
any sign of crude or precipitate action. He . . .
was suspected by his friends of believing that he
looked like Louis XIV. Mme. de Brecourt went so
far as to believe that his wife, in confirmation
of this, took herself for a species of Mme. de
Maintenon: she had lapsed into a provincial
existence as she might have harked back to the
seventeenth century; the world she lived in
seemed about as far away. . . . The old clothes
she fondly affected . . . added to her look of
having come down from a remote past or reverted
to it (95)

She and her husband even write "roy" and "foy" in their
letters! Most hilarious, and most clearly damning, is
James's description of the lady's intelligence:

. . . the action of her mind was wholly restricted
to questions of relationship and alliance. She
had extraordinary patience of research and tenac-
ity of grasp for a clue, and viewed peOple solely
in the light projected upon them by others; that
is, not as good or wicked, ugly or handsome,

wise or foolish, but as grandsons, nephews, uncles
and aunts, brothers and sisters-in-law, cousins
and second cousins. You might have supposed, to
listen to her, that human beings were susceptible
of no attribute but that of a dwindling or thick-
ening consanguinity. There was a certain expec-
tation that she would leave rather formidable
memoirs. {95-96)

209
The whole family is pretentious. They ridicule the Dossons'
English while speaking the language as if it were French
(81; cf. 98, 36)! Like the rest of the "American colony"
in Paris, they think of themselves as "a little kingdom of
the blest" (43).

The main problem with the Probert family, however, is
that it has lost its American identity and virtues without
acquiring any better replacements. As Mme. de Brecourt
perceives of the Dossons, "for the reality of the thing
. . . they're worth all of us. We're diluted and they're
pure, and any one with an eye would see it" (96). The
Dossons have "native and instinctive delicacy" and "charm-
ing primitive instincts" (97), while as Francis says with
unconscious irony about the Proberts' reaction to her £§g§
Egg, "1 never saw people so affected" (157). Even Mme. ds
Brecourt is crude enough to ask Gaston about the Dosson
fortune (82), an indelicacy the Dossons would not even
consider committing.

Gaston Probert has the most serious problem discover-
ing his and his family's national identity. "He would have
had a country and countrymen, to say nothing of country-
women, if he could"--but he cannot (39). He is "an Ameri-
can who had never been in America," a Frenchman who knows
he is not French (38). Even Francis perceives his dilemma:
"'Well, gag you a Frenchman? That's just the point, ain't
it?'" (47). Actually to Gaston the point is more whether

or not he is an American, for in an intriguing variation

 

210

on the convention of the American seeking his identity from
EurOpe, Gaston is trying to "recover the national tie" of
his family to the United States. He takes much less time
than Winterbourne to discover that the Proberts have been
too long abroad: "There's a sad want of freshness-—thsrs's
even a provinciality--in the way we've Gallicised" (111).
He wants to be American. But with a Gallomaniac father and
"an old Legitimist marquis" as godfather,

the young man, therefore, between two stools,

had no clear sitting-place: he wanted to be

as American as he could and yet not less French

than he was; he was afraid to give up the little
that he was and find that what he might be was

less . . . (39-40)
He is, says James, a man without a country (41, 67). Conse-
quently he feels that he is in danger of having no identity
at all.

Gaston is one of those unfortunates who is forced to
choose between past and present, his family or Francis,
because no reconciliation of the two is possible. The de-
cision to marry Francis is the only one which allows Gaston
to retain any individual identity (205, 210). The heritage
of his family is a false past, and to marry a girl of his

father's choosing would be to surrender both his identity

and his taste:

He didn't know what old frumps his father might
have frequented-—the style of 1830, With longd
curls in front, a vapid simper, a Scotch plai
dress and a corsage, in a pOlnt suggestive of
twenty whalebones, coming down to the knees—-
but he could remember Mme. de Marlgnac s . I .
and the taste that prevailed in that milieu.
the books they admired, the verses they read

 

 

211

and recited, the pictures, great heaven! they
thought good, and the three busts of the lady
of the house in different corners (as a Diana,
a Druidess and a Croyante: her shoulders were
supposed to make up for her head) . . . (108)

 

So Gaston chooses the beauty and sincerity of Francis
Dosson instead, hoping to mold her plastic qualities, like
Waterlow the American artist, into a sophisticated form.
What is needed is the rejuvenation of the old conventional
manners so that they eXpress genuine feelings again, a
synthesis of the sincerity of the Dossons with the "high
standard" of the Proberts (101—02). Since Francis resembles
a figure of the French Renaissance, she may eventually be-
come the revivifying fusion Gaston desires.
But Gaston himself will need to be changed as well.
Waterlow, the impressionist painter who "combined in odd
fashion many of the forms of the Parisian studio with the
moral and social ideas of Brooklyn Long Island" (96), sees
that Gaston is still "essentially a foreigner" when in
anguish:
. . . he had the foreign sensibility, the senti-
mental candour, the need for sympathy, the com~
municative despair. A true young Anglo-Saxon
would have buttoned himself up in his embarrassment
and been dry and awkward and capable and, however
conscious of a pressure, unconscious of a drama;
whereas Gaston was effusive and appealing and
ridiculous and graceful--natural above all and
egotistical. (202)

Gaston follows the tradition of the lover in the French

novel. Francis must change him as he changes her; she

begins by forcing him to make the choice between her and

his family. Later somehow she must accustom him to the

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

212
American necessity of making a living. And as the German
waiter, not assimilated himself into French society, per-
ceives of the couple leaving the cafe, they do not seem to
know where they are going let alone how they will get there.

So the novel works as a parable on expatriation and
social fusion, on American identity and European effects on
it. But in addition the work is as much the old story of
the young man marrying the girl he loves in spite of par-
ental opposition, as a realistic assessment of social con-
ditions. James uses the conventions of his international
theme to set up the conditions of a typical social comedy.
Nationalities are lessening in importance in the interna-
tional tales--which can hardly be international without
them. Just how interchangeable and irrelevant nationality
becomes in the international stories, though, is clearest
in works like "The Aspern Papers" and "A London Life."

In "The Aspern Papers“ nationality is just a device—-
one James would learn to use exquisitely in the major phase--
to detach the characters from the restrictions of conven-
tional national traits. The Misses Bordereau, after all,
are supposed to be American women with French names who
have lived for years in a Dutch house in Italy (XII, 10).
After so many mixtures in and removals from national identi-
ties, they have no nationality at all: "They were believed
to have lost in their long exile all [American7 national
quality, besides being as their name implied of some remoter

French affiliation" (4). When Miss Bordereau is asked if

 

 

 

 

213
she is American, she replies, "I don't know. We used to be."
Pausing, she adds, "We don't seem to be anything now" (19).
Much more than the Freers or even the Proberts, the Bordereau
ladies are an "altogether new type of American absentee";
"the American name had ceased to have any application to
them" and they have shed "all native marks and notes" (47).

The reason James wants to deprive the Bordereaux of all
nationality is summarized in the preface to the work. For
"romance—value" he wants to be tied to literal facts as
little as possible: "The historian, essentially, wants
more documents than he can really use; the dramatist only
wants more liberties than he can really take" (Prefaces,
161). James is changing from the early historian of the
international theme to the later dramatist. He is not so
much interested in a specific social fact as in a dramatic
situation and an idea-~"the reality and the closeness of
our relation to the past" (162). This preoccupation would
take more explicit form in Th§_§§n§g cf the Past, but even
as early as "The Aspern Papers" (1888) the relation between
the past and the present is a major strain of the inter-
national theme.

It was, of course, the survival of Shelley's mistress
well beyond the Romantic Period that started James's imagin-
ation to work. For the Byronic era was the most attractive
of all to James-~just far enough in the past to be intensely
different but also firmly continuous with the present stand—

point from which he was writing (Prefaces, 164-65). James

214

transplants the story's antecedents from England to America,
he says, to protect the source of his "germ" for the story,
to avoid irrelevant comparisons with the real Shelley and
his mistress. But James is also conducting an experiment,
he claims, in recovering the Byronic age as felt in America:

. . . it was natural, it was fond and filial, to

wonder if a few of the distilled drops might n't

be gathered from some vision of, say, "old" New

York. Would that human congeries, to aid ob—

ligingly in the production of a fable, be con-

ceived as "taking" the afternoon light with the

right happy slant?--or could a recogniseable

reflexion of the Byronic age, in other words, be

picked up on the banks of the Hudson? (Only

just there, beyond the great sea, if anywhere:

in no other connexion would the question so

much as raise its head. I admit that Jeffrey

Aspern is n't even feebly localised, but I

thought New York as I projected him.) (165)
James may have thought of New York and the Hudson, but no~
trace of either appears in any way in the story. The
Byronic light hangs solely over Venice and makes Aspern's
supposed American nationality a mere detail. That fact,
like Juliana's nationality, plays no part in the tale whatso-
ever. Rather, as Jamss notes in his rationale, the work is
a "fable," a construction having much more to do with romance
and drama and an idea than with social fact. James asserts
that switching Aspern's origin from England to America as
a device "was 'cheap' or expensive according to the degree
of verisimilitude artfully obtained" (166).10 James claims
that he could have worked out a thoroughly credible Amer-
ican Jeffrey Aspern, one that would satisfy even the his-
torian. Perhaps so, but he does not, and he does not have

to. Jeffrey's nationality, like Juliana's, is never

215
questioned. For the focus of the story is on the myth of
Jeffrey Aspern, that part of him which survives in the
present through Juliana Bordereau; the reality of his past
dies with Juliana and goes up in smoke with the letters.
Only the romance of the vague past remains, and the drama
of the confrontation of Juliana and the critic--the man who
would destroy all myth to get at a vulgar reality.
James is writing pure romance, pure drama, pure fable.
He does not care about literal facts so long as the reader
believes them enough to be drawn into the story. His re—
fusal to justify the nationality of Jeffrey Aspern proves
its insignificance:
If through our lean prime Western period no
dim and charming ghost of an adventurous
lyric genius might by a stretch of fancy flit,
if the time was really too hard to "take," in the
light form proposed, the elegant reflexion, then
so much the worse for the time--it was all one
could say! (Prefaces, 168)
This blatant begging of the question shows how far James
had moved in the direction of non-realistic fiction. Such
a rationale belongs with his defense of the "supersubtle
fry" of the fables for artists and the fins intelligencss
of the major phase; if these do not exist, they should.
(Prefaces, 221-23). They are larger than life; they are
types; they are archetypes.
"A London Life" (1888) also demonstrates the mere
expediency in James's use of nationality. Likewise the

tale reveals James's problem in portraying American charac-

ters as distinct from EurOpean types, a problem which

 

 

 

 

216

explains not only the declining significance of the old
international conflicts but also the growing tendency of
his characters to be types belonging more to the conven-
tions of literature than to separate nations. The "sup-
posed 'international' conflict of manners" that he had been
portraying for years is justly considered an "international
fallacy" in the preface to "A London Life" (Prefaces, 132).
James is tired of "the scant results, above all for inter-
esting detail, promised by confronting the fruits of a con-
stituted order with the fruits of no order at all":

We may strike lights by opposing order to order,
one sort to another sort; for in that case we
get the correspondences and equivalents that
make differences mean something; we get the
interest and the tension of disparity where a
certain parity may have been in question. Where
it may n25 have been in question, where the
dramatic encounter is but the poor concussion of
positives on one side with negatives on the
other, we get little beyond a consideration of the
differences between fishes and fowls. (132)

Just as James's passionless pilgrims end up with no iden-

tity at all or one defined primarily in negative terms, so
James recognizes how tenuously even some of his more intel-
ligent figures cling to their shreds of American identity.
There is no necessity in their being American; they are not
narrow national types, but broadly human ones:

"A London Life" breaks down altogether, I have
had to recognise, as a contribution to my com-
prehensive picture of bewildered Amsricanism.
I fail to make out today why I need have con-
ceived my three principal persons as sharers
in that particular bewilderment. There was
enough of the general human and social sort
for them without it; poor young Wendover in
especial, I think, fails on any such ground to

 

 

 

 

 

 

217

attest himself-—I need n't, surely, have been
at costs to bring him all the way from New York.
Laura Wing, touching creature as she was de-
signed to appear, strikes me as a rare little
person who would have been a rare little person
anywhere, and who, in that character, must have
felt and judged and suffered and acted as she
did, whatever her producing clime. (133)

These passages are so self-explanatory, due to James's own
deep insights into his work, that commentary seems super-
fluous. The heart of the old international theme is
breaking down because James is more interested in creating
drama than social commentary:

What matters . . . is that the prime intention
shall have been justified--for any judgment of
which we must be clear as to what it was. It
was n't after all of the prime, the very most
prime, intention of the tale in question that
the persons concerned in them should have had
this, that or the other land of birth; but that
the central situation should really be rendered
. . . Nobody concerned need, as I say, have come
from New York for that . . . (134)

In fact, there is no necessity in such characters coming
from any particular location. Consequently Laura and
Wendover are gratuitously American; and Laura's sister
Selina is perhaps falsely so:

The great anomaly, however, is Mrs. Lionel;

a study of a type quite sufficiently to be
accounted for on the very scene of her develop-
ment, and with her signs and marks easily mis—
takeable, in London, for the notes of a native
luxuriance. . . . the wicked woman of my story
was falsified above all, as an imported product,
by something distinctly other than so engendered
in the superficial "form" of her perversity, a
high stiffbacksd angular action which is, or
was then, beyond any American "faking." (133-34)

James was so used to being able to make anything from his

flexible countrymen that he did not create Selina carefully

 

 

 

 

218

enough to insure her credibility as an American. Whether
anyone else would have noticed if James had not pointed out
this weakness is doubtful, since Selina's nationality is no
strong factor in her role. The reader might indeed wonder,
though, how two people as different as Laura and Selina
could have the same background.

The main question is why Laura is American. Once again
James acutely provides his own answer:

I must have seen the creation of my heroine,

in 1888, and the representation of the differ-

ences I wished to establish between her own

known world and the world from which she finds

herself recoiling, facilitated in a high de-

gree by assured reference to the simpler social

order across the sea. (134-35)
In addition "the impression was always there that no one
so much as the candid outsider, caught up and involved in
the sweep of the machine, could measure the values re-
vsaled." That is, James is learning to use nationality and
the conventions of the international theme to save himself
"preparations" and to reinforce the dramatic situations
that form the core of his fiction. And he is using his
fresh Adamic American as the most objective observer-

participant possible. Again, we shall find these tech-

niques refined in the major phase.

 

 

Notes
1

2Cf. Notebooks, p. 129. The observation is a common-
place of Jamesian criticism. -

November 25, 1881, Notebooks, p. 24.

 

3See Notebooks, p. 49; Prefaces, pp. 203-04.

 

 

4The fact that mrs. Brash is without honor in her own
country is evidence, of course, that America still has an
imperfect taste for its past.

58cc Wegelin, pp. 54 ff.

60f. Granville Hicks, The Great Tradition (New York,
1967), pp. 118-20, whose viewpoint on James as an American
is very close to Van Wyck Brooks' s; the quotation is from
the Letters, I, pp. 242-43.

7_a_:__he Bostonians (London, 1921), I, p. 31, quoted by
Stone,_ p. 92.

 

81h fact, as the rest of Newman's description reveals,
James characterizes his Americans much better with more ab-
stract passages than he does with concrete detail. The
essence of many characters, as he progresses, is con,
tained in masterly touches of rather non-physical descrip-
tion. His problem eventually becomes his salvation.

90f. Prefaces, p. 281, on his being a "civil alien,"
needing to be "born again."

10"Verisimilitude" here is best understood in the sense
that it is related to the reader's suspension of disbelief;
if a fact seems credible within the work, it has verisimili-
tude. James may have tried for more, but he certainly did
not need to, and just as certainly he did not succeed in
creating more than the illusion.

g19

220
3. The Major Phase (1901-1904)

During the years immediately following the turn of the
century, James's optimism, like everyone slse's, is at its
highest. No cloud of the huge war to come has yet arisen,
and while James is not particularly enthusiastic about
American imperialism and considers Theodore Roosevelt "a
dangerous and ominous Jingo," he is willing to watch an
American empire grow if the positive benefits to his home-
land will even approximate the social benefits Britain has
derived from her empire.l McKinley's assassination is bar-
baric to him, and he dislikes and distrusts American poli—
tics intensely, but he is willing to remain politically
neutral with the faith that the United States can only
develOp more civilized ways as she enters the larger world
of international affairs. So with an eye uneasily averted
from contemporary public affairs, James builds his novels
on the assumption of future international social fusion on
a personal level, gratefully acknowledging any public
progress in that direction. When Sir George 0. Trevelyan
publishes the first volumes of his history of Th§_American
Revolution, James congratulates him mainly on.contributing
to the new Anglo-Saxon unity: .

I doubt whether you know what a work of civili-

zation you are perpetrating internationally by

the very fact of your producing so exquisite a

work of art. The American, the Englishman, the

artist, and the critic in me--to say nothing of

the friend!—-all drink you down in a deep
draught, each in turn feeling that he is more

 

 

221

deeply concerned. But it is of course, as with

the other volume, the book's being so richly and

authoritatively English, so validly true, and

yet so projected as it were into the American

consciousness, that will help to build the bridge

across the Atlantic; and I think it is the mystery

of this large fusion, carried out in so many ways,

that makes the thing so distin uished a work of
James himself, of course, had decided to further Anglo-
American unity during his English period by ignoring the
contrasts which had formed the early basis of the inter-
national theme. For a time he seems to forget America com-
pletely, though, rather than treat her as a more and more
equal Anglo-Saxon community. But now that "human Anglo-
Saxonism, with the American extension, or opportunity for
it," is once more his greatest interest, James returns the
artistic glance to the question of American character
(Letters, 1, 418).

The social fact that America is still more an "oppor-
tunity" for the extension of Anglo-Saxon culture than an
actual living example of it to James, should not obscure
the corresponding fact that in his novels of this period
the major Americans are already worthy of inclusion in
civilized society. In fact Isabel Archer, Milly Theale,
Maggie Verver, and even Lambert Strether are demonstrably
courted by that society. The question posed by the inter-
national theme is no longer whether or not Americans can

enter EurOpean society, but what effects they may have on

it. Indeed, even this question is submerged by other

 

preoccupations of the dramatist. For the more James assumes

 

 

 

222
social fusion, the more he can ignore it as a theme and
simply use it as a basis for drama. Consequently James's
warnings in the prefaces, written right after the major
phase, must be carefully heeded to avoid distorting the
international elements in the novels of his maturity--
or even in some earlier novels. "There are cases," James
remarks, "in which, however obvious and however contribu-
tive" the difference between "the distinctively American
and the distinctively European outlook" may be, "its office
for the particular demonstration has been quite secondary,
and in which the work is by no means merely addressed to the

illustration of it" (Prefaces, 198). In such works there

 

is a condition of already "achieved social fusion . . .
without the sense and eXperience of which neither 'The Wings
of the Dove,’ nor 'The Golden Bowl,’ nor 'The Portrait of a
Lady,’ nor even, after all, I think, 'The Ambassadors,’
would have been written" (Prefaces, 199). Consequently I
think that Leon Edel's interpretation of Th3 Portrait gf‘g
L511 as an international fable is a distortion of the major
thrust of the work. Edsl sees Isabel as an embodiment of
American idealism--blind to history, but believing in free—
dom and equality-—who refuses to try to reforge the bond
with England (Warburton), finding it impossible to do so and
remain free. She does not marry Goodwood due to fear of
losing herself to commercialism--a valid parallel, to be
sure, to James's feelings about the commercial American

2

male. But carrying the fable much further (or even this

 

 

 

223
far perhaps), while not impossible, seems less and less
likely and appropriate. The Touchetts, Osmond and Madame
Merle are hardly advertisements for social integration, and
it seems unlikely that James would write a parable on the
American refusal to reunite with England at the very time
he feels America is coming closer and closer to a social
synthesis with the mother country. True, he is dealing
with the possibilities for integration, and it is possible
to read the constant alternative marriage to Warburton as
the ideal Isabel should follow. The lord may well be the
"sun" designed to go along with all the "garden" imagery
surrounding Isabel, as R.W. Stallman claims.3 Warburton
is in a false position, owning an estate yet preaching
radical economic change-~a position Isabel argues against
very conservatively, so perhaps the two would correct each
other's faults. But there is little direct evidence in the
novel that Isabel would have done best in marrying the
Englishman; whom Isabel should have married, except Osmond,
is not at all unambiguous. Certainly there are few encour-
aging combinations of America and England around. Mrs.
Touchett is an independent cosmopolite with little else to
recommend her. Ralph Touchett and his father are amusing-
but hardly productive Anglo-Americans, and neither can, as
Ralph admits, overcome his American shortcomings. The
marriage of Henrietta and Bantling is comical--and dis-
appointing to Isabel, who thought Henrietta would choose

better if she ever married. And Goodwood certainly comes

 

224

off as well as Warburton as a suitor. The point is that any
attempt to trace a coherent fable breaks down because
James's best novels are more than fables; they are dramas,
situations created by James from his international materials
but not governed by the theme. Isabel is American because
a girl with the right romantic notions for the story can
be most easily imported from America and supplied with a
fortune. The work is not so much a critique of American
idealism, as a broader critique of romantic temperament.4
James wants his heroine to be, as he says, like Shake-
speare's Portia, "the very type and model of the young
person intelligent and presumptuous" (Prefaces, 49). The
international theme is a means to dramatic ends, not the
end itself.

In the later novels this fact is more obvious:

. . . for instance, the subject of "The Wings

of the Dove," or that of "the Golden Bowl," has not

been the exhibited behaviour of certain Americans

as Americans, of certain English persons as

English, of certain Romans as Romans. Americans,

Englishmen, Romans are, in the whole matter,

agents or victims; but this is in virtue of an

association nowadays so developed, so easily to

be taken for granted, as to have created a new

scale of relations altogether, a state of things

from which emphasized internationalism has

either dropped or is well on its way to drop.

. . . the subject could in each case have been

perfectly expressed had all the persons con-

cerned been only American or only English or

only Roman or whatever. (Prefaces, 198-99)
James conceived many of these novels without Americans in
them: Strether was almost an Englishman; Milly Theale be~
came American only near the end of James's plotting in the

notebooks. Prince Amerigo was originally French (Notebooks,

225
130—31). James decides on the locale and nationalities of
his characters according to the economics of fiction, ac-
cording to which setting and nationality will save the most
"preparations," those concrete details needed to build up
to the heart of a dramatic situation. It is easier to put
Strether in Paris than anywhere else, and easier to make
him American than any other nationality, in order to create
the right moral outlook, tone of regret and feeling of lost
time; similarly, it is easier to create a princess with a
fortune and free of traditions and relatives by bringing
one over from New York than by spending the pages necessary
to extricate one from English family ties. Nationalities
as such are essentially interchangeable in the late novels;
they are conveniences to be used--this is the value to the
dramatist of the social fusion James sees.

Such fusion consequently begins, to "the novelist
sometimes depressed by all the drawbacks of a literary form
overworked and relaxed," to ”measure more and more as a
portent and an Opportunity" (Prefaceg, 199). The realist
tied to the narrow locale and the conventions of a single
literature may begin to cross borders, to find many "odd
and fresh phenomena," a "vast new province, infinitely
peopled and infinitely elastic . . . annexed to the kingdom
of the dramatist" (199—200). James begins to see the "mix-
ture of manners," leading to the social synthesis which he
had projected even in the early international tales, as

"a happy instinctive foresight," as he eXplains in his most

 

226
important statement on the international theme:

The mixture of manners was to become in other

words not a less but a very much more appreci-

able and interesting subject of study. The

mixture of manners was in fine to loom large and
constantly larger all round; it was to be a

matter, plainly, about which the future would

have much to say. Nothing appeals to me more, I
confess, as a "critic of life" in any sense worthy
of the name, than the finer-—if indeed thereby the
less easily formulated-- group of the conquests of
civilization, the multiplied symptoms among edu-
cated people, from wherever drawn, of a common
intelligence and a social fusion tending to abridge
old rigours of separation. . . . It is a question,
however, of the tendency, perceptive as well as
reflective too, of the braver imagination-~which
faculty, in our future, strikes me as likely to

be appealed to much less by the fact, by the pity
and the misery and the greater or less grotesque-
ness, of the courageous, or even of the timid,
missing their lives beyond certain stiff barriers,
than by the picture of their more and more steadily
making out their opportunities and their possible
communications. Behind all the small comedies and
tragedies of the international, in a word, has ex—
quisitely lurked for me the idea of some eventual
sublime consensus of the educated; the exquisite
conceivabilities of which, intellectual, moral,
emotional, sensual, social, political-~all, I mean,
in the face of felt difficulty and anger--constitute
stuff for such "situations" as may easily make many
of those of a more familiar type turn pale.

There, if one will-~in the dauntless fusions to come--
is the personal drama of the future. (Prefaces, 202-03)

 

The novels of the major phase deal with such attempts at
social fusion, such gropings toward a sublime concensus,
culminating in the beautiful marriage of Thg'Golden‘ggwl.

But they already presume that on the highest level much of
the synthesis has already taken place; otherwise such
harmony as Prince Amerigo and Maggie find--or the love that
grows between Merton Densher and Milly Theale, or even the
fine acclimation of Strether to Madame de Vionnet and Paris_-

would never have the opportunity to arise. The culminating

227
event in Thg_Golden Egg; is not a marriage, the aim of so
many early international tales. The marriage, symbol of
union, is a foregone conclusion early in the novel. Rather,
the climax of the work is a much deeper and more dramatic
fusion of two peOple already married for some years. As
James admits in the same preface, "the emphasis of the in-
ternational proposition has indeed had time, as I say, to
place itself elsewhere-~if, for that matter, there be any
emphasis or any proposition left at all" (211). The novels
are therefore as much dramas on characters in archetypal
roles as parables on social fusion--if indeed they are not
much more drama than parable.

Consequently Christof Wegelin‘s interpretation of the
major phase, while essentially correct from the old view-
point of the international theme, is incomplete and skirts
the most interesting development in the mature novels--the
movement toward myth and archetype, a deeper if not entirely
new sense of the past.5 Wegelin places so much emphasis
on the nationalities of characters in the late novels be-
cause James consistently makes his native Americans moral
and innocent and his Europeans amoral and experienced, only
Partly recognizing that James is consistent about national-
ity mainly because that consistency saves him dramatic
preparations (87-88). James can most economically use the
conventions he has developed. In contrast Wegelin sees
"the consistency with which he arranged various national-

ities in his moral dramas" as "neither incidental nor

 

 

228

ephemeral":

Taken together, the three novels form a trilogy

exploring the possibilities of two radically

different systems of morality represented by

America and Europe. And coming just before his

return to America in 1904, which led him to re-

adjust his focus, they constitute-a climax in

his lifelong attempt to define his sense of the

fundamental differences between the two worlds. (88)
Th; Ambassadors gives Strether a lesson in "social beauty,"
an experience in the moral value of style, beauty and order,
represented by Madame de Vionnet, who converts him away from
the "moral absolutism" of Woollett (86; 99-101). Milly
Theale, in Th2,fling§‘gf the Dove, is an American who gives
Englishman Merton Densher a lesson in "spiritual beauty,"
converting him from the pragmatic empirical morality of
Kate Croy (117, 121). Finally, in Th3 Golden §gwl, Prince
Amerigo wins Maggie to a sense of the value of social dis-
cipline and the preservation of appearances as she wins him
to a sense of the value of moral beauty--a "double con-
version" resulting in a "finally achieved harmony" between
the two modes of life, American and European (121, 138-39):
"On one level, then, Thg Golden ggwl is a fable emblematic
of the achievement of the international 'social fusion'
which James envisioned as the ultimate result of the in—
creasingly intimate social relations between Europe and
America" (125).

Wegelin demonstrates his thesis so well that there is

little value in duplicating his effort. I would like to add

to his view of the international theme, however, and outline

the development of archetypal roles and characters in the

229
major novels as these arise from the elasticity of James's
international materials. These works are fables on only
one level, and that level may not be the most important
one. Since I have already discussed The Portrait 2; e They
and The Ambassadors at length in the previous chapter,
The TThge e; The Teze and The Golden hehT will serve better
as the main examples in this one.

Milly Theale is much more than innocence and "spiritual
beauty." She is the "potential heiress of all the ages"
not simply because Susan Stringham says so, but because she
is "one of the rarest . . . cases of American intensity"
(XIX, 109, 116). She is a composite of nations, potential
heir to all, free to borrow from all countries and all
times. In itself this condition makes her a latent uni—
versal type. To be sure, Milly partakes of the old mania
of the passionate pilgrim; she comes to England not for
companionship but to realize an old conception:

It wasn't a question, in short, of the people

the compatriot was after; it was the human,

the English picture itself, as they might see

it in their own way——the concrete world inferred

so fondly from what one had read and dgeamed.

(XIX, 135)

And like Clement Searle and her earlier American cousins,
Milly gilds with her preternatural alertness an already
gilded lily, Lancaster Gate, as she attends her first
gathering at Mrs. Lowder's overdone residence:

Emma,assassins marsh?

and so deep an undertone. The smallest things,

the faces the hands the jewels of the women,
the sound,of words, especially of names, across

 

 

230

the table, the shape of the forks, the arrange—

ment of the flowers, the attitude of the servants,

the walls of the room, were all touches in a

picture and denotements in a play; and they marked

for her moreover her alertness of vision. She had

never, she might well believe, been in such a state

of vibration; her sensibility was almost too sharp

for her comfort . . . (148)
James's New Yorker is still the most perceptive observer of
Europe possible, but with the same tendency to idealize.
So Milly's "American mind" and vieWpoint break down before
a sample of English society like Kate Croy. Kate is too
dark and deep, part of a society too various, for Milly's
initial perception (277). But she is growing. As in the
fortunate fall theory, Milly matures because her innocence‘
is pierced by an early initiation to evil. For even though
she cannot yet sound the depths of Kate Croy, she has been'
able to fathom Lord Mark and some of the less devious
socialites at that first gathering in Lancaster Gate: "she
had, on the spot, with her first plunge into the obscure
depths of a society constituted from far back, encountered
the interesting phenomenon of complicated, of possibly
sinister motive" (153-54)-

Milly is more than an American outgrowing her pro-
vincialism; she is the archetypal innocent undergoing the
inevitable initiation. And she is more than just an inno-
cent, though Merton Densher and Kate Croy do not immediately
perceive the fact. Densher, through whose eyes the reader

views Milly in the second volume, does not notice right

away that she is not the same girl he saw in the States.

 

231

To him the "Miss Theales" are just run of the mill American
social phenomena (XX, 10).7 Kate does not understand the
woman either, thinking that Milly is so innocent that she
does not know what Lord Mark is--that she "has no natural
sense of social values" (60). But unlike middle-class Kate,
Milly is free of the necessity of recognizing rank. As a
rich "princess," Milly has her own ticket into society. The
Adamic innocent, as the novel develops, is not so much Milly
as Densher, caught between a good and a bad angel, who only
very slowly wakes up to Milly's grandeur and to Kate's sin-
ister game. When he does perceive part of Kate's plan, he

rationalizes just like Adam in Eden--since Kate has "brought

 

the apple and asked him to bite," she is responsible for any
consequences (91). Meanwhile Milly, visiting American friends
abroad, senses that she is "already . . . queer and disso-
ciated" from America (137). Even more important, being faced
with a fate that clears her perceptions, Milly senses things
that her English acquaintances have missed:

She saw things in these days that she had never
seen before, and she couldn't have said why

save on a principle too terrible to name; where-
by she saw that neither Lancaster Gate was what
New York took it for, nor New York what Lancaster
Gate fondly fancied it in coquetting with the
plan of a series of American visits. The plan
might have been, humourously, on Mrs. Lowder's
part, for the improvement of her social posi—
tion-~and it had verily in that direction
lights that were perhaps but half a century too
prompt . . . (137-38)

Milly perceives, that is, the fifty-year gap that must be
filled before there is a true Anglo-American social syn-

thesis on any broad scale. Just before Milly leaves the

 

 

 

232

scene of the novel in Book Eight, to be presented only in-
directly thereafter, the reader sees how much she trans—
cended her American identity. Through Densher's dazzled
eyes, to which Milly now has a "confounding extension of
surface," the reader sees her ability at the party in
Venice to put on and take off at will her "American girl"
personality, giving her complete social ease (215, 254-55).

The point is that, in spite of the truth in their ar-
guments, Milly is more than Wegelin's "spiritual beauty";
she is more than wounded innocence; she is more, even, than
R.W.B. Lewis's nearly archetypal Adamic American. In de-
fining the more sophisticated "ironic temperament" of the
elder Henry James as opposed to the "hopeful" Emersonian
and "nostalgic" Longfellow temper, Lewis claims that it
"was characterized by a tragic optimism: by a sense of
the tragic collisions to which innocence was liable . . .
and equally by an awareness of the heightened perception

8 If the elder

and humanity which suffering made possible."
"James's entire intellectual effort . . . may be described
as an immense salvaging of the American Adam" idea through
his preaching of the necessity of a fall beyond innocence,
Lewis claims that in the son's novels there is "a very com-
parable principle spelled out in extraordinary dramatic
detail" (55, 62). Consequently the novelist portrays
"innocent and metaphorically newborn heroes and heroines"

in a "dialect of innocence and experience" which "was so

obsessive and constant a theme for Henry James that one is

 

 

 

233
tempted to say it was not, finally, a theme at all: but
rather the special and extraordinarily sensitive instrument
by which James gauged the moral weather of the life he was
imitating" (152-53). Lewis sees this drama of the American
Adam developing from The Portrait 9T,e They through The_TThge

e: the Dove to, consummately, The Golden Bowl:

. . . the form which life assumed in James's
fiction reflected the peculiar American rhythm

of the Adamic experience: the birth of the
innocent, the foray into the unknown world, the
collision with that world, "the fortunate fall,"
the wisdom and maturity which suffering produced.
The longer James lived abroad, the closer he moved

toward a classic representation of the native
anecdote. (153)

Like Wegelin, Lewis demonstrates his thesis well as

far as he goes. Certainly The Portrait 9T,e Lady and the

three big novels of the major phase are recognizable variants
on the pattern. Isabel Archer, Lambert Strether, and Milly

Theale all mature through suffering or collisions with the

world outside Eden. In The Golden Bowl, with its father

named Adam and constant references to his and Maggie's in—
nocence, the Adamic metaphor is explicit and to some degree,
as Lewis argues, even central (153-54). Maggie "was n't
born to know evil. She must never know it," says Fanny
Assingham (XXIII, 78), and the Ververs are "so abjectly
innocent" that they are "victims of fate" ($91-92). They
are so pure in thought that they assume the often~paired
Prince and Charlotte will remain "in a state of childlike
innocence, the state of our primitive parents before the

Fall" (334). Like Milly, who seems "impossibly without

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

234
sin" to Kate Croy (XIX, 226), Maggie is initiated into a
world of evil, and emerges with the wisdom and maturity of
a very fortunate fall.
Nevertheless, having acknowledged this theme of Adamic
innocence in these works, I think there is a good deal more
than an Adamic archetype in many of the figures. As Lewis

admits, "The Golden Bowl is a startling inversion of the

 

 

Adamic tradition," for innocence turns aggressive and

triumphs (154). The seams of the Adamic theory show even

 

in Lewis's descriptions. In addition, James's American
Adams have an exquisite sense of the past instead of the
future, and a love of retrospection that is far from an
Adamic quality. He uses the tradition of the Adamic Amer-
ican, but he does not mind violating even its central con-
ventions. And as Lotus Snow perceives, James's characters
do not undergo exactly the usual change from.innocence to
experience, but remain innocent in a sense at the end as
they were in the beginning. Snow claims that several of

James's characters "lack the principle of growth, the

 

ability to deviate from the law of their being. The journey
they take is not from innocence to experience but of inno-
cence through experience."9 Thosewho have noticed Milly's
and Maggie's growing awareness of evil and increasing com-
plexity may dispute this description, but Snow is pointing
to an important characteristic of James's later figures--
that they do not "deviate from the law of their being,"

that they retain an aura of "innocence" or purity throughout

 

 

235
their experiences. What Snow has vaguely described, I think,

is the underlying unchanging archetypal quality, not con-

 

 

 

fined to the simple Adamic type, of James's most memorable

 

 

 

late characters.

A number of other critics, even hostile ones, have
touched on this trait of James's characters without fully
realizing its value. R.P. Blackmur, who describes the late
novels as "The Loose and Baggy Monsters of Henry James,"

perceives Kate Croy as a representation of "philosophical

 

or practical wisdom," Milly as "moral beauty," and Maggie
as James's version of "divine wisdom," closely anticipating
Wegelin. But he complains that these symbolic values inter-
fere with the verisimilitude of characterization. Maggie
Verver makes an incredible queen or princess, he says, even
metaphorically, and Milly Theale is merely an overvalued

10 Marius Bewley voices a sim-

creation of Susan Stringham.
ilar criticism of Milly, feeling that James indulges her

as a character just as Hawthorne indulges Hilda in The
Marble Tehh. Inflated metaphors canonize the American girl,

says Bewley, so she can purify the Old World.11

Van Eyck
Brooks, in his famous attack on James, also senses some
interference with the old concrete verisimilitude in the
later novels. "His peOple . . . grow dimmer and dimmer,"
Brooks complains, finally exploding that James's characters
have a "dim visual image—-no heart, no mind, no vitals.

No interests, no attributes, no activities, no race, no

philosophy. No passions, ambitions, convictions: no local

 

236

habitation—-scarcely a name."12

This exaggeration is so
distorted that Brooke's legitimate perception is likely to
be lost-~that James finds ways to delineate character which
are not concrete, and fills out the shape of his figures
with the shadows of archetypes. This same misapprehension
eXplains Granville Hicks's similar attack on the novels set
in England, which he describes as increasingly divorced from
concrete reality, and goes far, I suggest, toward eXplaining
the roots of much negative criticism of James.13

James knows what he is doing. He had learned, perhaps

 

through his re-perusal of such passages as the opening de-

scription of Christopher Newman in The American, that char-

 

acter is made up of less concrete items than hair, eyes,
and clothes. Consequently his portraits of later charac-
ters are sometimes so non-concrete, as he strives to cap-
ture the essence of their nature and type, that concrete
details get lost. Cissy Foy, for example, must ask Horton
Vint if Graham Fielder even has physical attributes likes
eyes--for she cannot tell from his description (XXV, 174).
This comic insertion proves that James is aware of his
non-concrete technique. The reason these characters become
more than concrete portraits is that James is striving for
something both deeper and broader. Thus Graham Fielder of
She $2231.22!§£.13 exquisitely personalized with hardly a
physical trait to his name, and then walks into a "fairy-
tale or a legend" with his tremendous new wealth in a new

world, feeling that he has just stepped "into the chariot

 

 

 

 

 

237
of the sun."14
Nearly as many critics, of course, have noted with
favor James's movement toward fairy-tale figures, though
perhaps only Matthiessen has done justice to the topic.
Joseph Warren Beach, discussing the striking figures of
speech in the late novels, notes that "many of them are
used to build up an atmosphere of fairy-tale or dream."15
Edward Stone, examining women like Mrs. Beck of "Guest's
Confession" (1872), who "might have been fancied a stray
shepherdess from some rococo Arcadia" according to James,
speculates on "the possibility that James's greatest pre—
ceptor was neither Balzac nor Turgenev nor George Eliot,

but myth itself." He also notices that the grounds at

Newmarch in The Sacred Fount are explicitly compared to

 

those of fairy tales with enchanted castles, places in
which "the strange 'came true'," and that Aurora Coyne in

The Sense eh the Past wants to marry "an adventurer--more

 

or less of a returned discoverer of hidden gold, something
of a modern Jason" (202, 206). Paull F. Baum had described
"The Last of the Valerii," one of James's earliest stories,
as a variation on the old theme "of a bridegroom pursued

by a jealous divinity on whose finger he has slipped a
marriage ring," and Lionel Trilling has traced some connec-
tions between Hyacinth Robinson and mythic tradition in

The Princess Casamassima.l7

But James's use of myth is even more widespread than

most have noticed. In both "A Passionate Pilgrim" (1871)

 

 

 

238
and "Flickerbridge" (1902) the anachronistic ladies are not
just a century out of step, but explicitly suggest Sleeping
Beauty. Miss Searle "was to the Sleeping Beauty in the Wood
what a fact is to a fairy~tale, an interpretation to a
myth" (XIII, 374), and Miss Wenham parallels the same arche-
typal figure (XVIII, 456--cf. Stone, 201). From early to
late James was aware of and used mythic parallels. Euphemia's
dressing in white and meeting with the witch-like old lady
of the castle in "Madame de Mauves" (1874) is another
familiar example (XIII, 228, 309—10). More generally,
James's use of fairy godmothers is striking. Mrs. Touchett
certainly acts as one to Isabel Archer, bringing her to a
new world and helping endow her with a fortune. To Jackson
Lemon of "Lady Barbarina" (1884), "Godmothers .'. . were
mainly associated with fairy-tales--he had had no baptismal
sponsors of his own," but he discovers that godmothers do
exist. He is blessed with a meddlesome facsimile in
Mrs. Freer, and as "a young man with a great deal of gold
who had suddenly arrived from a foreign country," he is
himself "an apparition surely in a prOper degree elfish"
(XIV, 51). By the time of the late novels, such references
are central to the works.18 Fanny Assingham of The Golden
Egg; notes how much of a "fairy godmother" she has been to
Prince Amerigo in arranging his marriage to the wealthy
Maggie Verver (XXIV, 274-76). And while Mrs. Lowder is
Playing fairy godmother to Kate Croy, a neo-Cinderella in

The Wings 2; the Dove, Susan Stringham performs a similar

 

 

 

E—‘q -.

 

239
service-~though it backfires--in introducing Milly Theale
to London as a princess.

The best discussions of myth in James published so far,
though several theses have dealt with it, are by R.W. Stall-
man and F.O. Matthiessen. Stallman's interpretation of
The Portrait eT_e_Teey startled several critics, for he
traced imagery in the novel connecting Isabel Archer with
Diana the huntress, and the aggressive Goodwood with Mars
the god of war (III, 220). The parallel explains the
imagery of the moon that follows Isabel, including even the
Palazzo Crescentini or crescent moon, and explains the
eXplicit reference to her as a "goddess in an epic" (III,
45). Stallman also notes her symbolic wearing of black and
white throughout the work, comparable to Milly Theale in

The Wings 3T the Dove. Warburton is a "sun" to Isabel's

 

moon and garden imagery, and Oshehe, deriving from the
French word, represents a form of the "world." Ralph com-
pares him to a disgusted prince who has abdicated (III,
358), giving him further stature as a type. Pansy fits in
as a pastoral "Dresden-china shepherdess," an "Infants of
Velasquez," perhaps an archetypal innocent beauty raised
by beasts.19

But F.O. Matthiessen has dealt with the topic most
fully in the major phase, and meets the questions raised
by James's use of myth most directly. Beginning a fine
analysis of The Wings QT the Dove, the work in which fairy

tale figures are used most obviously and extensively,

 

 

 

240
Matthiessen remarks:

. . . the more one scrutinizes the technique of
this novel, the more one perceives that, despite
James' past-masterly command over the details of
realistic presentation, he is evoking essentially
the mood of a fairy tale. He wanted to raise his
international theme to its ultimate potentiality.
(The Major Phase, 59)

 

Not just a treatment of social fusion, not just a variation
on the American Adam motif, the international theme moves
in these later novels toward the broader representation of
myth. James's sense of past literature adds a dimension
deeper than romance to his late works. The following exam—

ination of The Wings 2; the Dove, parallel to Matthiessen's

 

 

but supplementing his description with more evidence, shows

how important the conventions of fairy tale and myth are to

 

the work. Just as romance serves as a background contrasting
with realistic action to heighten verisimilitude in The
Portrait 2£.§.§291.and The Ambassadors, yet also increases
the tension and emotion in these works, so myth and fairy
tale provide fanciful comparisons to the figures and action

in The Wings Q; the Dove and The Golden Bowl, tying them

 

more firmly to reality even while exalting the conflicts
and confrontations and giving them broader significance.
Kate Croy, the first person introduced in the novel,
seems totally realistic, coming from a rather sordid middle
class background, with a hypocritical father and a poor
married sister. James originally planned to have Kate's
background play a strong role in explaining her material—

istic motivations, and touches of that intention still

 

 

 

 

241

shine through late in the novel, particularly when Densher
sees her in the last scene at the wretched Mrs. Condrip's
house instead of in Venice or at Lancaster Gate (XX, 364,
370; of. 383, 394). Densher perceives her predicament if
she does not gain wealth. But other considerations sub-
merge this portion of Kate's characterization, as James
admits in the preface (Prefaces, 297~98). Kate immediately
moves toward a rags-to—riches, Cinderella role when she is
out off from her past by Aunt Maud--the fairy godmother who
will try to marry her to a lord if only she will forsake
her father and promise not to see or communicate with him
(XIX, 16). At the same time James makes Kate a typical
"dark lady" by clothing her "altogether in black," including
a "black closely-feathered hat," the "thick fall of her
dusky hair" and the strange blue eyes which also seem al-
most black.20

Her fiance is a similar realistic figure separated
from his situation and made into a type. Merton Densher,
although he is a newspaper writer, does not look like a
member of his profession (47-48). Furthermore, he spent
his early years abroad and was schooled in Switzerland and
Germany by "migratory parents." When the reader learns
that Densher is only "half a Briton" to Mrs. Lowder, he
begins to suspect that Densher is one of those cosmopolitan
figures-~like Juliana Bordereau, Peter Sherringham, or his
cosmopolitan princesses of mixed national ancestry,

Christina Light, Claire de Cintre and Madame de Vionnet--

 

 

 

——-7———v—w~ ~ ~

 

 

242
whom James does not restrict to a single national type so
that he can make of him whatever he will. Such characters
are prime evidence of the main value of "social fusion" to
the novelist.

Milly Theale, of course, is the main archetype in the
novel, the paradoxically perfect but frail, prized but vul-
nerable princess. She is the one who can feel a pea
through a dozen mattresses and is always in danger of being
snatched by a villain. In order to create a credible ‘
princess in the situation he desires, James selects an
origin that detaches her from all relatives and embarrassing
details while giving her the greatest possibilities: "She

should be the last fine flower—-blooming alone, for the

 

fullest attestation of her freedom-~of an 'old' New York

stem" (Prefaces, 292). So that she may have "a strong and

 

special implication of liberty, liberty of action, of
choice, of appreciation," Milly must be rich and unattached,
a princess with the utmost chance to live happily ever after.
At the same time she must be exquisitely vulnerable--
delicately sensitive, so tender she can be killed by re-
jected love, a staple condition of ballads and sentimental
romances which James only scantily cloaks with the realism
of Milly's dreaded but terribly vague disease. She is
killed as much by the realization of Densher's hypocrisy

as by tuberculosis or anything mundane. Furthermore, her
connection with New York is only the vaguest. The reader

never sees her there even by projection. As Edward Stone

 

 

243
points out, Densher's represented sense of the past time
in New York with Milly does not fill in the episode con-

cretely at all.21

Instead that period just becomes a hazy
romantic era to Densher, further heightening Milly's stature
as a princess. New York is so cosmopolitan to James that,
eXcept for its commercial qualities, with which Milly has
only an indirect connection through her inheritance, New
York can produce any kind of character. Its conditions
in any case "provide better for large independence . . .
than any other conditions in the world"--and also provide
the novelist as much freedom as possible (Prefaces, 292).
Milly gains her alleged New York identity mainly by repeti—
tion, not by any inherent New York qualities in her black
dress of bereavement and striking red hair:

It was New York mourning, it was New York hair,

it was a New York history, confused as yet, but

multitudinous, of the loss of parents, brothers,

sisters, almost every human appendage, all on a

scale and with a sweep that had required the

greater stage; it was a New York legend of affec—

ting, of romantic isolation, and, beyond every-

thing, it was by most accounts, in respect to

the mass of money so piled on the irl's back,

a set of New York possibilities. 105-06)
With the stereotype of New York, or even more of Hollywood,
wealth and isolation that has grown up, such a description
might now pass as authentic concrete reference. But in this
Passage "New York" acts more as an incantation than as con-
crete description, and if the term is omitted the reader
can perceive more readily, I think, what James is creating.

Milly is the very typical heiress, glorified but just as

vulnerable as the many other heiresses that have glittered

 

 

 

244
across the pages of fiction. James gets away with this
vision of Milly by placing it in the eyes of a dazzled
New Englander, Mrs. Susan Shepherd Stringham, who has just
enough pastoral credulity in her rural Swiss and New England
make-up, indicated by her maiden name, to think any rich
girl from the big city is a princess. Consider, for example,
Susan's further vision of Milly's background:

New York was vast, New York was startling, with
strange histories, with wild cosmopolite back-
ward generations that accounted for anything; and
to have got nearer the luxuriant tribe of which
the rare creature was the final flower, the im-
mense extravagant unregulated cluster, with free-
living ancestors, handsome dead cousins, lurid
uncles, beautiful vanished aunts, persons all
busts and curls, preserved, though so exposed,

in the marble of famous French chisels--all this,
to say nothing of the closer growths of the stem,
was to have had one's small world-space both
crowded and enlarged . . . This was poetry-~it
was also history--Mrs. Stringham thought, to a
finer tune than even Maeterlinck and Pater, than
Marbot and Gregorovius. (llO-ll)

 

After such an introduction, Milly could be anything. For
to Susan, Milly is "the real thing, the romantic life it-
self" (107); she is always "a girl with a background," a
romantic past, always "the potential heiress of all the
ages" (107, 109). Ironically, since she is exploited like
the typical heiress, Milly is the "heiress of all the ages"
in the sense that she falls prey to the role as well. But
Mrs. Stringham does not recognize her vulnerability at
first; she sees only her possibilities. To her "When Milly
smiled it was a public event-~when she didn't it was a
chapter of history" (118). Either way Susan sees Milly in

charge, a princess in power and mien.

 

 

245

Susan herself is a beautifully drawn New Englander, a
widowed short story writer "from Burlington Vermont, which
she boldly upheld as the real heart of New England, Boston
being 'too far south'" (106-O7). She is well characterized
by her "small neat memories and ingenuities, little indus-
tries and ambitions, mixed with something moral, personal,
that was still more intensely responsive," by a felt Tyro—
lese hat and a fur boa, and by many explicitly enumerated
acts of a provincial New Englander (107-08). She is "a
mere typical subscriber, after all, to the Transcript"
(109).22 Initially, then, she ties Milly to reality by her
own provincial character even as she exalts her into a

princess. But when Susan gets to Switzerland, her manner

 

and type subtly change, transformed by her sense of the
past: "Mrs. Stringham was now on the ground of thrilled
recognitions, small sharp echoes of a past which she kept
in a well-thumbed case, but which, on the pressure of a
spring and exposure to the air, still showed itself ticking
as hard as an honest old watch." She had gone to school in
Switzerland, and has warm reminiscences, "sacred today be-
cause prepared in the hushed chambers of the past" (118).
What Susan's sense of the past does is transform Switzerb
land into a paradise, a fairy land setting for Milly's
further elevation. James is now able to palm off Mrs.
Stringham as a "woman of the world" through her cosmOpoli—
tan past, and explicitly make Milly "a princess" (120).

For Switzerland is literally a land of milk and honey and

 

 

246

youth, the pastoral heaven of the former Miss Shepherd:
The irrecoverable days had come back to her from
far off; they were part of the sense of the cool
upper air and of everything else that hung like
an indestructible scent to the torn garment of
youth--the taste of honey and the luxury of milk,
the sound of cattle-bells and the rush of streams,
the fragrance of trodden balms and the dizziness
of deep gorges. (ll9-20)

Again, however, the effect is created primarily for
Milly. She sits like a sculpture, rapt in thought. Even
her wealth, which she cannot get away from, serves to ex-
empt her from time and reality, showing "in the fine folds
of the helplessly expensive little black frock . . . in
the curious and splendid coils of hair, 'done' with no eye

whatever to the mode eh_jour, that peeped from under the

 

corresponding indifference of her hat, the merely personal
tradition that suggested a sort of noble inelegance; it
lurked between the leaves of the uncut but antiquated
Tauchnitz volume" (121). Milly is independent of fashion
and fad, a style and a tradition in herself. On the
precipice of one of the Alps, she meditates, "looking-down
on the kingdoms of the earth" like Christ being tempted by
Satan, but not looking "with a view to renouncing them"
(123). As a princess, she will just claim the kingdoms as
her due. This image captures for Susan all of Milly's
"type, aspects, marks, her history, her state, her beauty,
her mystery" (125). Dressed in black, Milly comes into a
candlelit room with drawn white curtains, and Susan-~full
of the comings and goings of the inn——absorbs all as“re-

minders, for our fanciful friend, of old stories, old

 

 

 

 

247

 

pictures, historic flights, escapes, pursuits, things that

 

had happened, things indeed that by a sort of strange con—
gruity helped her to read the meanings of the greatest

 

interest into the relation in which she was now so deeply

 

involved" (133). The only note bringing this image down
to earth is Susan's first glimpse of an additional shadow,
sensed from the danger also symbolized by the precipice,
that the future "was n't to exist for her princess in the
form of any sharp or simple release from the human predica-

ment" (l25).23

 

What is James creating? Clearly romance is backing
up the realistic situation here just as in The Portrait 2;

e Lady and The Ambassadors. Adding to the combination of

 

romance and realism, in which both the tension of romance
and the credibility of realism are preserved, James is
blending in elements of the fairy tale, with a similar sym-
biotic effect. The fusion is difficult, for the fairy tale
is exempt from the requirements of time and reality, while
the novel must be constantly concerned with both.24 With
parallels to fairy tales constantly in the background, the

work takes on more and more dimensions of myth even as the

 

events take place in conventional chronology. James is
using the friction of the ideal possibilities and the all
too real vulnerabilities of Milly to elevate her predica-
ment in a manner similar to classical tragedy. Even as
James justifies choosing a New Yorker for his princess, it

is clear that he is more interested in the dramatic

 

 

 

248
consequences of the choice than in the rationale: "to be
the heir of all the ages only to know yourself, as that
consciousness should deepen, balked of your inheritance,
would be to play the part, it struck me, or at least to
arrive at the type, in the light on the whole the most be-

coming" (Prefaces, 292). But the result is broader than

 

tragedy, like myth, and touches on the somber fact that the
highest possibilities of man are always limited by his
baser motives and bordered by the inevitability of death.
As Matthiessen points out, "If James created the spell of

a fairy tale, he did it, as the great fabulists have always
done, for the sake of evoking universal truths" (74).

Milly combines, then, the aura of a princess with the
humanity and vulnerability of a frail young woman. In
order to satisfy Milly's social longings and desire to see
England, Susan thrusts her into part of London society at
the height of the season through her acquaintance with an
old schoolmate, now Kate's aunt, Maud Lowder. Milly feels
she is in a "really romantic" situation for the first time,
a "fairy tale" produced by Susan's fairy godmother "wand,"
an impression echoed by Mrs. Lowder.25 Here she meets
equally romantic people, such as Lord Mark, whose age is
so indeterminate that Milly could not tell "whether he
were a young man who looked old or an old man who looked
young" (151); and Kate Croy, the "handsome young girl from
the heavy English house" who was like "a figure in a picture

stepping by magic out of its frame" (171). With her mind

 

 

 

 

 

 

249

well prepared by English fiction, Milly sees Kate as the
very type of the "London girl . . . with turns of head and
tones of voice, felicities of stature and attitude, things
'put on' and, for that matter, put off, all the marks of
the product of a packed society who should be at the same
time the heroine of a strong story" (172). As in The
Ambassadors, James first uses parallels from typical romances
to deepen the effect of the novel:

Kate Croy really presented herself to Milly

. . . as the wondrous London girl in person

(by what she had conceived, from far back,

of the London girl; conceived from the tales

of travellers and the anecdotes of New York,

from old porings over Punch and a liberal

acquaintance with the fiction of the day).

(171; of. 192)

But soon the romantic picture of Kate darkens almost im—
perceptibly; the romance deepens, and Kate begins to take
on the traits of an age—old type for the reader. Miss Grey
is more than a "London girl"; she has the ability "to show
as a beautiful stranger, to cut her connexions and lose her
identity, letting the imagination for the time make what it
would of them" (212). What Milly will have to learn is that
Kate is both more modern than the London girl of contempor-
ary fiction and a much more ancient type--dating back in
her variations to Lady Macbeth and Clytemnestra, and to the
ubiquitous wicked would-be empresses of Oriental literature--
the woman determined that her husband shall be rich or

powerful, no matter what the cost in morals. Milly does

perceive the possibly sinister motives underlying certain

 

 

 

 

250
behavior in romantic London society (153—54), and sees that
Kate is "the least bit brutal" (181), but she is an adven-
turous heroine who enjoys rather than shuns the "abysses"
and "labyrinth" of dangerous Europe (182, 186).

With the evil brewing so quickly, Milly reaches "a
sort of magnificent maximum, the pink dawn of an apotheosis
coming so soon" after her arrival in London (220). At Lord
Mark's estate Milly is virtually transformed into a Renais-
sance princess, perhaps one of the Medici, by her resemb-
lance to a Bronzino portrait.26 Kate sees how "impossibly
without sin" Milly is, like a Madonna, and Milly herself
feels that she will "never be better than this" (221, 226).
But as if to counterpoint Milly's perfection at its highest
point, James now has her ask Kate to accompany her to the
doctor, whose name (Luke) preserves the sense of old paral-
lels through its Biblical association (228). After they go,
Milly's apotheosis is not deflated, but made deeply poignant
as James had planned; for just as Milly emerges most clearly
as the "heiress of all the ages," she is cut down, "balked"
of her "inheritance," by evidence of an incurably fatal
disease (Prefaces, 292). She must forsake London society
at the peak of her success, and she walks alone through the
streets "duskily draped, sable-plumed" with this knowledge,
and even more, with the "great common anxiety" of death
(245-50). Later, in a hotel, she paces "like a caged
Byzantine" through "the queer long—drawn almost sinister

delay of night," nevertheless liking the effect (256).

 

 

251
As the volume ends, she is retreating from life for "dips
and dashes into the many-coloured stream of history (287),
while the reader learns, ominously, that Kate Croy has al-
ways been virtually invulnerable to disease, and is always
at her best late at night (258, 276).

As Matthiessen claims, Densher is "an important factor
in preventing Susan Stringham's intensely 'literary' version
of Milly as a princess from becoming merely silly" (74).

He serves this function mainly at the opening of Book Six.27
Densher's vision of Milly broadens, however, and he eventu—
ally idealizes her as much as Mrs. Stringham. As their ac-
quaintance deepens, Densher recalls his scant time with
Milly in America as more and more intimate, until it be-
comes like "one of those fabulous periods in which prosper-
ous states place their beginnings" (79). Susan only makes
Milly a princess; Densher eventually turns her into an
angel. In transition between the two images, wearing a

"big black hat, so little superstitiously in the fashion,
her fine black garments throughout, the swathing of her
throat . . . an infinite number of yards of priceless lace,"
Milly transforms her royal gown into a holy vestment, as,
"its folded fabric kept in place by heavy rows of pearls,"
ancient symbols of purity, the gown "hung down to her feet
like the stole of a priestess" (96). She will cover his
sin with forgiveness; better still, she will transform his
guilt into love. But Densher is still unaware of her value.

He thinks he is in a high romance. Kate is playing her part

 

 

 

 

252
so well that the effect is "something like the artistic
idea, the plastic substance, imposed by tradition, by genius,
by criticism, in respect to a given character, on a dis-
tinguished actress" (34). Understanding neither Milly nor
Kate yet, Densher fancies that he is involved in "one of
those rare cases of exaltation-—food for fiction, food for
poetry--in which a man's fortune with the woman who doesn't
care for him is positively promoted by the woman who does"
(81). But the game is deeper and more sinister than roman—
tic, as once again the elements of fairy tales deepen the
effects of the romance.

For Milly is now in her fairy palace "all toned with
time and all flourished and scalloped and gilded about"
(132), the Venetian Palazzo Leporelli, where she is sur—
rounded "with servants, frescoes, tapestries, antiquities,
the thorough make-believe of a settlement," treasuring every
residue of time as "the priestess of the worship" (134)-
As though she were a princess in a tower surrounded by a
moat-~the canals of Venice—-as well as a priestess in a
temple, Milly might be playing a role in a fairy tale or a
Maeterlinck play, James remarks (139, 143). The allusion
is apparently an attempt to connect further the romantic
with the realistic elements in the situation, a technique

28 She feels the "impossible

Maeterlinck was known for.
romance" of living in the castle happily ever after, "to
sit there for ever, through all her time, as in a fortress;

and the idea became an image of never going down, of

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

253
remaining aloft in the divine dustless air, where she would
hear but the splash of the water against the stone" (147).
Milly is beginning to see that in order to live in a fairy
tale, one's castle must be a fortress keeping out both dust
and life. With Lord Mark urging her selfishly instead to
hold a queenly court for her friends and come up and down
the magnificent staircase in "Veronese costumes" (147),
Milly also realizes how her bad health and money attract
"admirers," and with this sober "judgment formed in the
sinister light of tragedy," she rejects the suit of the de-
signing Lord Mark (157-58). The fairy tale is turning very
sordid. The lord whom Mrs. Lowder had intended to hook for
Kate is drawn off by the bait she had hoped would attract
Densher away from her niece. No wonder Milly senses that
her apotheosis was "a hundred years ago" (153).

No one else really sees the tragedy coming yet--cer-
tainly not Densher. To him Milly's "palace-—with all its
romance and art and history--had set up round her a whirl-
wind of suggestion that never dropped for an hour. It
wasn't therefore, within such walls, confinement, it was
the freedom of all the centuries" (174). He is still blind
to the reality under the fairy tale, and deludes himself
about his own role as prince:

Behind everything for him was his renewed
remembrance, which had fairly become a habit,
that he had been the first to know her. This
was what they had all insisted on, in her ab-
sence, that day at Mrs. Lowder's; and this was

in especial what had made him feel its influence
on his immediately paying her a second visit.

 

 

 

 

 

254

Its influence had been all there, been in the
high—hung, rumbling carriage with them, from the
moment she took him to drive, covering them in
together as if it had been a rug of softest silk.
It had worked as a clear connexion with something
lodged in the past, something already their own.
He had more than once recalled how he had said to
himself even at that moment, at some point in the
drive, that he was not there, not just as he was
in so doing it, through Kate and Kate's idea, but
through Milly and Milly's own, and through himself
and hTe own, unmistakeably--as well as through the
little facts, whatever they had amounted to, of
his time in New York. (185—86)

 

Those "little facts" had in truth amounted to very little.
His sense of the past is so willfully distorted that it be-
comes a fantasy-rationale for the real role he is playing.

Kate, of course, does not see Milly's situation as
tragic, but as an opportunity. Susan Stringham, though she
may perceive part of the sober truth, is suppressing her
knowledge well (192-93), presumably to protect Milly. As
the princess' preparations for holding court in the palace
build up, however, Susan feels that Milly's most fitting
setting is emerging, and she inadvertently pinpoints the
negative part she has played while intending to be a good
fairy:

It's a Veronese picture, as near as can be--with

me as the inevitable dwarf, the small blackamoor,

put into a corner of the foreground for effect.

If I only had a hawk or a hound or something of

that sort I should do the scene more honour. The

old housekeeper, the woman in charge here, has a

big red cookatoo that I might borrow and perch on

my thumb for the evening. (206)
Susan has joined, without intending to, the company of

hunters, whose hawks will soon bring the dove to the ground.

The mixture of sacred and fairy tale motifs, well known in

 

 

 

255

Veronese paintings, represents Milly's continuing priestess-
princess image, and the danger being posed to it. Milly is
being transformed through loving Densher, however, into the
image of the dove that Kate Croy first compared her to (XIX,
283); a dove like those fluttering in the "bright historic
air" of the Piazza San Marco, between the great church and
the "Splendid Square, which had so notoriously, in all the
years, witnessed more of the joy of life than any equal
area in Europe" (XX, 293). She is torn between the protec-
tion of withdrawal-~into her castle-fortress-temple, sym-
bolically parallel to the church-~and the jeTe he sz£e in
loving Densher, an extrovert act parallel to the "great
social saloon" figured by the rest of the Piazza (189-90).
Kate and Densher, walking from the church to the social
center of the square as they discuss the whole situation,
are responsible for drawing Milly in the same direction.
Ready to propose to Densher, Milly appears at her fabulous
party dressed in white for the first time instead of "her
almost monastic, her hitherto inveterate black" (213-l4).
She is now fully the beautiful but vulnerable dove in the
courage of flight-~ready, unfortunately, to use the con-
temporary metaphor, to be shot down on the wing (218—19).

In the face of Milly's imminent proposal, Kate comes
to Densher's rooms to seal their strangely tacit bargain.
Milly had put her in the shade at the soirée, and Densher's
appreciation of his dual conquest no doubt revealed to Kate

that Milly might in fact be emerging as a rival. She is.

 

 

 

 

 

256
The "vague faint snatches, mere ghosts of sound, of old
fashioned melancholy music," which Densher had sensed sym—
bolically surrounding Milly, increase dramatically for him
(184-85). He now realizes that if he disappoints Milly,
he will kill her (252). Carrying this burden of responsi—
bility as he goes to visit her, he is told by the gondolier
that she is not receiving. Immediately Densher feels the
tragedy upon them. The gondolier's face "would have been
blank . . . if the term could ever apply to members of a
race in whom vacancy was but a nest of darkness--not a vain
surface, but a place of withdrawal in which something ob— g
scure, something always ominous, indistinguishably lived" ~
(256). As in a fairy tale, everything turns black. The
city seems "all of evil . . . a Venice of cold lashing rain
from a low black sky" (259). When he goes to St. Mark's
again, the storm is symbolically framed in the arcade by
"the old columns of the Saint Theodore and of the Lion,"
suggesting martyrdom, and the piazza that represents Milly's
social emergence seems "more than ever like a great drawing—
room, the drawing-room of Europe, profaned and bewildered by
some reverse of fortune" (260-61). Mrs. Stringham comes to
tell him that the princess, like the Biblical king Hezekiah,
"has turned her face to the wall," and the storm makes
everything appear more grey and tragic than ever (274).
The recent past seems disconnected and far away, just as
the buildings across the channel from his apartment,

"blurred and belittled, stood at twice their distance" (278).

 

 

 

 

 

257

After Densher returns to Kate in London, she too seems
far away. There is a gap between them, and "they met across
it even as persons whose adventures, on either side, in
time and space, of the nature of perils and exiles, had had
a peculiar strangeness" (313). Milly has broken the spell
for Densher. Both Kate and Densher talk as though she is
already dead (340). Lesser realities like Lancaster Gate
look "smaller now" to Densher, who is "a man haunted with a
memory," a "sense of the presence" of Milly that is like
"the page of a book" (342-44). After the dove "has folded
her wonderful wings," he goes to church for monastic con-
templation (356, 361-62). More than anything else, Kate
now seems diminished, especially when he sees her at the
lowly Mrs. Condrip's instead of in the grand piazza in
Venice or even at Lancaster Gate (364). By reading the
letters from Milly and her lawyers, Kate fails Densher's
ideal test of delicacy, being neither princess nor priestess.
Milly becomes a perfect memory, enhancing her archetypal
stature through James's technique of not allowing her to
appear directly for two full books--"all as if to approach
her circuitously, deal with her at second hand, as an un—
spotted princess is ever dealt with" (Prefaces, 306).

Matthiessen concludes his examination of The KEEEE 2E
$22.22EE by remarking that "though he came to work essen-
tially in the genre of the fairy tale," James nevertheless
"had not become conscious of the possibilities of dealing

explicitly with myth." Consequently "When he groped his

 

 

 

 

258

way back to 'the sense of the past', it was only to the
dawn of the nineteenth century, for the sake of a contrast
with later social manners. He was not to become aware of
the obsessive presence of all times, of the repetition of
primitive patterns in civilized life" (72-73). Perhaps
not. Later writers would use The Golden Bough of Frazer to
enter deeper caverns of the past. But with his use of
romantic and fairy tale motifs, James gives a sense of the
past to the reader that is deeper than the nineteenth
century. His characters become both strangely exempt from
time, moving like figures in fairy tales, yet fatally in-
fluenced by centuries of it, due to the dual nature of his
archetypes. For an archetype is simultaneously so old that
it seems timeless, and so recurring that it suggests a long
successive line moving back into time. By using such
figures James is surely at least moving in the direction of
myth, and is deepening the shadow of the past on the present.

The Golden Bowl can also be treated as a fairy tale or
drama of archetypes. Certainly the Prince and Princess are
like their counterparts in fairy tales, ready to live hap-
pily ever after at the end, and some of the other charac—
ters are similar types. The Prince becomes a type partly
by being the last direct descendant of a family that stretches
back as far into the Roman past as Count Valerio's ("The Last
of the Valerii"). That this long history serves more to
tYpify the Prince than to give him a pedigree is shown by

the fact that Maggie is also supposedly from "a braver and

 

 

 

 

 

 

259
finer" age, and would have fit in well with "the
cinquecento" (XXIII, 13).29 With her money, the Prince's
mythical and metaphorical "ship" of fortune is sailing in
the "Golden Isles" (27). Charlotte Stant, the third point
of the eternal triangle, is also a type, beginning as a
cosmOpolitan polyglot American. To the Prince, however,
she has arms that "Florentine sculptors in the old time
hadlbved," looks like a "huntress" from a distance (playing
a Diana role similar to Isabel Archer's), and resembles a
"muse" as she approaches (47).30 Even Fanny Assingham, who
is a ficelle and a fairy godmother, and is one of James's
well-known Europeanized Americans, looks exotically Arabian
or Jewish or Creole (34). Adam Verver of course has his
oWn symbolic antiquity and taste for it. He views Maggie
as a nameless statue "lost in an alien age," "mythological
and nymphlike"(l87), and adds the Prince to his collection
of antiquarii "as if he had been some old embossed coin, of
a purity of gold no longer used, stamped with glorious arms,
mediaeval, wonderful" (23; of. 138-40).

The Prince and Charlotte are caught in a "magic web"
(297), and when they go treasure hunting they find a golden
bowl, a crystal gilded with "old fine gold" by "a lost
art" practiced in "a lost time" (112—l4). Adam and
Charlotte find similar fairy treasure on their hunt,
"Damascene tiles" with "the infinitely ancient, the im-
memorial amethystine blue of the glaze, scarcely more meant

to be breathed upon . . . than the cheek of royalty" (214-15).

 

 

 

 

 

260
Even the buildings come from fairy tales and myth. Port—
land Place is explicitly compared to a castle (XXIV, 99,
306), and Fawns is compared to a temple (324), paralleling
the development of the Palazzo Leporelli in $22.!i25§.2£‘222
31

2212- The actions and roles of the characters often seem
mythic as well. Maggie feels like the "scapegoat of old"
expiating everyone's sins (233—36), and pictures Charlotte
as "some echo of an ancient fable-—some vision of lo goaded
by the gadfly or of Ariadne roaming the lone sea strand"
(307). At one point the Prince and Charlotte are pictured
as lovers in a high Wagnerian opera (280), "interlocked in
their wood of enchantment, a green glade as romantic as

one's dream of an old German forest." When Fanny Assingham

smashes the golden bowl, the Prince appears as if by magic.

 

And these are only a few of the outstanding parallels to

 

mythology and fairy tales that James uses in the work.

The Golden Bowl is also a fine example of the other

 

central deve10pment of the major phase, the consummate por-
trayal of consciousness, and it is in this connection that

I wish primarily to discuss the work. Interestingly enough,
this representation of consciousness is intimately con-
nected with the tendency of James's characters to lose con-
crete external attributes, and consequently to appear more
as archetypes than individuals. John Henry Raleigh, in a
finely perceptive essay on James's theory of consciousness,
32

analyzes the identity of his figures very carefully.

James's most striking characters do not impress the reader

 

 

 

261
mainly as unique individuals, but as magnificent portrayals
of consciousness-~"those who most perfectly body forth his
basic assumptions as to the nature of personality and ex-
perience" are the most memorable (Raleigh, 4). In the
later novels of consciousness "Page after page is given to
its exploration; characters are ranked according to how
high or how low, in perceptiveness and subtlety, are their
conscious minds; and the movement of the story progresses
as various bundles of consciousness impinge upon one an-
other, attracted or repulsed or drifting" (5). Conscious-
ness becomes the only "knowable reality" in James, and
character is presented as a "tabula rasa being written
upon by experience, or sense impressions" (8-9). His
finest American differs from others by being "morally
superior, extremely sensitive, inordinately curious, a
supreme gatherer of impressions, in short, a superior
tabula rasa" (11). Each character, since consciousness is
the only knowable reality, is fundamentally isolated: "the
technique of the late works is an attempt to-dramatize most
effectively the essential ambiguity of these relationships
within which the various characters are, paradoxically,
both intimately intertwined and utterly isolated, and
where each individual can know another only from moment to
moment and then never completely" (18). As a result of this
isolation, the characters take on the stature of types
rather than individuals, figures defined by their roles or

situations. Characters in the late novels do not differ in

 

 

 

 

262

their manner of perceiving, but only in the degree of their
perception, which defines their awareness and ability to
act more than their character. For this reason, even though
the novel is turned deeply inward, toward consciousness,
"'the bourgeois and individual passes into the mythical and
typical'."33

The sense of the past becomes a crucial faculty in such
characters. For if the ability to absorb the bombardment of
sense impressions as a superior tabula rasa is important,
the ability to rework these impressions in retrospect in
order to distill their essence is vital. A discriminating
sense of the past formulates knowledge from such impres-
sions, having no other source of reality and truth.“ As
Raleigh describes the process in The E125§.2£.EQ2.2212
"the characters of these novels are subtly and intimately
interconnected in an eternally fluid relationship, coming
together to shoot impressions at one another, drifting apart
to rework the impressions into knowledge and coming together
again in a different relationship" (21). This is exactly
what happens in these late novels. A dramatic scene alter—
nates with a chapter of non-scenic retrospection by Strether

in The Ambassadors, preparing for a new dialogue or dramatic

 

scene on a different basis. Or Maggie confronts Charlotte

carefully in The Golden Bowl, letting her suspect only so

 

much of her knowledge, then waits until Charlotte has time
to talk with the Prince (projecting the probable conversa-

tion), and finally confronts the Prince to test her

 

 

 

 

 

263

conclusions by observing any new reactions in him. All the
time she is assimilating impressions and comparing them
with her store of past experience. Strether gains his
reputation for retrospection, Milly "was forever seeing
things afterwards" (XIX, 155), Densher gradually senses where
his actions have been leading, Prince Amerigo has "a certain
persistent aftertaste" of important conversations (XXIII,
326), and Maggie has a "full after-sense" of events (XXIV,
20), because such a sense of the past is essential to mature
consciousness and crucial to the proper apprehension of
experience.

The Golden Bowl shows how finely James develops this
form of the sense of the past in his late characters--and
also reveals his cultivation of the reader's sense, as'I

hope to indicate with additional examples from The Portrait

 

eT‘e Lady and The Ambassadors. The Prince, whose viewpoint

 

occupies the first half of the novel, is of course constantly
aware of his familial past, and marries Maggie partly be—
cause her wealth can help retrieve his patrimony. As he

complains to Maggie, "there are two parts of me . . . One

 

is made up of the history, the doings, the marriages, the
crimes, the follies, the boundless betises of other people—-
especially of their infamous waste of money that might have
come to me" (XXIII, 9).34 The entire opening scene is an
example of a more continuously present sense of the past;

it is a reflection of the Prince's mind engaged in retro-

spection, "catching the echoes from his own thought" (11),

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

264

including previous events and conversations. He is think-
ing while on the way to the home of Fanny Assingham, whose
own youth and "beauty were things more or less of the past"
and whose marriage "dated from the twilight of the age, a
primitive period" (20, 35), and is rendering both impres-
sions of the past and judgments on it for the reader. At
Fanny's he is to meet Charlotte Stant, whom he loved but
could not marry due to a mutual lack of funds. She is
consequently "already known" to his memory when he arrives;
her features are like "items recognized, each of them, as
if, for the long interval, they had been 'stored'--wrapped
up, numbered, put away in a cabinet" (46). His sense of
their past together is therefore vibrantly alive as she
once more enters his present consciousness.

Fanny, who knows of the earlier romance, is given
tremors by her sense of the past as well, flashing back for
some pages on Charlotte's fling with the Prince. Her crown-
ing worry is how this past can fit the present: "'That
anything of the past', she broods, 'should come back now'"
that the Prince is to marry Maggie is an acute embarrass-
ment; "'How will it do, how will it do?'" (69-75). Every-
one but the Ververs, in fact, is having such twinges of the
sense of the past, and theirs will begin as their innocence
recedes. Charlotte vibrates over mere marble floors:

"they were a connexion, marble floors; a connexion with
many things: with her old Rome, and with hTe; with the

palaces of his past and, a little, with hers; with the

 

 

 

 

265

possibilities of his future, with the sumptuousities of his
marriage, with the wealth of the Ververs" (116). For what
she wants in asking the Prince to help her find a gift for
Maggie's wedding is to renew some of her old romance: "To
see you once and be with you, to be as we are now and as we
used to be, for one small hour--or say for two—-that's what
I've had for weeks in my head" (96). But this renewal is
exactly what Amerigo fears, and he hesitates to accompany
her due to "the sense of the resemblance of the little plan
before him to occasions, of the past, from which he was
quite disconnected, from which he could only desire to be.
This was like beginning something over, which was the last
thing he wanted. The strength, the beauty of his actual
position was in its being wholly a fresh start, was what it
began would be new altogether" (94—95). He goes with
Charlotte anyway, and discovers that he cannot outrun his
personal past any more than his familial history. He is an
"old Roman" in his manners and morals, a phrase he had used
"as a pleasantry, in the other time" to explain his actions
to Charlotte. He reverts to the same explanation now, and
to the same mannerisms, with a very "old-Roman" shrug (110).
His act is a preview of the fuller reversion which will come
when his sense of the past is more deeply touched.

Adam Verver's sense of the past occupies Book Two.
He is retrospective as well as a collector of "antiquarii,"
and his mind is filled with memories of Maggie's mother,

memories preparing him now for another marriage. He recalls

 

 

 

266

"wandering images, out of the earlier dusk, that threw her
back for his pity into a past more remote than he liked their
common past, their young affection, to appear" (142). She
and Maggie are the bright spots in a deep past made up of
"years of darkness" for him, years of time lost in money-
making; though the money is useful new in collecting art
for a museum project in America. He is pleased with his
change in vocation, and "could live over again at almost any
quiet moment the long process of his introduction to all
present interests," a habit of mind that fills in the past
for the reader very conveniently (149). Retrospection is
his constant pastime and pleasure; "when he wished to feel
'good', as they said at American City, he had but to re—
trace his immense development" (149).

He and Maggie have been idyllically close, even after
her marriage to the Prince and the birth of their haby.
"But time had finally done it; their relation was altered"
by his own contemplation of marriage, a change that
"marked a date" in their lives. Maggie senses the change
and fears that he will be exploited by one of the old
biddies fluttering around him, and suggests that their old
friend Charlotte has been taken for granted and would be a
fine candidate for his bride. This suggestion is apparently
Maggie's first re-evaluation of the past (182). She and
Adam walk "in the 'old' garden, as it was called, old with
an antiquity of formal things, high box yew and expanses of

brick wall that had turned at once to purple and to pink.

 

 

 

 

267
They went out of a door in the wall, a door that had a slab
with a date set above it, 1713, but in the old multiplied
lettering" to a bench beneath a great oak (159). (The
numerals are Roman, of course!) This talk will remain a
landmark in the memory of each, like so many scenes in
The Golden Bowl.

Another landmark scene, Adam's proposal to Charlotte,
reminds him of yet a third important scene, in which he and
Fanny had apparently discussed the Prince as a match for
Maggie: "It was where he had walked in the afternoon sun
with Fanny Assingham" that he takes Charlotte, "and the
sense of that other hour, the sense of the suggestive woman
herself, was before him again as, in spite of all the de-
gustation we have hinted at, it had n't yet been" (203).
The reader begins to see why Fanny Assingham feels so re-
sponsible and worried. Such retrospections allow James to
fill in the past whenever and in Whatever order he chooses.
In addition the parallel scenes he creates reveal pro-
grossing consciousness, measuring the differences as well
as the parallels. Looking for antiquated treasure with
Charlotte as he had many times before, Adam finds himself
for once not tending strictly to business. He had shepped
with her often, "yet at what point of his past did our
friend's memory, looking back and back, catch him, in any
such place, thinking so much less of wares artfully paraded
than of some other and quite irrelevant presence?" (214).

The reader can see the force of Maggie's suggestion working

 

 

 

 

 

268
on him. He proposes to Charlotte, then for another half-
hour recalls the scene "well in his memory's eye," revising
his estimate of their past friendship continually (217).
Later, in Paris, he has thoroughly romanticized his past
with the once taken-for—granted Charlotte, praising her

"extraordinarly fine eyes, as it was his present theory

 

that he had always thought them" (230). Nevertheless, even
after his marriage he and Maggie like to stay at home with
each other "in make believe renewals of their old life"

(252). Neither marriage has yet made any notable dent in

 

their relationship.

While Maggie and her father restructure their sense
of past relations somewhat, the others are doing the same.
Charlotte is caught up in a fever of retrospection, and
soon captures the Prince in memories as well. She comes to
him in a hansom cab rather than Adam's carriage because
"'It makes me feel as I used to--when I could do as I
liked'" (299). She sits by the fires enjoying the charm
"'of trying again the old feelings. They come back-~they
come back. Everything,‘ she went on, 'comes back'" (300).
Everything comes back to the Prince, too, in spite of his
resolutions and the fact that "no mention of their great
previous passage was to rise to the lips of either" (301).
Their past hangs like a huge unmentioned presence over all
their conversation, and the Prince is entangled once again:

He couldn't have told what particular links
and gaps had at the end of a few minutes

found themselves renewed and bridged; for he
remembered no occasion in Rome from which the

 

 

 

 

269

picture could have been so exactly copied.

. . . The sense of the past revived for him

nevertheless as it had n't yet done: it

made that other time somehow meet the future

close, interlocking with it, before his watch-

ing eyes, as in a long embrace of arms and

lips, and so handling and hustling the present

that this poor quantity scarce retained sub-

stance enough, scarce remained sufficiently

there, to be wounded or shocked. (297)
In short, "through steps and stages that conscious compu-
tation had missed," the Prince is seduced by his sense of
the past.

Later, at a banquet in an English country house with
Charlotte, the Prince is recalling the days of his engage—
ment to Maggie. Fanny is there, in turmoil over what she
may have wrought in bringing Maggie and Amerigo and
Charlotte together, just as she had worried earlier: "For
what she was most immediately feeling was that she had in
the past been active for these peOple to ends that were now
bearing fruit and that might yet bear a larger crop" (276).
After all, poor innocent Maggie and Adam are in Eaton Square
playing house, having pushed Amerigo and Charlotte to go to
the English country estate of some friends in their place--
a fantastic opportunity. Fanny talks with the Prince there
before he returns to London to find Maggie suddenly changed,
and his conversation with her "was substantially to under-
lie his consciousness of the later occasion." He will re—
turn and "live over inwardly" this talk with Fanny; for as
James alerts the reader, "The main interest of these hours

for us . . . will have been in the way the Prince continued

 

 

 

 

 

270

to know, during a particular succession of others, separated
from the evening in Eaton Square by a short interval, a cer-
tain persistent aftertaste" (326-27). The customs of English
society and the social responsibilities of marriage and
friendship are causing him a schizophrenic, "restless play of
memory and a fine embroidery of thought" (327). His "old
Roman life" now seems vague and "thin" in comparison to this
complexity (332). In spite of further complications, how-
ever, he stays an extra day at Matcham to take Charlotte
through Gloucester, an occasion fitted for memory "as if the
whole place and time had been a great picture, from the hand
of genius, presented to him as a prime ornament for his col-
lection and all varnished and framed to hang up" (350).

The whole country house episode sets Fanny Assingham
in a "fever of retrospect" and conjecture (390). Her per-
ception summarizes the past for the reader and predicts
future events that are likely to occur on the basis of what
she has seen. Her thinkingis a $222.92 Tehee of recol—
lection and portentous "prophetic flare" (383). Since the
reader has been unable to grasp Maggie's viewpoint through
the Prince, James fills in its progression through Fanny's
projections--that Maggie is waking up to the fact that she
has never fully possessed the Prince, and must protect her
marriage and her father's supposed ignorance of the prob-
lem (384, 388). With Fanny's great anticlimactic conclusion,
that "Nothing—~1n spite of everything--yTTT happen. Nothing

has happened. Nothing Te happening" because Maggie is

 

 

 

 

 

271

gaining control, the reader is ready to encounter Maggie's
viewpoint directly, and see how she could possibly manage
nothing so well (400).

Central to the presentation of Maggie's viewpoint from
Book Four to the end, and central to her increasing control
over the situation, is her growing sense of the past and
the resulting change in her evaluation of the present. She
has a throbbing need "to know where she 'really' was" with
the Prince (XXIV, 57).35 When she looks at the "pagoda in

her blooming garden," where she and her father have spent

 

so many afternoons, it represents to her "the arrangement

. . . by which, so strikingly, she had been able to marry
without breaking, as she liked to put it, with her past"
(5). But she is coming to see that her marriage must cause

her to break with this past, or it may soon be no marriage

 

‘ at all. A long line of events is falling into place for

I Maggie. Thinking of her father, she recalls a conversa-

tion in which Fanny Assingham had charged that she and Adam
were not living at all, and "there came back to her with it
an echo of the long talk they had had together, one September
day at Fawns, under the trees, when she put before him this
dictum of Fanny's":

That occasion might have counted for them-~she
had already often made the reflexion—-as the
first step in an existence more intelligently
arranged. It had been an hour from which the
chain of causes and consequences was definitely
traceable——so many things, and at the head of
the list her father's marriage, having appeared
to her to flow from Charlotte's visit to Fawns,
and that event itself having flowed from the
memorable talk. (22

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

272

She sees how her father's marriage, more than here, had
changed everything; had changed especially "their old free—
dom, their never having had to think, where they were to-
gether concerned, of any one, of anything but each other
(80).

The biggest change, however, has been caused by Maggie
herself—-by the simple but monumental act of waiting for
the Prince at Portland Place, instead of at her father's
home in Eaton Square, on his return from Matcham. Nothing,
not even her acceptance of the Prince's proposal, had
changed her style of life so much as this action. It has
a "historic value" that keeps coming "back and back" to
Maggie; "the whole passage was backwardly there, a great
picture hung on the wall of her daily life for her to make
what she would of" (IO-ll, 16). The repercussions of the
event still hang in her mind. She recalls "two strangely
unobliterated impressions above all"—-the Prince's shocked
look on returning from Matcham and Eaton Square, and
Charlotte's "bold wavering glance" on the following morn-
ing (103). She had carefully compared Amerigo's and
Charlotte's reactions, and "to make the comparison at all
was, for Maggie, to return to it often, to brood upon it,"
recalling the impressions like looking at old portraits in
a necklace medallion (35). What Maggie was asserting by
her simple act was her determination to be the Prince's
wife more than her father's daughter; "She wanted him to

understand from that very moment that she was going to be

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

273
with him again, quite with them" instead of just with Adam

(27).

Part of the result of her stand, interestingly, is the
renewal of her old companionship with Charlotte before either
was married, a perfect revival of the past:

The two young women, while the passage lasted,

became again very much the companions of other

days, the days of Charlotte's prolonged visits

to the admiring and bountiful Maggie, the days

when equality of condition for them had been

all the result of the latter's native vagueness

about her own advantages. The earlier elements

flushed into life again, the frequency, the in—

timacy, the high pitch of accompanying expres-

sion-~appreciation, endearment confidence . . .

(37)

Maggie, who always figures things out afterwards (43),
realizes that their new relation "has been quite as in old
days" (58). Paradoxically, her action causes a reversion
to the old idyllic relation with her father as well. Maggie
wants to keep her father ignorant of her motives and her
problems, yet must effectively change her relation with him
in order to keep her husband. Her very fear that any
noticeable change will alarm him, that "sombre ghosts of
the smothered past" would "show across the widening strait
pale unappeased faces" (74), causes her to compensate for
her absence and carry on their relation in the old way.
Yet the time of their closeness, "so strangely, already
seemed far away" to her, and she knows its days are numbered
(77). They had planned one last long trip without Amerigo

or Charlotte, a trip Maggie must somehow tactfully cancel

without arousing his suspicion:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

274

. . . setting herself the difficult task of

making their relation, every minute of the

time, not fall below the standard of that other hour

in the treasured past which hung there behind them

like a framed picture in a museum, a high-water-mark

for the history of their old fortune; the summer

evening in the park at Fawns, when, side by side

under the trees just as now, they had let their

happy confidence lull them with its mos§ golden tone.

85

She is "humbugging" him for the first time, even with "the
old pleasantness between them so candidly playing up there
again" (79). She succeeds--or rather they both succeed--
in submerging the felt difference between this talk and
the old talk at Fawns, when his marriage had been the sub-
ject of discussion, "all the vibration, all the emotion of
this present passage being precisely in the very sweetness
of their lapse back into the conditions of the simpler
time, into a queer resemblance between the aspect and the
feeling of the moment and those of numberless other moments
that were sufficiently far away" (82).

Having renewed the old relationship with Charlotte and
Adam on the surface, Maggie tries to develop her relation-
ship with the Prince. When he had returned from Matcham,
he had been surprised to find her at home instead of with
Adam, but assumed that a warm embrace would smooth over any
problem (28); and while he is very sensitive to what Maggie
is doing (39-40), he uses that embrace repeatedly to try to
control and pacify her (55—56). Again she notices his tech—
nique mainly by retrospection: "There were hours when it

came to her that these days were a prolonged repetition of

that night—drive, of weeks before, from the other house to

 

 

 

 

 

 

275
their own, when he had tried to charm her by his sovereign
personal power into some collapse that would commit her to
a repudiation of consistency“ (139; cf. 28). She cannot
shake him into treating her change seriously and directly.
Only after prodding Fanny to tell her whether there is any—
thing between Amerigo and Charlotte, "anything there
shouldn't be, there shouldn't have b22n——all this time"
(109), only after rummaging in the British Museum records
of the Prince's family for some reassurance, and finally
discovering by accident that Charlotte and Amerigo had been
together alone just before her marriage, is Maggie able to
disturb the Prince's imperturbability. She is confronting
Fanny, who had lied before, with the evidence of the golden
bowl and the anecdote the shopkeeper had recalled of the
Prince and Charlotte. Fanny not only admits she has con-
cealed the past, thinking it safely buried, but attempts
to save trouble again by smashing the evidence. But the
Prince, coincidentally, had appeared just as this particu-
lar moment, and Maggie can judge his startled facial ex—
pression by comparing it with her earlier observation of
him after his return from Matcham (181). She sees that
the bowl's fragments Vaguely but disturbingly remind the
Prince of something; his sense of the past is finally
stirred (182). Maggie gives him time to recover, then grad~
ually leads up to the bomb, her knowing of his "having for
a long time had, twg relations with Charlotte" (190). The

Prince is gasping, groping for time to compose himself, to

 

 

 

 

276
assimilate this revelation and re-evaluate Maggie's past
behavior on this new basis. His hesitation causes his
affair with Charlotte, "the history of their confidence,"
to loom powerfully for Maggie (192). She is sure now that
their relation has been deep. That confirmation of her new
sense of the past is sufficient for the moment; ringing the
bell for the maid, she "stopped everything for the present"
(203).

Book Five opens, after this confrontation, with a
period of reassessment. Maggie now measures her progress
in terms of old landmarks in time, the old scenes at Fawns, 5'1
old friends, crucial actions. Both she and the Prince have
fought to reassimilate the past, to find out--almost a re-
frain in the novel--"where they are" (191; cf. 57, 215,
263). They are inevitably joined in this occupation by
Adam and Charlotte. Part of Charlotte's doom will be never
to know exactly where she stands, caged by frustration; part
of Adam's mystery and possible greatness lies in the uncer-

tainty of his knowledge and role. Nor does Fanny see how

 

everything stands, nor how Maggie knows "where, as you say,
you 'are'" (215). But Maggie does know, and feels in full
control (235—36). When Mrs. Rance and the Lutches—-who had
alarmed Maggie as the first predatory women after Adam--
return for a visit, the event "measured for Maggie the ground
they had all travelled together since that unforgotten after-
noon of the none so distant year, that determinant September

Sunday when, sitting with her father in the park, as in

 

 

 

 

 

 

277
commemoration of the climax both of their old order and of
their old danger, she had proposed to him that they should
'call in' Charlotte" (209-10). Such renewals of memory,
shared with Adam, cause father and daughter to fall once
more into the old style of conversation. Adam asks Naggie,

apparently with a humorous implication, how Mrs. Rance and

 

the Lutches affect her now:

. . . and the consequence of this enquiry had been
for the pair just such another stroll together
away from the rest of the party and off into the
park as had asserted its need to them on the
occasion of the previous visit of these anciently
more agitating friends—-that of their long talk

on a sequesteged bench beneath one of the great
trees . . . [which7 Maggie had formed the habit

of regarding as the 'first beginning' of their
present situation. The Whirligig of time had thus
brought round for them again, on their finding
themselves face to face while the others were
gathering for tea on the terrace, the same old
impulse quietly to 'slope'--so Adam Verver himself,
as they went, familiarly expressed it—-that had
acted in its way of old; acted for the distant
autumn afternoon and for the sharpness of their
since so outlived crisis. (253)

 

The two can laugh at the "danger" once presented by these
women because that threat is too far in the past to be a
present danger, and Adam is now protected from these

"spectres of their past" by his other marriage. His other

 

marriage—~there‘s the rub; they do not laugh at friends
like the Castledeans, residing at Matcham, for that episode
is too recent and represents still too tender a wound (253-
54). I

The scene is rendered the same as so many of their
other talks; but James lets the reader know, by deliberate

and explicit omissions, how different their father-daughter

 

 

 

 

 

 

278

relationship has become: "They were avoiding the serious,
standing off anxiously from the real, and they fell again
and again, as if to disguise their precaution itself, into
the tone of the time that came back to them from their
other talk, when they had shared together this same refuge"
(257). Adam had not been married at their other meeting,
and they both silently recall the issue that they had dis-
cussed-~Charlotte (255-57). Their silent communication, so
clear to the reader from all the parallels and reminders of
the past that James sets up, is much more important than
their audible conversation. Adam responds with a general
"'Oh yes'" to Maggie, "'I remember the feelings we used to
have.'" No further specification is needed; both under-
stand. "Maggie appeared to wish to plead for them a little
in tender retrospect," those old feelings, but "she changed
the next instant that subject too":

She could only do so however by harking back--

as if it had been a fascination. She might have

been wishing, under this renewed, this still more

suggestive visitation, to keep him with her for

remounting the stream of time and dipping again,

for the softness of the water, into the contracted

basin of the past. (258)
The past is now nostalgically golden, a golden bowl from
which to dip strength for the present. For though they
talk about the past, they are really communicating through
it about the present. Drawn up short by this realization,
Maggie asserts at one point to her father that "Besides,
I'm speaking of what was." Adam "showed, however, after a

little, that he hadn't been reached by this discrimination"

(261). He feels so strongly how "without him nothing might

 

 

 

 

 

 

279
have been" (263), and Maggie knows from his exclamation of
pain "what a past-~still so recent and yet so distant-~it
alluded to" (270). They have reached a silent agreement;
they must separate; and Adam offers to take Charlotte to
America (271). Maggie knows that, silent as their communi-
cation on the real subject has been, "they would never re-
turn to it" (275).

This painful passage is made easier for Maggie by all
the previous parallel scenes, and by her conviction that
the Prince's old relation to Charlotte is effectively "a
chapter of history" (221). Charlotte has been kept in a
gilded cage by Maggie's circumspection (229-30), and by a
climactic confrontation en the terrace in which Maggie lies
rather than sacrifice "all past pretenses" and give
Charlotte the satisfaction of an indignant showdown (242 f.).
The Prince, she feels certain, has not told Charlotte how
much Maggie knows (213—l4). After the long walk with her
father, then, Maggie feels how much the scene of hypocriti-

cal "making up" between her and Charlotte, to which the

 

confrontation had apparently led, had helped her father and
herself reach their decision to separate (277). All loose
ends seem tied up, all relations smoothly changed, so the
removal to America will not provoke a scene.

For Charlotte, of course, who had apparently been un—

able to get anything out of the Prince, the failure to pry

 

something from Maggie on the terrace left her completely in

the cold. After the confrontation "no ghost of anything it

   

 

 

 

 

280
referred to could ever walk again" (279). Charlotte has no
material with which to cause a scene that would bring every-
thing out in the open, cause a reconciliation, and result in
the four staying on together. In a very ironic reversion,
"she was thus poor Charlotte again for Maggie" (282). The
terrace episode with Charlotte is another landmark scene for
the princess, like the latest talk with her father: "Maggie
lived over again the minutes in question--had found herself
repeatedly doing so; to the degree that the whole evening
hung together, to her aftersense, as a thing appointed by
some occult power that had dealt with her" (278). Such
reflections are surely evidence that the subconscious does
operate in James's characters, for it has clearly governed
Maggie during the terrace scene. The subconscious acts as
a submerged but operative sense of the past guiding Maggie's
feelings and responses to Charlotte.36
One final scene with Charlotte, so ironic through its

parallels to earlier scenes, ends Maggie's drama with her.
Charlotte goes into the familiar gardens at Fawns for
refuge, carrying a book as an excuse, just as Maggie had
done. This time another confrontation occurs, one designed
to salvage Charlotte's pride:

It was a repetition more than ever of the

evening on the terrace; the distance was too

great to assure her she had been immediately

seen, but the Princess waited with her in-

tentiOn as Charlotte on the other occasion

had waited-~allowing, oh allowing, for the

difference of the intention! Ma gie was full
of the sense of that . . . (309

 

 

 

 

 

281
This is the real showdown, Maggie thinks, and makes a
gesture intended to show Charlotte that she is, figuratively,
unarmed for the battle--like the cowboys who throw up their
hands to show that they "weren't carrying revolvers" (310-11).
(Only James could get away with such a comparison.)

Charlotte is masterful. Cloaking her frustration in pride,

 

she acts as though the two are fighting over possession of
Adam, asking for "the definite break" between father and
daughter: "And I wish it now" (315). Charlotte's exile
to America thus becomes a paper victory for her, and Maggie
admires the face-saving value of Charlotte's ingenuity.
Only the Prince remains, in the last book, to deal
with. He is caged much like Charlotte, but Maggie wants
terribly to let him out (338). She "found herself almost
awestruck with yearning, almost on the point of marking
somehow what she had marked in the garden at Fawns with
Charlotte-~that she had truly come unarmed" (339). Now a
series of images and parallel scenes comes together for a

tremendous culminating effect. In The Portrait 9; g Lady

 

a similar framework of parallel scenes is provided by the

garden scenes at the Touchett's, and by Isabel's recollec-

 

tion that she had said the same things during the proposals
by Warburton, Osmond, and Goodwood. In The Ambassadors, the
image of a man standing at different times of the day on the
balcony of Chad's apartment in the Latin Quarter—~first

Little Bilham, then Chad, and finally Strether himself--

   

 

282
serves a similar telescoping and symbolic function, provid—
ing both parallels and crucial contrasts to mark develop-

ment. Two series of images come together in The Golden

 

893; to enhance the final scene. The first is a set of
window images, possibly parallel to the many memories de—
scribed as framed pictures throughout the work. Fanny
Assingham had first turned her back to the Colonel and faced
the dark window of her "dusky drawing-room," "the dim window
which opened upon the world of human trouble in general and
which let the vague light play here and there upon gilt and
crystal and colour" (XXIII, 377-78). She is in tears with
her overwhelming sense of moral responsibility for the
Ververs' predicament, and after she cries, she and her hus—
band find a foundation for serious and candid communication
which had been lacking. The window is a place to withdraw
to hide suffering, but it is also a place from which to
view the sufferings of others. Next Maggie finds herself
looking out her window in tears, like Fanny, with the
Prince looking on rather helpless and unaware of her feel—
ings (XXIV, 119-20), as she struggles to discover what is
wrong and how to right it. Ohly the reader knows this
scene is parallel to Fanny's, for there are no internal
witnesses of both scenes. James is relying on the reader's
sense of the past to put them together. After Maggie's
discovery of the bowl and its significance, she talks
earnestly with Fanny and goes to the "window as if still to

keep something in her face from sight. She stood with her

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

283
eyes on the street" and Fanny gazes with polite preoccupa—
tion at the bowl, fully aware of what Maggie is going
through (176). Yet again, seeing Charlotte’s doom and de—
Spair, and knowing her father must leave, Maggie takes her
post at the window and "had turned suddenly to crying, or
was at least on the point of it--the lighted square before
her all blurred and dim" (292). Not just crying for her-
self, Maggie cries for what her father is going through
and even has compassion for Charlotte. Finally, in the
reversal that will make their reunion possible, Maggie
tells the now ardent Prince that he must wait for full
reconciliation until Adam and Charlotte have gone, so she
will know his embrace is not just another attempt to con-
trol her; and the Prince turns this time and stares out
the window, presumably with tears of expiating remorse
(353).

Another converging set of images and parallel scenes
completes their reunion. At Fanny Assingham's home before
Maggie’s marriage, Charlotte and the Prince appear on a
"balustrade, which was mounted on fine ironwork, eighteenth-
century English" (XXIII, 92). When the Prince is most per-
plexed about English society at Matcham and is reminiscing
over his Roman heritage, "he leaned on the old marble
balustrade-—so like the others that he knew in still more
nobly-terraced Italy," and though he is alone Charlotte is
very close by (350). She is soon framed by an "old grey

window" and the Prince thinks the scene needs only "a moon,

 

 

284
a mandolin and a little danger to be a serenade" (356—57).
Charlotte and the Prince occupy the romantic balconies in
the early sections of the novel. The balcony—balustrade
image next arises when Maggie sees the Prince and Charlotte
looking like "truly superior beings" on the high castle-
like balcony at Portland Place, at the end of her walk with
her father just after her monumental act of waiting for the
Prince there rather than in Eaton Square. She recalls the
Christmas Eve when Amerigo had come out on the balcony to
see the "dingy waifs" chanting for pennies, reinforcing the
symbolic parallels of the Prince and Charlotte as current
king and queen of the castle, and of Maggie and her father
as waifs on the outside begging to be let in (XXIV, 99).
But as Maggie begins to gain control, it is she who occupies

the balconies and the balustrades, until the reader sees her,

 

near her triumph, enjoying the royal view over the gardens
at Fawns as if in a "castle—tower mounted on a rock" (306).
Fittingly, then, the final scene takes place on "the balcony
from which Maggie, in the springtime, had seen Amerigo and
Charlotte look down together at the hour of her return from
the Regent's Park" (355). For a time she and the Prince

sit there like "a pair of effigies of the contemporary

great on one of the platforms of Madame Tussaud," a striking
variation of the image (360-61). But not for long. With
their sense of the past finally reconciled with the present,
and the future looking very much happily-ever—after, they

stand on the balcony overlooking a scene "coloured with the

 

 

 

 

285
odd sad pictured 'old—fashioned' look that empty London
streets take on in waning afternoons of the summer's end"
(362). The balcony and window image merge. And with per-
haps too many parallels to lovers fading into the sunset,
they melt into each other's eyes and arms. Their sense of

poetic justice-—and the reader's—-has been fully satisfied

 

by the turning of time.

 

 

 

 

 

Notes

le. Letters, I, pp. 309-11, 379, in which James's
ambivalence is very clear.

2These remarks are taken from a paper read by Leon
Edsl at Michigan State University in 1969, entitled
"James's Poem of America."

3The Houses that James Built, p. 26.

4

 

See especially Stallman's assessment, ibid., p. 22.

 

5Wegelin recognizes that James uses the "fable or
fairy tale" form in such works as The Ambassadors, and that
the American girl, for example, "is merely the American
variety of a type to which, quite independently of inter—
national contrast, he liked to assign the role of protagon-
ist in the struggle which is central in his work, the
struggle of the individual . . ."—-The Image of Euro e in
Henry James, pp. 58, 88. But Wegelin ignores, “for the—
purposes of his study, the role of myth and archetypes in
the mature novels. When he states that The Golden Bowl is
more a fable than a realistic novel (123), he means that it
is a parable on the international theme rather than that it
is a story moving toward fairy tale and myth.

 

 

 

 

6Page numbers in parentheses in this paragraph all
refer to volume XIX of the New York Edition.

7All page numbers in this paragraph refer to volume XX.

8The American Adam, pp. 7-8.

 

9"The Pattern of Innocence Through Experience in the
Characters of Henry James," University of Toronto Quarterly,
XXII (April, 1953). p. 236.

10The Lion and the Honeycomb, pp. 277-78, 283.

11The Complex Fate, pp. 40-47.

12The Pilgrimag_ of Henrprames, pp. 128,138. Compare
my tracing of "American faces of the clear strain" in the
previous section, pp. 194—204.

lBHicks, The Great Tradition, pp. 116—18.

l4Noted by Matthiessen, Henry James: The Major Phase,
pp. 122-250

286

 

 

287

15The Method 2f Henry James, p. cviii.

16"Henry James and His Sense of the Past," pp. 88-89.

l7PaullF. Baum, "The Young Man Betrothed to a Statue,"
PMLA, XXXIV (1919), p. 578, and Lionel Trillin , Introduc-
tion, Th2 Princess Casamassima (New York, 1948 , I, pp. xii
ff., noted by Stone, pp. 115, l86n.

l8In Thg Ivory Tower, however, some of the mythological
comparisons seem to provide more humor through incongruity
than deep thematic significance. Davey Bradham plays a
Mercurial messenger for his wife Gussy, an "urgent Juno,"
a "bustling goddess" of the household (XXV, pp. 23-24).
And as James ironically adds, he makes these comparisons
with no intimation that the characters themselves could
have thought of them.

 

lgThg Houses that James Built, pp. 4 ff. In another
essay in the same collection, Stallman notes James's com-
parisons of characters with older types in Thg Ambassadors.
Mrs. Newsome is Queen Elizabeth, Maria is Mary Stuart, and
Madame de Vionnet is Cleopatra——to which Stallman promptly
adds Chad as a parallel to Antony (pp. 50-51, n. 6 .

2OXIX, p. 5. Cf. Matthiessen, p. 59, on Kate as dark
and Milly as a light girl. But Milly is a redhead, not a
typical blonde, and she too wears black until her unveiling
in white in Venice. Page references are to volume XIX
unless otherwise designated.

21Stone, pp. 45—49, thinks the passage is therefore
a "dodge," not recognizing that keeping the time in New
York vague increases its romance and enhances Milly's por-
trait as princess.

 

22James's meaning here will be well understood by
readers of T.S. Eliot's poem "The Boston Evening Trans—
cript," in which the "evening quickens faintly 1n the street,/
Wakening the appetites of life in some/ And to others
bringing the Boston Evening Transcript. . . .

23Cf. Stone, pp. 59—60, on James's "subtly insisting"
on the "symbolic possibilities of Switzerland" here, and
Matthiessen, p. 64.

24Stone, p. 36.

25XIX, pp. 145, 215. Cf. Matthiessen, p. 60, on
Milly's "Eastern carpet."

26Cf. Matthiessen, p. 65, and Cargill, pp. 341—43.

288

2 .

70f. XX, pp. 10, 62, 87. The following page references
are to volume XX unless otherwise designated.

280f. Matthiessen, p. 71.

29Page references are to volume XXIII unless otherwise
marked.

30Miriam Rooth of The Tragic Muse is the parallel of
course.

31

32"Henry James: The Poetics of Empiricism," Time,
Place and Idea: Essays 2g the Novel, pp. 1—22.

Page references in this paragraph are to volume XXIV.

33Thomas Mann, quoted by Raleigh in "The English Novel
and the Three Kinds of Time," 3p. gi§., p. 54. Connecting
Raleigh's description of consciousness in James with the ap-
pearance of his characters as types is my own idea, but
Raleigh verges on the discovery. He treats the non—concrete
representation of character, complained about by Brooks,
Hicks, and others, at least by implication, explaining the
reasons for such representation. And he notes another charac-
teristic of James's figures which I discussed in describing
them as archetypes, noting that it is not "merely coinci-
dental that so many characters in James's novels are soli-
taries with only the vaguest of antecedents. Even the
forthright Newman is given a past of hints and shades, and
he, evidently, has no ties or connections. In what I re—
gard as James's masterpiece, Th3 Wings 9f Egg ng2, each of
the principals is carefully introduced as an isolated
figure."—-p. 19. But Raleigh' does not connect this charac-
teristic with the tendency of James's figures to become
archetypal; instead, he explains it as a result of hls
theory of consciousness.

 

34Again, page references are to volume XXIII until
otherwise designated.

35Page references following now refer to volume XXIV.

36Andre Gide first made the claim that his figures have

no subconscious, but later critics have generally agreed.

See Raleigh, p. 15, on Gide and his Views. These crltics

have apparently not noticed passages like the one quoted,

in which the subconscious is metaphorically described as a
force outside the person, nor the subconsclous images that_
govern Strether's vision of Madame de Vionnet and the Lambinet
scene, nor the fact that the image of Osmond and Madame Merle

 

 

289

36(Cont.) in the drawing room haunts Isabel's sub—
conscious until she figures out why the scene disturbed
her. Compare also the Prince renewing the bond with
Charlotte "through steps and stages that conscious compu—
tation had missed"-—XXIII, p. 297.

 

 

 

 

290
4. The Reassessment (1905-1914)

By the time Th2 Golden ng1 appears in 1904, James is,
not surprisingly, already in America. For the idealization
of Americans in the novels of the major phase is a symptom
not only of his desire to think well of his native country
in spite of its political problems, but also of a desire to
reestablish a direct contact with American life.1 Doubts
about the wisdom of his old choice of Europe as his home
have been increasing in James's mind for some time. As
early as 1899, while the American characters of the English
period are diminishing in identity due to James's long
estrangement from his native land, James begins to lament
the apparent loss of his own American identity, and strongly
recommends to his brother William that he keep his sons safe
from expatriation:

What I most of all feel, and in the light of

it conjure you to keep doing for them, is their
being a méme to contract local saturations and
attachments in respect to their gwn great and
glorious country, to learn, to strike roots into,
its infite beauty, as I suppose, and variety.
Then they won't, as I do now, have to assimilate,
but half-heartedly, the alien splendours-—
inferior ones too, as I believe--of the indi-
gestible midi of Bourget and the Vicomte Melchoir
de Vogue . . . the beauty here is, after my long
stop at home, admirable and exquisite; but make
the boys, none the less, stick fast and sink up
to their necks in everything their own countries
and climates can give de pareil et de superieur.
Its being that "own" will double their 2&2

of it. (Letters, I, 316)

 

291
James is traveling in France and Italy to break his long
stay at Lamb House and London, and must "suppose" and
"believe" that the United States now has infinite beauty,
variety, and superior splendours because he no longer knows
what the country is like. The Continent is unsatisfying
because it is not his "own" culturally, and because it is
increasingly becoming modernized. Italy is a devastating
disappointment for him, ruined by restoration. Lamenting
the changes in Rome, James complains, "I can't remount
[the stream of timg7--but can only drift on with the thicker
and darker tide: wherefore pray for me, as who knows what
may be at the end?" (Letters, II, 104). James is begin-
ning to feel alien in Europe and isolated from America, a
man without a country.

Uncertain of his own national identity, he becomes very
sensitive on the issue.of expatriation. Not only does he
advise William to keep his nephews home, but he writes a
friend of Mrs. Wharton that "She mggp be tethered in native
pastures, even if it reduces her to a back-yard in New York"
(Letters, I, 396). He writes Mrs. Wharton perSonally much
later in 1912, after she sets a novel badly in Paris, that
"your only drawback is not having the homeliness and the
inevitability and the happy limitation and the affluent
poverty, of a Country of your Own (comme moi, par
exemplel)" (Letters, II, 285). With such light yet seri-
ous irony James expresses his continuing ambivalence toward

his expatriation, a condition he tries hard not to admit

 

 

 

292
as final and which, while it helps him overcome the pro-
vincial limitations and cultural poverty of America, never
provides him with a permanent national home. Lamb House
is more and more a refuge from London than an expression
of his national identity, a fact dramatically emphasized

when restrictions on his travel to Lamb House as an alien

 

during the war become a major factor influencing him to
become a British citizen.2

Those who actually become expatriates, such as Robert
Louis Stevenson, are not enhanced in James's eyes by their
decision. James's objections to Stevenson's expatriation
from Britain to the South Seas can be explained as a reflec-
tion of his attachment to England, but in the light of his
comments about keeping Americans on their own side of the
Atlantic instead of exporting them to England for accul—

‘ turation, his position on Stevenson is more accurately

 

traced to a rejection of all expatriation. James feels
that Stevenson's writings, including even his letters, de-
teriorate after his departure (of. Letters, I, 198, 208,
331). With the failure of his plays and the low popular—
ity of his fiction, James may well have felt that his own
work was declining due to his long expatriation. Even
though the incident is hearsay, then, one can readily be—
lieve that James expressed to Hamlin Garland one nostalgic
night in Dover the wish that he gguld have been an Ameri-
can, and that he could start over.3 Sometimes the nostal-

gia seems both wistful and detached, as in 1902 when he

 

 

 

 

 

293

sees a photograph of himself at age twenty and feels that

"the image has a pleasing ghostliness, as out of the far

past, and affects me pathetically as if it were of the

dead--of one who died young and innocent. Well, so he

did" (Letters, I, 407). He likes to call his life in Amer-

ica "the prehistoric existence" during these years (Letters,

I, 375), a past that is gulfs away and cannot be recovered.

Nevertheless, like Spencer Brydon in "The Jolly Corner,"

James wonders what he would have been like had he stayed

in America, and he wonders whether or not he can in fact

go home again. Not astonishingly, he is soon ready to try.
He begins to believe again, as he writes to Howells,

that "the 'International' is very presumably indeed, and

in fact quite inevitably, what I am chronically booked for"

(Letters, II, 10), so he enters the major phase concen-

trating once more on the puzzle of American character as

an offshoot of European culture. His trips to the Continent

become "expensive and supererogatory, inasmuch as not re-

solving themselves into new material or assimilating with

my little acquired stock, my accumulated capitalcfif(for

convenience) 'international' items and properties" (Letters,

1, 418). He calls the theme "international" now only "for

convenience," for it is no longer international. Instead

of France and Italy "what now most interests me . . . is

human Anglo-Saxonism, with the American extension, or oppor-

tunity for it, so far as it may be given me still to work

the same" (I, 418). This central theme of the novels of the

 

 

 

 

 

294

major phase, then, becomes the impetus that sends him back

 

to America after twenty years abroad.
James later explains the reasons for his return to

America in The American Scene, with his characteristic

 

clarity of vision when assessing his past:

It was "Europe" that had, in very ancient days,
held out to the yearning young American some
likelihood of impressions more numerous and
various and of a higher intensity than those he
might gather on the native scene; and it was
doubtless in conformity with some such desire
more finely and more frequently to vibrate that
he had originally begun to consult the European
oracle. This had led, in the event, to his
settling to live for long years in the very pre-
cincts, as it were, of the temple; so that the
voice of the divinity was finally to become, in
his ears, of all sounds the most familiar. It
was quite to lose its primal note of mystery,

to cease little by little to be strange, impres-
sive and august—~in the degree, at any rate, in
which it had once enjoyed that character. The
consultation of the oracle, in a work, the in-
vocation of the possible thrill, was gradually
to feel its romantic essence enfeebled, shrunken
and spent. The European complexity, working
clearer to one's vision, had grown usual and
calculable-~presenting itself, to the discourage-
ment of wasteful emotion and of "intensity" in
general, as the very stuff, the common texture,
of the real world. Romance and mystery-—in
other words the amusement of interest-~would have
therefore at last to provide for themselves else-
where; and what curiously befell, in time, was
that the native, the forsaken scene, now passing,
as continual rumour had it, through a thousand
stages and changes, and offering a perfect
iridescence of fresh aspects, seemed more and
more to appeal to the faculty of wonder. It was
American civilization that had begun to spread
itself thick and pile itself high, in sort, in
proportion as the other, the foreign exhibition
had taken to writing itself plain; and to a

world so amended and enriched, accordingly, the
expatriated observer, with his relaxed curiosity
reviving and his limp imagination once more on the

 

 

 

   

 

 

295

stretch, couldn't fail again to address himself.
Hothing could be of a simpler and straighter logic:
Europe had been romantic years before, because she
was different from America; wherefore America would
now be romantic because she was different from
Europe. (365-66)

America is now the undiscovered country, the one which
could possibly provide the essential background of freshness
and contrast needed for his fiction. James wants to examine
this "extension" of the Anglo—Saxon race--if that is still
what America is—-to see whether or not that study will

give new life to the international theme:

My native land, which time, absence and change
have, in a funny sort of way, made almost as
romantic to me as "Europe," in dreams or in my
earlier time here, used to be--the actual
bristling (as fearfully bristling as you like)
U.S.A. have the merit and the prefious pro erty
that they meet and fit into my ("creative" pre—
occupations; and that the period there which should
represent the poetry of motion, the one big taste
of travel not supremely missed, would carry with
it also possibilities of the prose of production
(that is of the production of prose) sfiEh as no
other mere bought, paid for, sceptically and half-
heartedly worried through adventure, by land or
sea, would be able to give me. (Letters, I, 419)

Just as determined to visit America as he had been to live
in Europe, James turns aside his brother William's warnings
that twentieth—century America may be a shock to a prodigal
son who departed in the eighteen eighties:

What you say of . . . the Vocalisation, of the
Shocks in general, and of everything else, is
utterly beside the mark--it being absolutely
£23 all that class of phenomena, and every
other class, that I nurse my infatuation. I
'want to see them, I want to see everything.

I want to see the Country (scarcely a bit New
York and Boston, but intensely the Middle and
Far West and California and the South)--in

 

 

 

 

296
cadres as complete, and immeasurably more
mature than those of the celebrated Taine
when he went, early in the sixties, to Italy
for six weeks, in order to write his big book.
(Letters, I, 420)
Enthusiasm so great can only be followed by huge success or
dismal disillusion.

To be sure, the visit results in strong impressions,
and a string of stories on American society. But the trip
also cuts short the major phase, for James realizes how
idealized the Americans of his long novels have been, and

ultimately rejects the style and content of such works as

The Golden Bowl.4 He sees much in America that he did not

 

expect to see. What he had not counted on was the jolt his
sense of the past would receive, especially after creating
a myth of American character based on hopes and memories,
when confronted with an almost all new society. In spite
of his intention to travel mainly in the areas of America
he is not familiar with, he is forced by shock at the vast
changes to spend long agonized hours in New York and Boston,
and when he reaches the exotic areas such as California that
he wanted to see, he finds only "nature and climate, fruits
and flowers; for there is absolutely nothing else, and the
sense of the shining social and human inane is utter" (II,
33). ‘
Gone is the blithe assumption of the inevitable syn—
thesis of European and American society which pervades the
major phase. The United States is "a living and breathing

and feeling and moving great monster" to James (II, 20);

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

297

"the country is unlike any other-~to one's sensation of it;

those of Europe, from State to State, seem to me less dif-
ferent from each other than they are all different from
this—-or rather this from them" (II, 24). James is so dis-
oriented that he wisely decides to unravel the mysteries of
American life after he returns to England. He trusts his
"after-sense," his sense of the past, to discriminate more
carefully than his immediate perception (cf. Notebooks,
318-22). The result is The American Scene, a brilliant
sociological analysis far greater than any of his earlier
travelogues, and a series of tales on American life which
record in effect the death of the old international theme.
Even before The American Scene is published (1907),
however, James's change in perspective begins to appear.
Articles that will be chapters of the finished work are
published while he is still in the States. And the preface
to the New York Edition of his works, completed in 1906-07,
reveal an interesting transition from the optimism of the
major phase to the soberer view necessitated by his return
to America. Reassessment begins immediately upon James's
arrival, of course, but due to the tendency of his mind to
assimilate experience slowly and carefully and to rely on
"after-sense" for final judgment, that reassessment is not

complete until the prefaces, The American Scene, and

 

several tales have worked through the paradoxes and am-

bivalent feelings that harrow his mind when he confronts

this strange new society.

 

 

 

 

298
One of the first old configurations to be re—examined,

naturally, is the international theme. James fights hard to
salvage his earlier impressions. In discussing the classic
cases of international contrast of the seventies and eighties
in the prefaces, James defends their essential accuracy for
early twentieth-century America even while arguing that the
contrasts are breaking down due to increasing social syn-
thesis (cf. Prefaces, 207). The old types are still
around, he rationalizes, it is just that they are no longer
strictly American or strictly European figures: "The evo-
lution of Varieties moves fast; the Pandora Days can no
longer, I fear, pass for quaint or fresh or for exclusively
native to any one tract of Anglo-Saxon soil" (Prefaces, 271).
More significantly, James begins to see that the allegedly
growing social fusion may be in fact merely greater social
con—fusion:

What has really happened, I think, is that the

great international cases, those that bristle

with fifty sorts of social reference and overflow,

by the same token, with a hundred illustrations

of social incoherence, are now equally taken for

granted on all sides of the sea, have simply be—

come incidents and examples of the mixture of

manners, as I call it, and the thicker fusion:

which may mean nothing more, in truth, but that

social incoherence (with the sense for its 0 -

posits practically extinct among the nations)

has got itself accepted, right and left,as

normal. (Prefaces, 206—07).
And America seems to be the main source of disruption; the
social and technological changes James has noticed slowly

encroaching on his favorite cities in Europe have already

revolutionized American society. Some changes, like the

 

 

 

 

 

299

automobile, do not disturb James too much—~they replace the

privacy that they diminish with convenience or some other
advantage. But the increasing social incoherence overcoming
Europe serves only to deprive one of the last sanctuaries
in the world of the stable factors needed to produce good
fiction.

All the old assumptions are falling. Are these new
Americans in any way still Anglo—Saxons, still the old Amer-
icans used for familial contrasts with Europeans in the
international theme?:

I am careful to put it as a question, and all

for a particular reason--the reason that, to

be frank, I find myself, before the vast diluvian
occidental presence in Europe, with its remorse-
less rising tide and its positive expression of
almost nothing but quantity and number, deprived,
on definite and ample grounds, of the precious
faculty of confidence. This confidence was of
old all instinctive, in face of the "common run"
of appearances, the even then multitudinous,
miscellaneous minor international phenomena,
those of which the "short story," as contempor-
aneously practiced, could effect a fairly prompt
and easy notation . . . (Prefaces, 207

James is lost. What can be made of these new Americans?
Now "one of those big general questions," once answered
with assurance, destroys the master's confidence in the old

international theme:

"Who are they, what are they, whence and whither
and why?" the'britic of life," international or
other, still, or more and more, asks himself, as
he of course always asked, but with the actual
difference that the reply that used to come so
conveniently straight, "Why, they're just the
American vague variety of the dear old Anglo-
Saxon race," not only hangs fire and leaves him
to wait and wonder, but really affects him as
having for this act of deference (as to which he

 

 

 

 

300 .

can't choose, I admit) little more than a con—

scious mocking, baffling, in fact a just all

but sinister, grimace. (Prefaces, 208)
The old Bowery Theatre, "nursed in the English intellectual
cradle, and in the American of a time when the American
resembled the English closely enough," is now filled by
"representatives of the races we have nothing 'in common'
with" (Prefaces, 196). In the old days hotel registers
were filled with recognizably traditional Anglo—Saxon
names; now the guest lists are inscribed with "alien syl—
lables and sounds, representative signs that fit into our
'English' legend (as we were mainly conscious up to a few
years since of having inherited that boon) scarcely more
than if borrowed from the stony slabs of Nineveh" (Prefaces,
208-09). Clearly the old convention that an American is
just an Englishman diluted a bit by the Atlantic would have
to be extensively revised.

This "melting pot" condition in the United States is
the most crucial change for James. Recording his impres—
sion of immigrants to America in his notebooks, James
emphasizes the one overwhelming 'question that hangs so

_—.——.—_—-—_—————-—_—

sees: that of what the great Infusion (call it that) is

 

going to be" (Notebooks, 317). In The American Scene James

 

even questions whether or not "American" can be a specific
designation after such an influx of immigrants: "What
meaning, in the presence of such impressions, can continue

to attach to such a term as the 'American' character?--

 

 

 

301

what type, as the result of such a prodigious amalgam, such
a hotch-potch of racial ingredients, is to be conceived as
shaping itself?"5 James has observed the so-called "melting
pot," but questions whether any cohesive alloy of these
peOples is possible, or if so what quality of metal can be
produced. Not being well acquainted with the Darwinian
qualities of the economic world of the early twentieth
century, James is astonished at the mutation of the jovial
products of rich Italian culture and Mediterranean sun-
shine into competitive, anxious, time-ridden ditch diggers:

It has taken long ages of history, in the other

world, to produce them, and you ask yourself,

with independent curiosity, if they may really

be thus extinguished in an hour. And if they

are not extinguished, into what pathless tracts

of the native atmosphere do they virtually, do

they provisionally, and so all undiscoverably,

melt? (129)
James is similarly disoriented when an apparently typical
"native" from whom he asks directions in New Hampshire
turns out to be an Armenian. Europeans are despoiled of
their old manners, projecting "a tolerably neutral and
colourless image" (127—28), as if the blankness noted in
American faces of the English period in fact points to some
peculiarly American abrasive that grinds away differences
but leaves no positive character in their place. Again and
Again James tries to connect these new Americans with the
old "international" types: "Do certain impressions there
represent the absolute extinction of old sensibilities, or

do they represent only new forms of them?" (146). But it

is no use. These transplants are "disconnected from the

 

 

F____l

historic consciousness implied in their own type" (207).

302

They have lost the sense of their past. Visiting Ellis
Island, where immigrants pour into the States, James senses
a mighty "clock that never, never stops--least of all when
it strikes . . . some louder hour of our national fate than
usual" (85). The clock moves eternally forward into the

future. For the first time James becomes deliberately re-

 

actionary: "There was no escape from the ubiquitous alien
into the future, or even into the present; there was an
escape but into the past" (87).

Escaping into the past means returning to England, for
America is obliterating her past as quickly as possible.
The work of time in America is to erase the past, not to
enrich it. Buildings are obsolete and torn down in a
decade or so (cf. 87—88), and even the proud skyscrapers do
not have "the authority of things of permanence or even of
things of long duration" (77). "What was taking place was
a perpetual repudiation of the past, so far as there had
been a past to repudiate, so far as the past was a positive
rather than a negative quantity" (53). Now everything in
America has a "single thickness"--all present, no past;
scenes in the States leave no "after—sense" (294, 298, 454).
Like Henry Adams, James is deeply shaken by the fast change
of the nineteenth century: " . . . ages do come out, as a
matter of course, so far from where they have gone in.

But it had done so, the latter half of the nineteenth century,

in one's own more or less immediate presence" (79-80).

 

F____l

It was as though someone had completely switched both the

303

sets and the characters during a short intermission in the
play. James sees a completely new situation which seems to
have almost no continuity with the old at all. His birth-
place demolished, he feels "amputated of half AEig? his-
tory? (91). To crown his sense of isolation, he is taken

for a foreigner—~an Englishman, significantly-—in this new

 

land of foreigners (423). There may be an American identity,
James thinks, but it is not and probably cannot be his.

James's impressions of America clarify and turn more
negative with time. As the ambivalence of his immediate
perceptions battles in retrospection toward a single domin—
ant image, his "after sense" counteracts the older nostalgic
impressions by recalling mainly the intrusively new and un—
desirable facets of America. Consider, for example, this
statement from a letter written in 1905:

I found my native land, after so many years,

interesting formidable, fearsome and fatiguing,

and much more difficult to see and deal with in

any extended and various way than I had supposed.

. . . It is an extraordinary world, an altogether

huge "proposition," as they say there, giving one,

I think, an immense impression of material and

political power; but almost cruelly charmless . . .

(Letters, II, 48)

Time is curing both his nostalgia and his enthusiasm. There
is no choice; he must return to England. Once back, he is
not likely to try the trip again. As he writes Mrs. Henry
White in 1908, "I have had to plead simple abject terror--
terror of the pendulous life. I am a stopped clock—~and I

strike (that is I caper about) only when very much wound up"

 

 

 

 

r__________

304
(Letters, II, 118). He cannot get into phase with the Am—
erican clock that never stops; he is not about to get so
wound up about America again, nor to swing once more across
the Atlantic. Analyzing his impressions late in 1909, James
has sifted his memories and been even more convinced by his
sense of the past journey that the United States is a harsh

and ruthless land:

. . . somehow the memory of what was fierce and
formidable in our colossal country the last time

I was there prevails with me over softer emotions,
and I feel I shall never alight on it again save as
upborne on the wings of some miracle that isn't in
the least likely to occur. (Letters, II, 147)

Not miracle but tragedy takes him back one last time in
1910, as he accompanies his desperately ill brother William
back to New Hampshire to die. Suffering from his own de—
clining health after returning to England in 1911, however,
James is doubly determined not to be moved any more.
William's widow Alice asks him to return in 1913, but he
cannot:

Dearest Alice, I could come back to America
(could come back on a stretcher) to die—-but
never, never to live. . . . 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 to which I oc-
casionally and painfully and losingly sacri-
ficed, I have a superstitious terror of see-
ing them at the end of time again stretch out
strange inevitable tentacles to draw me back
and destroy me. . . . You see my capital-—
yielding all my income, intellectual, social,
associational, on the old investment of so
many years--my capital is here, and to let it
slide would be simply to become bankrupt.
(Letters, II, 306)

 

 

305
James knows that he must return to what is left him, some
new "English period" or a much different version of the
international theme. His sense of his American past can
never be quite the same. With his last drop of nostalgia,
he writes to Howells of the time when both were writing
with confidence on American subjects as "those conditions
in which, as 'quiet observers,’ as careful painters, as
sincere artists, we could still, in our native, our human
and social element, know more or less where we were and
feel more or less what we had hold of" (Letters, II, 224).
Those times had passed irrecoverably for both. Neverthe-
less James is not finished with America. In the years im-
mediately following his journeys in the United States, James
reworks his reactions to the new society. And in nonfiction

like The American Scene and in a string of new American

 

tales, he expresses his final disillusion and disapproval
unmistakably.

Even before embarking on the American tales, James
shows growing disaffection with America and the interna-
tional theme. "Fordham Castle" (1909), another attempt to
picture "an up-town subject," however obliquely, conveys
his rejection of the morals of that society. The "pair of
little uptown identities" in the work appear only as the
absent, insensitive, materialistic, social climbing wife
and son of the two lonely characters left in the Swiss
pension. The old "more or less mitigated, more or less

embellished and disfigured, intensified or modernised

 

 

 

 

 

306
Daisy Millers" in the story for once "betrayed the conscious
need of tricking-out their time-honoured case." James
therefore gets away from "too unbroken an eternity of mere
international young ladies" by focussing instead on the
people they leave in their wake (Prefaces, 276-77). The
result is not only a variation on the old international
theme, but a condemnation of the degenerated Daisy Miller
mentality worthy of the American tales that follow.

"Julia Bride" (1908) exposes the American girl and the
society she dominates with much more acid than the earlier
international tales about her. It portrays a girl who is
far from the shining American princesses of the major phase
and from the fresh and innocent Daisy Millers of the early
period, though she is still related to each. Julia is much
more caught in a web of social climbing and hypocrisy beyond
her control than Daisy is; though the stories deal with
similar social problems, "Julia" launches a more serious
grievance against American society. James does not like the
effects which the American courting customs depicted in
"Daisy" have had since the eighties. So even though the
story is "all tainted with the up-town debility" that
plagued James (Prefaces, 264), not stretching downtown to
criticize the heart of America, the story is tinged with
naturalism and moves closer to social criticism than any
of his earlier comedies. Julia is not just one more doll
in the "too unbroken an eternity of mere international young

ladies," for James is after bigger game:

 

 

 

 

 

307

. . . I really did n't take her for particularly
important in herself, and would in fact have had
no heart for her without the note, attaching to
her as not in the least to poor little dim and
archaic Daisy Miller, say; the note, so to call
it, of multitudinous reference. I had had, for
any confidence, to make it out to myself that

my little frisking haunter, under private stress,
of the New York public scene, was related with a
certain intensity to the world about her; so that
her case might lose itself promptly enough in a
complexus of larger and stranger cases-—even in
the very air, by what seemed to promise, of the
largest possibilities of comedy. What if she
were the silver key, tiny in itself, that would
unlock a treasure?--the treasure of a whole view
of manners and morals, a whole ran e of American
social aspects? (Prefaces, 263-64

Something more documentary than the innocence of a Daisy
Miller or a Francis Dosson is to be pictured, something
with "consequences and remoter bearings," which reveals the
effects on American society of the "freedom repeatedly to

contract for the fond preliminaries of marriage which has

 

 

been immemorially cherished by the American female young"
(Prefaces, 264). "Presumably of the greatest . . . bear-
ing on the social tone at large, on the manners, habits and
ideals of communities clinging to it——of generations wedded,
that is, to the young speculative exchange of intimate vows"
(264), the practice of repeated engagement must "in some
degree determine the mixture of elements in the young lady's
consciousness and have much to 'say,‘ in one way or another,
to the young lady's general case" (265). The custom may,

in fact, have some causal relation to "that other almost
equally prized social provision . . . the unrestricted

freedom of remarriage in the lifetime of the parties, the

 

308

unhampered ease of rupture and repudiation for each" (265).
Here is a fine perception of an early Hollywood-like moral—
ity. Julia Bride outdoes even Daisy Miller; she not only
flirts with all, she gets engaged to them. The mother
makes a career of three divorces; the daughter settles fur
six engagements.6

But this characterization of the story is not totally
fair. In a way Julia is trapped by her mother's past.
Since her mother has had three husbands, Julia has had three
fathers; her past is a series of chunks of time with no con-
tinuity. To her the past is a shame she is forced to conceal
and lie about. She senses the falsity of her mother's and
her own position, but even though basically honest, she
cannot avoid lying about the past for the benefit of others
tainted by it—-and in the hope of finally landing a suitor
of her own. But in the end all she has left is memories,
"ghosts" of former walks in the park and tours of the
museum, for to old suitors like Murray Brush she "had
ceased personally, ceased materially . . . to exist."7
She is a creature created by and caught in circumstances.

Except for Julia's beauty, which is a "primal curse“
to her due to its social effect (158), only the worst of
the conventional American characteristics in the old in—
ternational theme remain. Mr. French, brought up in
Germany, seems like "a high—caste Englishman" (160)-—a
combination almost as mixed in nationality as the Bordereaux.

His main claim to Julia's consideration arises from his

 

 

 

 

309
ability to inspire social climbing and grasping (191).
Murray Brush, an American who went to Europe like so many
others to find "the right sensibility" (176), returns still
bristling with faults; he has only "intuition," not "under-
standing" and imagination (178). He is as common as his
name. James is less optimistic now about the ability of
the average compatriot to learn from Europe; American in—
nocence shows a very negative side. Mrs. Drack, a huge
woman with millions of dollars, is even worse, as her name
suggests. Her face is a "featureless desert" worse than
any blank American faces of the English period; she has an
"innocent elephantine archness; she fairly rioted in that
dimension of size" (171). Mrs. Drack is a parody of
8

American worship of wealth and mere quantity.

James uses his sense of past conventions of his in-

 

 

ternational tales in order to construct such stores as
"Julia Bride," reversing the conventions to contrast the
old America with the new. But his personal sense of the
past is much more evident in "The Jolly Corner" (1908) and
"Crapy Cornelia" (1909), in which the agony of the main
character is caused by the incongruity of the harsh present
with the finer past he recalls. These stories combine
criticism of the present with explicit comparisons to the
past, and by focusing on the predicament of a character who
wants to recover and preserve the past yet also adapt if
possible to the present, the tales begin to formulate the

problem to be faced by Ralph Pendrel in The Sense pf the Past.

 

 

 

310

"The Jolly Corner" combines criticism of American so-
ciety with a very interesting problem of identity. Rather
clearly the situation of the hero, Spencer Brydon, parallels
James's own position, so the possibility of a personal
parable cannot be ignored. Although Leon Edel sees "no
betrayal" in the tale, no sense in James that his country
betrayed him by not evolving according to expectations,
Edel finds evident "self doubt and questioning of his iden-
tity" by James in the work, and a resolution of that ques-
tioning in the rejection of American culture and reaffirms-
tion of his cosmopolitan vieWpoint.9 I shall essentially
follow this interpretation in examining the sense of the
past in the tale, though John Clair's interpretation is
both intriguing and fruitfu1.lo

Brydon has been away from America for thirty-three
years (James had been away twenty) and is fifty-six when

he returns (James was sixty). His reactions to America

almost exactly parallel James's in The American Scene. His

sense of the past had led him to expect something different;

America seems too new, different, queer; it has changed too
fast (Tglgg, XII, 193-94). Brydon feels fondness for the
older homes still surviving, homes he once considered ugly,
like James confronting the old brownstones once again.

His sense of the past is so starved in the new America that
anything old looks good, even "ancient" Alice Staverton,

an unchanging landmark who is now an anachronism from the

earlier age (196). Here "in the vast wilderness of the

 

 

 

 

311
wholesale, breaking through the mere gross generalization
of wealth and force and success," Alice's home is a touch
of frugality and tone. She is like Cornelia Rasch of
"Crapy Cornelia," whose home is a refuge from the present
to White-Mason. She is "a person whom nothing can have
-altered" (205), the essential landmark in time or static

character, like Carteret of The Tragic Muse, who marks an

 

era for the main character.

Just as James wonders what he would have been like had
he stayed in the States, so Spencer Brydon tries to project
his possible identity if he had remained in America, trying
to reconcile his sense of the past with his apprehension of
the present. He sees the "capacity for business and a sense
of construction" in America, but "these virtues, so common
all round him now, had been dormant in his own organism"
(196). Henry Adams says he would have liked to help build
the railroads if he had been able; Brydon begins to feel that
he could have: "If he had but stayed at home he would have
anticipated the inventor of the skyscraper." He had a "real
gift," he thinks, and if he had only stayed home, he could
have turned his gift into a gold-mine (197). James probably
had no such delusions, but they do parallel his desire to
start over and remain an American. The worlds of finance
and technology were always foreign to his abilities, or so
he professes, and even in his own field, he did not think
that he and Howells had imaginations grasping enough to make

much out of American materials. Nevertheless, he no doubt

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

312

could not help wondering what he might have become, and
"The Jolly Corner" seems to be a parable giving his own
assessment of the probable consequence of having remained
in America.

When Brydon returns to the States after his long stay
abroad, only Alice Staverton and the boyhood house on the
"jolly corner" in New York are left of his past, and the
house is as much the haven of might-have-beens as of actual
history. Inside it, nonetheless, his sense of the past
quivers. The very doorknobs "suggested the pressure of the
palms of the dead":

The seventy years of the past in fine that

these things represented, the annals of nearly
three generations, counting his grandfather's,
the one that had ended there, and the impalpable
ashes of his long extinct youth, float in the
very air like microscopic motes. (201)

Somewhat like Ralph Pendrel entering his English house in

The Sense pf the Past to apprehend what it would have been

 

like to live a century before, Brydon enters his house

each night in quest of his old identity and some sense of
what staying in America would have done to him: "What
would it have made of me, what would it have made of me?

I keep for ever wondering, all idiotically, as if I could
possibly know!" (203). Brydon fears that he has "followed
strange paths and worshipped strange gods" in going to
Europe--the charge Granville Hicks and Van wyck Brooks make
against James--but hopes that eventually he can discover
the "alter ego deep down somewhere within" him that is the

essence of his American character (205).

 

 

 

 

 

313

Almost like the pathological pilgrims to Europe of
James's earliest stories, Brydon is so sensitive to the
past that he is irrational at times.11 There is just not
enough evidence of the past left to justify his building
the castles he builds. The quest becomes an obsession.
Armed with a candle at first, then with nothing as his
eyes grow accustomed to the dark, he haunts the house with
alternating hope and despair, and finally with tense expec-
tation. James makes it clear that the quest is pathologi—
cal; when Brydon emerges in the mornings into the present
outside world, the experience is compared to "the assault
of the outer light of the Desert on the traveller emerging
from an Egyptian tomb" (203). America may well be parallel
to the desert, but Brydon is also being criticized—~for being
blinded to the quality of the present in America. He thinks
he could have been great had he remained; he does not yet
realize how sterile that doubtful greatness would have been.

At last, however, the quest is fulfilled, but with an
illumination that Brydon does not expect. Thinking he has
found the "ghost" of himself one night upon discovering a
closed door which he is certain that he had left open, he
flees from that door to a window to reconsider the con-
frontation he has been so ambivalently seeking. The opened
window helps him break the spell, though not completely.

He discovers that America is "hard-faced houses . . .
Great builded voids, great crowded stillnesses" wearing "a

sort of sinister mask" in the small hours of the night, a

 

 

 

314
"large collective negation" (220—21). When "he looked
again at his watch," Brydon discovered "what had become of
his time-value (he had taken hours for minutes-—not, as in
other tense situations, minutes for hours)" (221). His
escapade had not intensified and broadened his perception
of time, but had telescoped his vision, foreshortening the
hours. Like the painter of the madonna of the future,
he has been caught in a fantasy which has stolen his hours
and made them seem only moments; like Ralph Pendrel and
Marmaduke ("Maud-Evelyn"), he has run the risk of being
trapped in a past of his own creation. Even after breathing
fresher air from the window, Brydon is in danger: "His
choked appeal from his open window had been the sole note
of life, and he could but break off at last as for a worse
despair" (221). Worried that he now has no choice, that
his fate is determined, he is on the verge of suicide and
of tearing the house down (222-23). His insanity is finally
cured when he does encounter the man he might have been,
finding dimly "the face of a stranger" and a hand with two
fingers missing (224—26). He feels "sold," not because—-
as Clair maintains—-the man is an impostor hired by Alice
Staverton, but because he had expected his glygg ggg to be
part of his repressed true self, and a gloriously desirable
man. Instead he sees that he would have been crippled and
insensitive, an identity created by social forces rather
than a creative individual.

Fortunately Brydon has escaped the fate of being

 

 

 

 

 

 

315
captured by such an identity, just as James escaped by
going to Europe. Like Ralph Pendrel, he has had a tre—
mendous adventure: "He had come back, yes--come back from
further away than any man but himself had ever travelled";
he has been "carried back . . . from . . . the uttermost
end of an interminable grey passage" (227). Like James
looking at the picture of himself as a youth, Brydon decides
that "It must have been that I Egg . . . Yes-—I can only
have died" (228). James will let his American identity
that might have been forever rest here in peace.

Another character faced with a choice between America's
past and her present, a choice of the life style he will
follow, is the hero of "Crapy Cornelia" (1909). White-Mason
is a middle-aged New Yorker (forty-eight) who feels passed-
by and out of place, having been turned down by three ladies
he wished to marry. Now at last a lady, rich Mrs. Worthing-
ham, seems to be leaning in his direction. The problem is
that she represents an America not comfortable for White-
Mason. Her house is terribly bright and new inside, and
the lady herself seems to have "an iridescent surface, the
shimmering interfusion of her various aspects" (Tglgg, XII,
338 f.). She has the "twenty superficial graces" of "high
modernity":

She was "up" to everything, aware of every-
thing—-if one counted from a short enough time
back (from week before last, say, and as if
quantities of histor had burst upon the world
within the fortnight ; she was likewise sur-

prised at nothing, and in that direction one
might reckon as far ahead as the rest of her

 

 

 

 

 

316

lifetime, or at any rate the rest of his, which
was all that would concern him: it was as if

the suitability of the future to her tastes was
what she most took for granted, so that he could
see her, for all her Dresden-china shoes and her
flutter of wondrous befrilled contemporary skirts,
skip by the side of the coming ages as over the
floor of a ball-room, keeping step with its mons-
trous stride and prepared for every figure of the
dance. (342)

Mrs. Worthingham is another American Adam newly created,
without any past or any sense of it. She is a creature
solely of the present and the future, like Dosson of Th£_
Reverberator, representing what James most dislikes about
the new culture. His old "passionless pilgrims" are no

longer nguveau riche nor even pilgrims; they are settled

 

insensitive members of high American society.

White-Mason is attracted to her because he has "an
ideal of adjusted appreciation, of courageous curiosity, of
fairly letting the world about him, a world of constant
breathless renewals and merciless substitutions, make its
flaming assault on its own inordinate terms" (339). Like
James planning his return to America, he wants to experience
everything; he will try anything once. He is even willing
to give up his old identity, which Mrs. Worthingham cannot
recognize in any case:

That indeed . . . was of the very essence of the
newness and freshness and beautiful, brave social
irresponsibility by which she had originally
dazzled him; just exactly that circumstance of
her having no instinct for any old quality or
quantity or identity, a single historic or social

value, as he might say, of the New York of his
already almost legendary past. (348)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

317

Nevertheless, his real preference is not the new at all; he
just has no other choice. "The few scattered representatives
of a society once 'good'"—-"rare men in a vast desolation"
James adds in Latin—-are completely dominated by impossible
figures like Mrs. Worthingham (349). White-Mason's true
preferences come out in passages like these:

The high pitch of interest, to his taste, was

the pitch of history, the pitch of acquired and

earned suggestion, the pitch of association, in

a word; so that he lived by preference, incon-

testably, if not in a rich gloom, which would

have been beyond his means and spirits, at least

amid objects and images that confessed to the

tone of time. (339)

Newness was value in the piece . . . if only

because maturer tone was after all most ap-

preciable and most consoling when one staggered

back to it, wounded, bleeding, blinded, from

the riot of the raw—-or, to put the whole ex-

perience more prettily, no doubt, from excesses of

light. (339-40)
White—Mason is partly blinded by the harsh light of contempor-
ary American society, but he is not long blind to it, as
Spencer Brydon is. He knows he must wear eyeshades to pro—
tect his vision of the past.

Images of light and dark, representing the harsh
present and the more subdued past, surround White—Mason as
he makes his choice. He wants Mrs. Worthingham for "lighting
up his autumn afternoon of life," and "her outlook took form
to him suddenly as a great square sunny window that hung in
assured fashion over the immensity of life" (341-43).

Mrs. Worthingham represents for him "the condition, so

ideal, of being shut out from nothing and yet of having . . .

 

 

318
none of the burden or worry of anything"; she is social and
economic security for the twilight years. But he does not
marry her. A dark figure from the periphery of his past
blocks his view of Mrs. Worthingham, a figure "rotund" and
"oddly unassertive" but casting a shadow ages longer than
the modern lady's (343-45)-

Renewing acquaintance with Cornelia Rasch sours White-

 

Mason on any marriage with Mrs. Worthingham. He recalls

his old style of life as a conservative New Yorker, and even
though Cornelia is not personally attractive, her quality
and tone make Mrs. Worthingham seem the ultimate in incom-
patible social impossibilities. Like Strether when Jim
Pocock recalls the late Mr. Newsome, White-Mason now
shudders to think of "the doubtless very queer spectre of
the late Mr. Worthingham" (349). And what had originally
attracted him to her, the complete lack of a sense of the

past, is now a detriment. Yes, she would marry him, as the

 

other three would not, but she would bury his identity to
do it; she could not appreciate him for what he was and is;

only Cornelia can do that:

Mrs. Worthingham had no data . . . No data, he
felt,for a conception of the sort of thing the
New York of "his time" had been in his personal
life--the New York so unexpectedly, so v1v1dly,
and, as he might say, so perversely called back
to his senses by its identity With that of poor
Cornelia's time; since even she had had a time,
small show as it was likely to make now, and his
time and hers had been the same. Cornelia figured
to him while he walked away as by contrast and
opposition a massive little bundle of data . . .
wherever he might touch her . . . he would . . .
recognize some small extrusion of history. (352)

 

 

319

Even the poorest representatives of the earlier time have
more to offer than the finest of the new. Proudly, White—
Mason refuses to give up the little that is left. Mrs.
Worthingham not only has no past, she has no delicacy and
no manners. She condescends to Cornelia so badly that
White-Mason savagely attacks the future society of America:

This was clearly going to be the music of the

future--that if people were but rich enough and

furnished enough and fed enough, exercised and

sanitated and manicured, and general advised

and advertised and made "knowing" enough, avertis

enough . . . all they had to do for civility was

to take the amused ironic view of those who might

be less initiated. In his time, when he was young

or even when he was only but a little less middle-
aged, the best manners had been the best kindness

. . . (348)
Social polish is a very superficial and commercial article
in the new American culture.

"Crapy Cornelia" is a simple, nostalgic tribute to a

slightly finer American past. White-Mason knows his era
is gone; "the last nail in the coffin of the poor dear ex-
tinct past had been planted for him by his having thus to
reach his antique contemporary through perforation of the
newest newnessfl He and Cornelia are in a "rare little
position . . . as conscious, ironic, pathetic survivors to—
gether of a dead and buried society" (353). Pitiably, all
that is left is a thin veneer of the past, which they must
eke out as best they can:

But we can't afford at this time of day not to

help each other to have had——well, everything

there was, since there's no more of it now, nor
any way of coming by it except pp; and therefore

 

 

320
let us make together, let us make over and
recreate, our lost world; for which we have

after all and at the worst such a lot of
material. (357)

The nostalgia is not so thick that it obscures how thin
even the America of twenty years before was to James; it is
only when compared with "the new, the 1atest,the luridest
power of money" that "the ancient reserves and moderations
and mediocrities" seem so valuable:

These last struck him as showing by contrast

the old brown surface and tone as of velvet

rubbed and worn, shabby, and even a bit dingy,

but all soft and subtle and still velvety--which

meant still dignified; whereas the angular facts

of current finance were as harsh and metallic

and bewildering as some stacked "exhibit" of

ugly patented inventions, things his mediaeval

mind forbade his taking in. (354)
Such passages inevitably remind the reader of James's own
"mediaeval" mind, his and Henry Adams's bewilderment before
machinery of a technological age, and James's failure to
"crack" the downtown New York world of finance. And White-
Mason's reminiscences of the area "south of Thirtieth Street
and north of Washington Square," not far from James's van-
ished home, sound like nostalgic passages from The American

Scene:

. . . those days, those spacious, sociable,
Arcadian days, that we flattered ourselves

we filled with the modern fever . . . were

so different from any of these arrangements
of pretended hourly time that dash them—
selves forever to pieces as from the fiftieth
floors of sky-scrapers. (357)

Nostalgia lies thicker than the dust on Cornelia's relics.

White-Mason is enthralled: "'Do you mean you can tell me

 

 

321

things--?' It was too beautiful to believe. 'About what
really was?'"-—Cornelia finishes the hOpeful sentence (364).
She can help him live with "these modern wonders--such as
they are!" (365). Both she and White-Mason feel old, left
behind by the fast pace of what is called progress (366—67).
White-Mason has decided that the present is not worth keep-
ing up with. In Cornelia's flat, even with its bright
fire, he needs no dark glasses to filter out glare. For
Cornelia's light has the tone of time; and if her crepe and
his inertia suggest death as well as age, the tale is not
criticizing these figures so much as recognizing that their
mellow old world is dead and deserves commemoration. For
James, also feeling old, has turned for a final warm part-
ing with a more compatible past before returning to a cold
new world that seems not so much brave as utterly ruth-
less.12

James's criticism of America continues right up to the
war. "A Round of Visits" (1910) portrays Mark Monteith re-
turning to America after being swindled by an American
friend left in charge of his affairs. Mark's renewal of
his old acquaintances is far from happy; Florence Ash is
about to be divorced from her husband, and Newton Winch
(a casual acquaintance) turns out to be a swindler similar
to the one who disrupted his life abroad. Winch redeems
himself by his sensitivity in perceiving Mark's troubles,
but his only expiation for his crimes is suicide--hardly

an optimistic solution fer American society to follow.

 

 

322
The Outcpy (1911) is no more flattering to America.
Breckenridge Bender, the American collector who has come
to buy the painting at stake in the work, is a poor suc-
cessor to Adam Verver, and belongs in the line of blank
American faces lately disgraced by Mrs. Drack:

Fortune . . . had simply overlooked and neglected
his vast wholly—shaven face, which thus showed

not so much for perfunctorily scamped as for not
treated . . . at all. Nothing seemed to have ,
been done for it but what the razor and the sponge,
the tooth-brush and the looking-glass could of-
ficiously do; it had in short resisted any possibly
finer attrition at the hands of fifty years of
offered experience. It had developed on the lines,
if lines they could be called, of the mere scoured
and polished and initialled "mug" rather than to
any effect of a composed physiognomy; though . . .
its wearer carried this featureless disk as with
the warranted confidence that might have attended
a warning headlight or a glaring motor—lamp.13

Not until the war years will James review the positive side

 

of America, trying to put together the pieces of the inter-
national theme one more time to see what he can make of
them-~the artist eternally reassimilating the past to relate
it to the present and the future. The picture he formu—
lates, unfinished when he dies but carefully outlined,

frames the final section of this chapter.

 

 

Notes

le. Letters, I, pp. 309-11.

2Letters, I, p. 338; of. II, 477-78.

3Garland' '8 evidence, recorded in Roadside Meetings
(New York, 1930), p. 461, and quoted by Bewley, pp. 70-7ln,
is hearsay, but the testimony rings true: "He became very
much in earnest at last and said something which surprised
and gratified me. 'If I were to live my life over again,‘
he said in a low voice, and fixing upon me a somber glance,
'I would be an American. I would steep myself in America,
I would know no other land. I would study its beautiful
side. The mixture of Europe and America which you see in
me has proved disastrous. It has made of me a man who is
neither American nor EurOpean. I have lost touch with my
own people, and live here alone. My neighbours are
friendly, but they are not of my blood, except remotely.
As a man grows old he feels these conditions more than
when he is young. I shall never return to the United States,
but I wish I could.'" Garland's memory may distort some
sentiments, but overall the passage parallels scattered
sentiments in James's letters remarkably well.

4James writes to Mrs. Wharton, for example, November 19,
1911, that The Goldgp Bowl now seems an "arduous and thank-
less task," and its "vague verbosity" no longer pleases him
so much as the "steel structure of the other form," plays.
--Letters, II, p. 209. Volume and page references in the
following paragraphs are to the Letters.

 

 

5AS, p. 121; cf. p. 64. Page references in parentheses
now ref—r to The American Scene.

6Cf. Wegelin's treatment, p. 159.

 

7Tales, XII, pp. 177, 187-88. Page references follow-
ing are to this edition.

8How differently James can feel about representatives
of American wealth in the final years is suggested by a
comparison of Mrs. Drack with RosannaGaw of The Ivory
Tower, who parallels her in physical size but not at all
in character; or by comparing her with Aurora Coyne of
The Sense of the Past, whom Cargill interprets from her
name as a representative of America's "rising millions."
James still rejects the ugly commercial sources of American
wealth and the predatory tycoons like Abel Gaw in The
Ivory Tower, but finds some wealthy Americans a bit more
tolerable than Mrs. Drack, if not quite so admirable as the
heiresses of the major phase.

 

 

323

 

 

 

 

 

 

324

I

9Introduction, Tales, XII, p. 8. Page references
are to this volume.

101 have not yet ascertained the accuracy of Clair' s
remarks on the tale, in The Ironic Dimension in the Fiction

 

Lf Henry James (Pittsburgh, 1965), pp. 17- 36, which make
Brydon' s sense of the past more subject to pathology than
parable, but the interpretation makes no essential differ-
ence to my argument. Even if Alice Staverton is a schemer
as Clair argues, then modern American society is still
reprehensible, and she becomes an example of what happens
to Americans who-~unlike Brydon--remain in America most of
their lives: they become amoral exploiters.

11See p. 202, and of. Clair, pp. 19, 27.

12James compares himself to White-Mason, for example,
in a letter to Miss Henrietta Reubell, October 19, 1909,
Letters, II, pp. 139-40: "I have great occasional bouffées

 

of fond memory and longing from our dear old past Paris.
It affects me as rather ghosty; but life becomes more and
more that, and I have learnt to live with my pale spectre
more than with my ruddy respirers. They will sit thick on
the old red sofa. But with you the shepherdess of the
flock it will be all right. You are not Cornelia, but I
am much White-Mason, and I shall again sit by your fire."
This attitude, as Bewley points out, makes the reader
wonder whether "his forty-eight—year-old hero, White—Mason,
doesn't overcome the grandiose temptation of luxurious ir—
responsibility in the present by submitting to an equally
pernicious sentimentalization of the past."--p. 77n. If
James had remained in White-Mason's position, and had not
criticized American society even as he recalled it with
nostalgia, this charge would also fit the author himself.

13The Outcry (New York, 1911), pp. 24-25, quoted by
Stone, pp. 83-84.

 

 

 

325
5. The Final Years (1914-1916)

As though telescoping and re-living his life, James
forsakes America again in favor of England, writes short
fiction until 1908, then returns to writing plays just as
he had from 1890 to 1895; finally, after similar discour-
aging eXperiences with these plays, and after his long ill-_
nesses and William's death, he once more composes long
international fiction just as he had in the major phase.
What caused the repeated pattern, and more particularly,
what caused the resurrection of the international theme?
The failure of the New York Edition to sell accounts for
his return to writing plays, for he had worked long and
hard on the edition, and was tired and bitter at its in-

different reception. Late in 1915 he writes Edmund Gosse

 

 

that his "poor old rather truncated editon, in fact en-
tirely frustrated one . . . has the grotesque likeness for
me of a sort of miniature Ozymandias of Egypt ('look on my
pppkp, ye mighty, and despair!')--round which the lone and
level sands stretch further away than ever" (Letters, II,
497). The edition "has never had the least intelligent
critical justice done it," he continues, and "I am past

all praying for anywhere; I remain at my age . . . and after
my long career, utterly, insurmountably, unsaleable." So

he returns to plays for a time. A few years of repeated

failure to achieve popular success in the theatre would

 

 

 

 

326
again explain his return to fiction. But if his fictional
capital, as he explains to Alice James, is all invested in
England, why should he write about America and the interna-
tional theme once more? The theme will not stay buried;

both The Ivory Tower and The Sense p§_the Past are resur-

 

 

 

rected from old sections of his notebooks. The fact that
international stories had been easy to write and had been
his only financial and popular success in the past could
explain his writing short tales during years of lean pro-
duction, but not the long novels he planned.

One major reason for trying long fiction once more is
simply the challenge of it. If pOpularity and financial
success are denied, art has its own rewards, and James cul-

tivates them. The Sense p£_the Past, the old international

 

 

ghost story he was writing for Howells in 1900, particu—
larly intrigued him due to its difficulty. But James is
not merely immersing himself in art to escape his personal
troubles or the cosmic disturbances of the age. Granted
James is disillusioned with America, but the tales of Amer-
ican life that he writes deal with that disillusion; they
do not try to avoid it; and The Ivory Tower is far from the
least of these works. In addition he suffers a disillusion
with EurOpe far greater than any shock America could give
him. Europe, heart of western civilization, not only
crumbles from the tide of Americanization, but disintegrates
from within to the barbaric condition of total war. But

James does not ultimately run from this disillusion either.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

327

His return to the international theme in The Sense 3: the

 

Past is no escape. Through utter despair he moves to re-
newed hope, salvaging what can be salvaged, and makes clear
that however precious the sense of the past may be, the
only viable place to live is in the present.
The war upsets James's sense of the past more than his
trip to America. His jarring visit to the States helps
make the war even more disastrous to him, though, by making
him value England so much more in comparison. Faced with
loving America less, James must love Britain more. When he
returns and sees the "old-world nooks and corners and
felicities" of rural England, he feels protectively "(in
the thick of revolution) that anything that happens--happens
disturbingly--to this wonderful little attaching old England,
the ripest fruit of time, can only be a change for the
worse" (Letters, II, 196). Unfortunately such sequestered
places are not universal in the country. Like New York,
London has become much more urban and commercialized, as he
writes to Mrs. Henry White in 1913:
But it's another London, this old Chelsea of
simplifications and sacrifices, from the world
in which I so like to feel that I for so long
lived more or less with you. I feel somehow
as much away from that now as you and Harry
must feel amid your new Washington horizons--
and it has of itself, for that matter, gone to
pieces under the sweep of the big broom of
Time, which has scattered it without ceremony.
(Letters, II, 297)
If James wants to enjoy old England, he must stay at Lamb

House and hOpe the outside world will not break in. He

alternates solitude at Lamb House with company in London,

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

328
growing admittedly fonder of the former. He is clearly,
however, no monk nor reactionary. Right up to the eve of
the war, James is primed for life in the present, and re—
fuses to succumb to the horror of fast change. In a letter
marking his difference in temperament from Henry Adams
even more than his fiction, James tries to encourage Henry
to live in the twentieth century:

I have your melancholy outpouring of the 7th,

and I know not how better to acknowledge it

than by the full recognition of its unmitigated
blackness. Of course we are lone survivors,

of course the _past that was our lives is at the
bottom of an abyss--if the abyss pap any bottom;
of course, too, there's no use talking unless
one particularly wants to. But the purpose, al-
most, of my printed divagations was to show you
than one pgp, strange to say, still want to--or
at least can behave as if one did. Behold me
therefore so behaving-—and apparently capable

of continuing to do so. I still find my con-
sciousness interesting——under cultivation of the
interest. Cultivate it with me, dear Henry--
that's what I hOped to make you do--to cultivate
yours for all that it has in common with mine.
Wpy mine yields an interest I don't know that I
can tell you, but I don't challenge or quarrel
with it--I encourage it with a ghastly grin.

You see I still, in presence of life (or of what
you deny to be such), have reactions-—as many as
possible--and the book I sent you ZNotes Lf a Son and
Brother7 is a- proof of them. It's, I suppose, be-“
cause I am that queer monster, the artist, an
obstinate finality, an inexhaustible sensibility.
Hence the reactions—-appearances, memories, many
things, go on playing upon it with consequences that
I note and 'enjoy' (grim word!) noting. It all
takes doing-—and I Lo. I believe I shall do yet
again--it is still an act of life. (Letters, 11,
360- 61)

 

 

 

On the very precipice of the apocalypse, he can write Alice
James that "the political atmosphere here is charged to

eXplosion as it has never been-~what is to happen no man

 

knows; but this only makes it a more thrilling and

 

 

J—% in _J

 

 

 

 

 

329
spectacular world. The tension has never been so great"
(Letters, II, 363). As in the case of his rising enthusiasm
for going to America in 1904, James's appetite for experience
is building him up for a fall. It is this bravery, this
insatiability for impressions of all kinds, that James loses
with the onset of the war, and he will have a long war with-
in himself to recover it.

In that first month or so after the outbreak of hos-
tilities, James is utterly devastated. Suddenly the past
seems no longer relevant at all to the present; George
Sand's autobiography is just "ancient prattle (heaven for-
give me!)" (Letters, II, 387); and worst of all,his own
works now appear to be wasted portraits of a world that
never was or never mattered. All is undone. Excerpts from
James's effusions to his friends show his grief and dis—
orientation better than any rhetoric I could summon:

. . . it's vain to try to talk as if one weren't

living in a nightmare of the deepest dye. How
can what is going on not be to one as a huge
horror of blackness? . . . The plunge of civili-
zation into this abyss of blood and darkness by
the wanton feat of those two infamous autocrats
is a thing that so gives away the whole long age
during which we have supposed the world to be,
with whatever abatement, gradually bettering,
that to have to take it all now for what the
treacherous years were all the while really
making for and meaning is too tragic for any
words. (Letters, II, 383)

Everything is of the last abnormalism now, and
no convulsion, no historic event of any such
immensity can ever have taken place in such a
turn-over of a few hours and with such a measure-
less rush—~the whole thing being, in other words,

such an unprecedented combination of size and
suddenness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

330
The pace of change in America cannot even compare with such
torrents. James has no faith now in either past or future,
for the two seem hideously disconnected. The future, laments
James, "looks to me as the past already looks":

I mean the recent past of happy motor-runs

. . . : disconnected and fabulous, fatuous,
fantastic, belonging to another life and an—
other planet. I find it such a mistake on my
own part to have lived on -—when, like other
saner and safer persons, I might perfectly
have not--into this unspeakable give-away of
the whole fool's paradise of our past. It
throws back so livid a light—-this was what we
were so fondly working for! (II, 387—88)

 

 

James's sense of the past is totally disrupted; his whole
conception of the past must be revised. He writes Rhoda
Broughton in August, 1914:

You and I, the ornaments of our generation,

should have been spared this wreck of our belief
that through the long years we had seen civiliza—
tion grow and the worst become impossible. The
tide that bore us along was then all the while
moving to this as its grand Niagara . . . It seems
to me to undo everything, everything that was ours, ;
in the most horrible retroactive way . . . (II, 389)

 

 

 

William James receives this expression of disjunction:

The extraordinary thing is the way that every
interest and every connection that seemed still
to exist up to exactly a month ago has been as
annihilated as if it had never lifted a head in
the world at all. (II, 395)

One of the effects of this colossal convulsion
is that all connection with everything of every
kind that has gone before seems to have broken
short off in a night, and nothing ever to have
happened of the least consequence or relevance,
beside what is happening now. Therefore when
you express to me so beautifully and touchingly
your interest in my 'Notes' of--another life and

 

 

 

planet, as one now can but feel, I have to make

an enormous effort to hitch the allusion to my

present consciousness. (II, 401-02)
His whole sense of the past is undone. James no longer
trusts his foresight, for it did not warn him at all of the
cataclysm coming; in fact, it projected peace and social
fusion. He is living entirely in the disastrous present;
and while he raises an occasional "xix; the old delusion"
(II, 388), he feels that his old assumption of social syn—
thesis is in fact a delusion. Like the American Civil War
and the French Revolution, both of which he recalls as
parallels when his sense of the past returns (II, 401;
390, 410), World War I will mark the end of one age and the
beginning of another for James. The problem, somewhat like
White—Mason's in "Crapy Cornelia," is whether to live out
one's life in a sequestered nook of the older era or move
into the tide of the new one.

James balances for a time between hope for the future
and grief for the past. He expects the "old systematic
organisation" to survive in some form, of course, and hopes
to remain a part of it (II, 395). As he writes Rhoda
Broughton in August, 1914, "I do believe that we shall be
again gathered into a blessed little Chelsea drawing—room--
it will be like the reopening of the salons, so irrepres-
sibly, after the French revolution" (II, 390). For his
initial shock and despair are almost immediately turning

to hope:

 

 

 

 

 

332

. . . one sees everything without exception that

has been a part of past history through the an—

nihilation of battle smoke if of nothing else, and

all questions, again, swoon away into the obscure.

If you have got something to do,stick to it tight,

and do it with faith and force; some things will,

no doubt, eventually be redeemed. (II, 403)
His sense of the past is very intimately and sensitively
dependent on his sense of the present. As the notion
rouses itself, James begins to see the war as a purge and
a challenge which will renew England's past greatness by
calling forth "certain parts of herself again that had
seemed for long a good deal lost" (II, 409; cf. 416-17).
Like Henry Adams, he complains that "the proportions of
things have so changed and one's poor old 'values' received
such a shock." But James does not st0p with Adams' de—
spair: "I say to myself that this is all the more reason
why one should recover as many of them as possible and keep
hold of them in the very interest of civilisation and the
honour of our race; as to which I am certainly right-~but
it takes some doing!" (II, 411). He is fighting a paraly—
sis of hOpe and despair:

Strange as it may seem, there are times when I

am much uplifted--when what may come out of it

all seems almost worth it. And then the black

nightmare holds the field again--and in fact one

proceeds almost wholly by those restless alter—

nations. They consume one's vital substance,

but one will perhaps wear them out first. (II, 443)
James notices the change in himself and welcomes it:
". . . I live partly in dark abysses and partly in high
and, I think, noble elations" (II, 446). The ship is still

rolling, but is beginning to ride the waves.

 

 

 

 

333

One major symptom of James's recovery from the shock
of the war is his taking up reading and writing once again.
Though he does not feel like finishing The Ivory Tower at
this time, he has "got hold of something else," The Sense

.9: the Past, and he finds "the effort of concentration to

 

 

some extent an antidote" to continual consciousness of the
war (II, 392). Percy Lubbock explains James's preference
for working on this novel as a form of escape from the
present:

The Ivory Tower had to be laid aside--it was
impossible to believe any longer in a modern
fiction, supposed to represent the life of the
day, which the great catastrophe had so belied;
but he took up The Sense of the Past again the
fantasmal story he had abandoned for its diffi-
culty in l900—-finding its unreality now {emote
enough to be beyond the reach of the war.

 

In other words The Ivory Tower is not enough of an ivory

tower for James--he needs The Sense 3; the Past to provide

 

 

the distance from the present desired. I disagree with this
interpretation of both novels. There is evidence that James
occasionally wanted to get away from it all, of course.

He writes Thomas Sergeant Perry for a volume on "the
American theatre of my infancy" so he can immerse himself

in the "ghostly little facts" of the past:

I ask with a queer dim feeling that they might,

or the fingered volume might, operate as a

blest little diversion from our eternal obsession
here. I have reached the point now, after eight
months of that oppression, of cultivating small

arts of escape, small plunges into oblivion and
dissimulation; in fact I am able to read again--

for ever so long this power was almost blighted--

and to want to become as dissociated as possible from
the present. (II, 460)

 

 

g H -

 

 

 

 

 

334
But to infer from the fact that James diverted his mind with
"small arts to escape" once in a while, that his novels are
just more extended diversions, is to overlook the reality
with which those novels deal, and the negative attitude
James had toward his past fiction because he felt it had
not diagnosed the problems of the age. He writes to
Compton Mackenzie that the "violence of rupture with the
past" caused by the war "makes me ask myself what will be-
come of all that material we were taking for granted, and
which now lies there behind us like some vast damaged cargo
dumped upon a dock and unfit for human purchase or consump-
tion" (II, 476). The war damaged James's fiction in his
own eyes by making it seem a deficient portrait of his time.
He is not likely to write new works he considers more de-
2

ficient.

The Ivory Tower was in fact set aside at the outset of

 

the war (see Letters, II, 392), which Lubbock explains by
assuming that the work seemed unreal to James as the repre—
sentation of a society that could bring on the war, so he
discarded it as a novel not relevant enough to merit com-
pletion at that time. Even if this interpretation is true,
however, the possibility immediately comes to mind that
James set aside The Ivory Tower to work on a mgr; relevant
novel rather than a pure fantasy. James may well have felt
that by not prophesying the war or picturing its causes in
the social fabric, he had been outside the main stream of

European history. But that conviction would not negate the

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

335
value of The Ivory Tower even while prodding James to work

on something else. For The Ivory Tower is a criticism of

 

 

American life in the twentieth century, and America had very
little to do with the causes of World War I. James may have
felt that he had neglected Europe too long in his compo-
sition on primarily American subjects. His desire "to try
and get back to some form of work adjustable in a manner to
one's present state of consciousness" (Notebooks, 361),

may be partly a wish to escape, but it may also lead to a

 

more direct confrontation with the problem. Some criticism
of Europe is clearly in order, or some more truly interna-
tional work placing the two hemispheres once more in per-
Spective. Consequently The Sens§_g£ the Past portrays a
crude, materialistic England of the fairly recent past——
the counterpart of the contemporary "exhibition that has
gone on so long of their huge materialized stupidity and
vulgarity," the "enormous national sacrifice to insensate
amusement, without a redeeming idea or a generous passion"
for which James fears the English will have to pay in the
course of the war (Letters, II, 377).

But before defending The Sense 3; the Past, I would

 

like to attack the idea that The Ivory Tower is unreal and

irrelevant. It would indeed be ironic if a work dealing

 

explicitly with the theme of isolation from reality, revealed
in fact the isolation of its author from contemporary
society-—ironic and unlikely. For The Ivory Tower is not an

ivory tower. No mere extension of the optimism of the major

 

336

phase nor nostalgic attempt to regain the old illusion,
the novel is one of James's clearest critiques of American
society. His trip to America leaves an unmistakable mark,
for the negative side of American culture is turned toward
the reader much more often than in earlier works. Abel Gaw
is a very predatory descendant of Adam Verver, a greedy
vindictive shrunken retired tycoon (XXV, 3-4). Horton Vint
and Cissy Foy are latter—day parallels of Merton Densher

and Kate Croy, or perhaps Gilbert Osmond and Selina Merle,

 

"well—nigh the crudest and most typical, the most 'modern'"
in their refusal to marry each other without wealth (XXV,
302). Gussy Bradham is stupid; her "straight cold radiance"
has an "emphasis that was like the stamp of hard flat feet"
(49). Her "extraordinary perfections of neatness, of
elegance, of arrangement" strike Rosanna Gaw as either "a
supreme attestation of care" or, more likely, as "the clear
truth of her essential commonness"; she is "an advertise-
ment of all the latest knowledge of how to 'treat' every
inch of the human surface and where to 'get‘ every scrap of
the personal envelope" (50). Other American characters do
not even have the envelope, as the old pale-faced American
who dominates the English period and deteriorates after

the major phase finally reaches his nadir. In the business
world there is "a kind of generalised or, as they seemed

to be calling it, standardised face, as of sharpness with—
out edge" (248). Representing the professions is the

lawyer Mr- Crick, dry as a desert, with no personal identity

 

 

337
and a mind full of dead facts (241-42, 244):

The refusal of his whole person to figure as a
fact invidiously distinguishable, that of his
aspect to have an identity, of his eyes to have
a consciousness, of his hair to have a colour,
of his nose to have a form, of his mouth to have
a motion, of his voice to consent to any separa—
tion of sounds, made intercourse with him at
once extremely easy and extraordinarily empty;

it was deprived of the flicker of anything by the
way and resembled the act of moving forward in a
perfectly-rolling carriage with the blind of each
window neatly drawn down. (245)

And there is the ubiquitous Miss Mumby, "a vessel of the

American want of correspondence" to anything. She is

 

"ample, genial, familiar and more radiantly clean than he
had ever known any vessel, to whatever purpose destined,"
takes everything for granted, and has "a kind of dazzling
aura, a special radiance of disconnection" (78). Always
dressed in white in her role as trained nurse, Miss Mumby
nevertheless seems to Graham Fielder a "violent repudiation
of type," for she could be "a youngish mother perhaps, a
sister, a cousin, a friend, even a possible bride" (79).
Like earlier Americans of the international theme, she has
been abroad, but with hardly any visible results:

Miss Mumby had been to Europe, and he saw soon

enough how there was nowhere one could say she

hadn't gone and nothing one could say she hadn't

done-—one's perception could bear only on what

she hadn't become; so that, as he thus perceived,

though she might have affected Europe even as she

was now affecting him, she was a pure negation of

its having affected herself, unless perhaps by

adding to her power to make him feel how little

he could impose on her. (81)
She is the epitome of colorless American "society," since

it was "already attested that the Miss Mumbys (for it was

 

338

evident there would be thousands of them) were in society,
or were, at any rate, not out of it, society thereby be-
coming clearly colossal" (82-83). And true to The Rever-
berator but with a more caustic criticism, Gray notes that
"the newspaper interest only fed the more full . . . from
the perfectly bare plate offered its flocking young emis-
saries" (249).3

Such Americans, of course, have absolutely no sense of
the past--and America provides no past for them to sense.

Unlike in such early tales as "A Passionate Pilgrim" the

 

main characters are not as a mere matter of course excep-
tional perceptors of the residues of time. Instead their re-
lation to the past and perception of it serve as a very re-
fined measurement of their maturity and development of con-
sciousness. In fact the sense of the past becomes more and
more, as the mounting evidence traced in this chapter implies,
the most reliable index of development in James, and it is
dangerous to interpret his characters without consulting
their personal sense of it. Many of his characters, from

Isabel Archer to Maggie Verver, have intelligence and fine

 

perception; but the stage of their progress at any given
point is often most clearly revealed by the state of their
sense of the past. Similarly, characters who do not change
are evaluated according to their perceptions of time. Horton
Vint, who represents what Graham Fielder might have been had
he accepted the chance to live with Mr. Betterman (290), is

constantly glued to the future. When he discusses the

 

 

 

 

 

339

coming of Graham Fielder with Cissy Foy, his eyes are
"fixed" on projecting what the event may mean to them,
envisioning only what is to come (161). He and Cissy are
ready to exploit their past relationships with Gray for
their own selfish futures, much as Kate Croy and Merton
Densher try to eXploit Milly Theale. To Vint, Gray repre-
sents "something like his entire personal future" (197).
Consequently his total sense of time is distorted. When he
talks with Graham about the past, he is completely dis—
oriented; time seems to him to stop, and he is startled by
the amount of time elapsed when he re-emerges to a con-
sciousness of it (229-30). He is a yes man to Graham, who
wishes instead that Vint "would only go on bristling as he
promised with instances and items, would only consent to
consist at the same rate and in his very self of material
for history" as he had when Graham first talked with him
(256).

Abel Gaw, of course, is unredeemable, as his perverted
and frustrated sense of the past reveals. He lives with one
purpose, an obsessive "hunger to learn to what extent he had
anciently, to what degree he had irremediably, ruined his
whilom associate" Mr. Betterman (93). When he is thwarted
in trying to establish that knowledge, and Betterman ap-
pears to be recovering, Gaw dies.

His daughter Rosanna is much finer than he is, and more
perceptive and less selfish than Horton Vint, but she too

lacks a truly mature sense of the past. Her problem is an

 

 

 

 

 

340

inability to assimilate the past properly; she just lives it
over, rehearsing it, trying to control it through retrospec-
tion. Unburdening her sense of responsibility for Graham's
career to Davey Bradham, Rosanna likes "the comfort of hav-
ing it well out, and yet of keeping it . . . well within
her control, more and more operative" (33). She feels un-
easy about her part as a young girl in influencing Graham
not to come to America, and tries to make up for his re-
sulting loss of a fortune by interceding with Mr. Betterman
on his behalf. She has a good memory for some things.
Smoking to relax, after she has "recovered the sense of the
past," Rosanna tells Davey of feelings that "come back to
me as if from yesterday," especially that "half an hour
that I recover vividly, recover, I assure you, quite pain-‘
fully still" in which she virtually determined Graham's
future. But her memory is not always so good. She cannot
recall the origin of the ivory tower (147-49), and is ap-
parently unaware of the way to get out of the ivory tower
she has created for herself (215).

Rosanna is always struggling rather unsuccessfully for
objective distance, for perspective. She is as nervous
when meeting Gray for the first time after his return to
America as she was when they met as adolescents in Europe,
and her use of a fan to hide behind is ludicrous (l42-46).
Likewise she has never fully recovered from Horton Vint's
proposal of marriage to her. Gussy Bradham has just men-

tioned Vint in connection with Gray:

 

 

 

 

341

Well, the next moment at any rate she knew, and
the more extraordinary then than anything was

the spread of her apprehension, off somehow to
the incalculable, under Gussy's mention of a name.
What did this show most of all, however, but how
little the intensity of her private associations
with the name had even yet died out, or at least
how vividly it could revive in a connection by
which everything in her was quickened? (54)

Rosanna is suddenly on pins and needles; "here withal was
association, association unquenched" (55). Yet she had
turned down Vint with calm decision, so she cannot imagine

why she still vibrates on the subject: "Something there

 

was, something there had to be, if only the marvel, so to
say, of her present, her permanent, backward vision of the
force with which they had touched and separated" (58). Her
consciousness is distorted by such renewed experiences; she
feels that days have passed, in effect, and wants to detach
herself to gain perspective "if only of mere space and time"
(67).

Rosanna obviously has sensitivity and great potential
for fine consciousness; James refers to her sometimes as
"our young woman of feeling" (61). But he also calls her
"poor brooding Rosanna" (44), indicating that she is caught
too much in her retrospection. The clearest indication
that Rosanna is not fully mature, however, is Graham's
impression of her after so many years:

. . . though there was even more of her in

presence than he had reckoned there was some-
how less of her in time; as if she had at once
grown and grown and grown, grown in all sorts

of ways save the most natural one of growing
visibly older. Such an oddity as that made

 

 

342
her another person a good deal more than her

show of not having left him behind by any
break with their common youth could keep her

the same. (130)
Rosanna has prodigiously put on space (she looks like a
walking pagoda under a parasol—-p. l), but like even the

buildings in the clear social air, she has not taken on the

 

 

tone of time. She has not assimilated the past in beauti-
fully documentary wrinkles or features; thus her face, so

important in revealing persons with a character and a past

 

in James, remains very much the typical blank American
sheet.

Graham Fielder is of course the most perceptive charac-
ter in the work.4 He is a native—born American who has been
in Europe during the most productive years of his develop-
ment but was exposed to America enough in early childhood
to pick up a strong impression. Consequently he now re—
turns as the most exquisite observer of America possible--

a variation on the older Jamesian convention of the Ameri-
can as the finest observer of Europe. Instead of being some
innate national faculty as in the early works, the sense of
the past is a function of early childhood impressions and
later development of consciousness. Graham's return to
America provides a strong exhibition of his sense of the
past and his projections of what he would find in America

after so many years:

He recognized--that was the secret, recognised
wherever he looked-~and knew that when, from
afar back, during his stretch of unbroken absence,

 

 

 

 

343

he had still felt, and liked to feel, what air
had originally breathed upon him, these

piercing intensities of salience had really
peOpled the vision. He had much less remembered
the actual than forecast the inevitable, and the
huge involved necessity of its all showing as he
found it seemed fairly to shout in his ear. (74)

 

Not just the sense of the past, but the whole "life of the
intelligence had its greatest fineness in Gray Fielder,"
a fact that is never more clear than when he is with Horton

Vint, in whom the reader has "a more or less apprehensive

 

foretaste" of what a life of intelligence means to a mind
bent on eXploitation (216). Even Vint sees how superior
Graham is--"tremendously 'cultivated" and cosmopolitanised

. . . extra-refined and ultra-perceptive"--yet how ele—
gantly simple (192), sees how "endowed with every advantage,
personal, physical, material, moral, in other words,
brilliantly clever, inordinately rich, strikingly handsome
and incredibly good" Graham is (200). When the two men are
together, silences deepen their conversations for Graham
and the reader, but Vint remains relatively puzzled. He
cannot usually figure out Graham's fine shades of meaning,
though he is impressed with their presence (221). During
one special silence of several minutes "Horton, truly
touched now . . . waited unmistakably for the sign of some—
thing more important than his imagination, even at its best,
could give him, and which, not less conceivably, would be
the sort of thing he himself hadn't sign, either actual or
possible, for" (201—02), Graham's "choicest silver scales"

of consciousness make him the frank and simple American of

 

344
the old international theme raised to a new height, make
his simplicity "a different affair from the crude candour

of the common sort" (192). Vint even finds his own sim-

 

plicities being "allowed for an deferred to" by Graham (193).
Graham's superior awareness is not enough to protect

him from Vint's exploitation at first. He is caught like

Rosanna in the sense of his past relationship with Vint,

in which Vint saved his life: "'I should be without a head

to-day if you hadn't seen so to my future, just as I should

 

be without a heart, you must really let me remark, if I
didn't look now to your past'" (231). This event is con-
stantly alluded to by Graham, is always present in his mind
(289-90). When Graham gets caught up with emotionally charged
associations, his retrospection swells immeasurably, causing
him to lose his sense of the passage of time just as Vint
and Rosanna do. Here is Graham's mind, for example, after
the bedside visit with Betterman: "His after~sense of the
scene eXpanded rather than settled, became an impression of
one of those great insistent bounties that are not of this
troubled world" until "he looked at his watch and saw how
the time had passed" (123—24). As he becomes better ac-
climated, his ability to assimilate experience refines and
accelerates. The intense conversation with Vint after
Betterman's death becomes a kinetic rather than a static
Part of his consciousness:

That concentrated passage between the two men

while the author of their situation was still
unburied would of course always hover to memory's

 

 

345

eye like a votive object in the rich gloom of a
chapel; but it was now disconnected, attached to
its hook once for all, its whole meaning con-
verted with such small delay into working, lay-
ing force and multiplied tasteable fruit. (250—51)

 

In order to avoid an ivory tower like Rosanna's, Graham
needs to bring his sense of the past up to date—-to recog—
nize that old buddy Horton Vint is now the amoral American
Graham might have become, that both Abel Gaw and Frank
Betterman won their fortunes through exploitation, and that

the America he once knew is not quite the Ameriéa now

 

bristling before him. Betterman wants to use Graham as "a
perfect clean blank" untainted by commercialism to expiate
his own past (77, 112), and Graham wants to think that
America is still the perfect clean blank of his childhood.
Both are wrong-~Graham has been subtly shaded by Europe,
and America has been darkly undermined by the claws of men
like Abel Gaw.

Graham does grow in awareness, of course; the plot
essentially turns on the development of the main character,
as in the novels of the major phase. Graham's growing sus-
picion that Vint is using his money for himself while acting
as his financial agent is the central fact Graham is to dis-
cover and deal with in the incomplete sections of the novel,
a fact that will help him realize the full meaning of his
first strong impression of America-~an image James took
pains to place early in the novel--that of Abel Gaw sitting
predatorily in his chair, gnawing vindictively on his mem-

ories. Graham's early expectation of a new American identity,

 

 

346

a "fresh start," a "broken link," and a "promise of puri-

 

fication" (76), is not disappointed in the manner he pre-
sumed disappointment might come. For American identity
does not finally consist, as in the English period, in
"their consistently having none-~than which deficiency
nothing was more possible" (75). Rather, it is charac-
terized by pragmatism so complete that the natural Amer-
ican morality of the old international theme is being de-

stroyed. Abel Gaw is the son of the American Adam.5

 

Graham is to discover the nature of American character
partly as a result of his indirect relationship to Cissy Foy
through old Northover "dggg lg tampg" in Europe. Exactly
how James will work out this relationship is unclear, though
a transferral of Cissy's affection from Vint to Graham sim-
ilar to Densher's switch from Kate to Milly seems likely.
Cissy perceives that Gray is "the one person within her
reach who would constitute a link with the delightful old
hero of her European adventure," with "her romance" (263).
Gray himself finds "every aspect of their so excellent time
together reviving now in a thick rich light" (262), and even
though Gray "felt no jump in him at the chance to discuss so
dear a memory in an air still incongruous" (264), James is
clearly planning a scene in which the two renew their sense
of that European episode. Apparently Cissy will fall in
love with Gray, perhaps leaving Vint a choice like Kate
Croy's-—the money or a mate, but not both. 0r Cissy may

be left with the choice, or Gray himself.6

 

347

Since James never exactly parallels two of his plots,
and since Cissy is not fully developed, the reader must
remain unsure of her role. James would undoubtedly break
more conventions of the old international theme in develop-
ing her part. She is explicitly not the American girl of
the early works, just as the rich but not at all beautiful
Rosanna is far from the old type: "'I've notoriously nothing
in common with the creature you mention,'" Cissy tells
Davey Bradham. "'I loathe,‘ she said with her purest
gentleness, 'the American girl.'" (188). Cissy imitates the
American girl's manner even as she denies that identity.
Davey replies by facing Cissy "an instant more as for a
view of the whole incongruity . . . 'Well, you do of course
brilliantly misrepresent her. But we're all'——he hastened
to patch it up--'unspeakably corrupt." With that sentence
Davey captures much of the essence of the novel. Like
"Julia Bride," Th§_lyg£y.ggg§§ reverses the old interna-
tional theme and its conventions, often with exquisite
irony, to reveal how American society has been corrupted.
Instead of two Europeans swindling a moral native American,

as in The Wings 9; the Dove, James portrays what now seems

 

 

a more likely event, two Americans swindling one of their
own, who is moral through his background in Europe. Amer—
ican innocence is no longer necessarily moral, nor is
morality necessarily innocent. James wanted the story to
be "absolutely current" and modern in its minutest details

(of. 353—55). In spite of the emphasis on Graham's sense

 

 

 

 

348
of past America, the novel's modernity and relevance are
difficult to deny.

Nor is James's last novel an escapist document, though
it treats the theme of escape from the present explicitly.
Contrary to Lubbock and Cargill, The Sense 2f the Past is
a direct resolution of an issue James was facing as a result
of the war, whether to give up on the modern era entirely
and die, or reaffirm the present and live.7 For the main
message of the work is that while the past may be a fine
place to visit, it is no place to stay. Escape is not the
main reason James gives for returning to work on the novel,
as he explains to Edith Wharton:

I have got back to trying to work—-on one of

three books begun and abandoned--. . . as perhaps

offering a certain defiance of subject to the law

by which most things now perish in the public

blight. This does seem to kind of intrinsically

resist--and I have hopes. (Letters, II, 426)
There may be escapism in trying to avoid a prevailing trend,
in this case the tendency of the past and all creative work
to be obliterated by the war, but James's intention seems
more positive than escape. He is repudiating the movement
toward anarchical revolution and the arbitrary rejection
of the past. If James were interested mainly in avoiding
reality, he would not wrestle so hard with it:

I have in a manner got back to work--after a

black interregnum; and find it a refuge and

a prop—~but the conditions make it difficult,

exceedingly, almost insuperably, I find, in a

sense far other than the mere distressing and

depressing. The subject-matter of one's effort

has become itself utterly treacherous and false
--its relation to reality utterly given away

 

 

 

 

 

349

and smashed. Reality is a world that was to

be capable of this--and how represent that

horrific capability, historically_1atent,

historically ahead of it? How on the other hand

not represent it either-—without utting into

play mere fiddlesticks? (II, 446)
Clearly James is still struggling to connect the past he
knew with the present he is learning to know--to link civ-
ilized society with the disaster that had left so few clues
to explain its generation. He is not simply escaping the
present; he is searching for its seeds in the past.

A novel may be hOpeful without being escapist. As he

writes The Sense 2; the Past, James feels that he should be

 

 

salvaging as much as possible, and that the war will leave
at least some redeeming residue. If he cannot take social
fusion for granted, he can fight for it, hope for it, or at
least re-examine the possibilities of it. The one silver
lining James sees in the war is the growing closeness of
the allied nations, particularly France and Britain. For
the English to appreciate the French valor in the war and
report it in the press "seems to me of the highest inter-
national value and importance," James declares, optim-
istically feeling that the two nations are again enjoying
a "feast of friendship" (Letters, II, 428-29, 454). It is
an "extraordinary luxury that that Whirligig of time has
turned up for us [England7 such an intimacy of association
with France and that France so exquisitely responds to

it . . . (I do wish to goodness w§.[fi.S.A;7'were in it,"

James writes to Mrs. Thomas Sergeant Berry, identifying

 

 

 

 

 

 

350
himself with both Great Britain and the United States on
the same page (II, 429). He fully expects and desires the
United States to join the allies. In becoming a British
citizen, James calculates the weight his act may have in
setting an example for his native country to follow (II,
478-79, 491). He believes even right after his decision
to be naturalised that "all the while . . . the tide of
American identity of consciousness with our own, about the
whole matter, rises and rises, and will rise still more
before it rests again--so that every day the difference of

situation diminishes and the immense fund of common senti—

 

ment increases" (II, 479).

The Sense pf the Past has a similarly hopeful assump—

 

 

tion implied in the central situation, the assumption that
both Britain and the United States have progressed to a more
civilized state since 1820, which will ultimately make
reconciliation possible. The novel is "an excursion into
the British past by an American, symbolic of the 'shared
instincts and ideals, of a communion of race and tongue,

temper and tradition,’ of the English and the Americans"

 

(Cargill, 490). But although the ancestors Ralph visits
are good specimens, they are not up to modern standards.
Mrs. Midmore, the "very finest woman of her age possible"
(XXVI, 143), represents "by the aid of dress the absolute
value and use of presence as presence" (145). Her costume
and speech and manners are part of a clear tradition (148).

But the Midmores' refinement suffers from the vulgarity of

 

 

 

 

351

the old "money patronage" system. Ralph, being wealthy,
discovers "extraordinary readiness . . . in everyone to
profit by this, the want of delicacy and dignity, by our
modern measure, in the general attitude toward pecuniary
favors" (316). Perry Midmore is stupid, so his blundering
for a handout is the worst, but the whole family is rather
crude about money (156, 274-75). In fact compared with
moderns of similar social standing, the Midmores (as their

name reflects) are only half-developed in manners and

 

morals-~the discovery Ralph must make to cure his distorted
evaluation of the past. The point is that an American of
1910 is much more refined than an Englishman of 1820, which
is no small progress, considering the Americans of 1820,
toward a synthesis of the two cultures. "The contrast be-
tween the civilization from which Ralph comes and the more
brutal one into which he penetrates is at any rate more a
contrast between present and past than America and Europe."
Ralph Pendrel is a 1910 Yankee, however, with the
initial sense of the past of an earlier variety of Ameri-
can in the international theme. He is parallel in atti-
tude to Clement Searle ("A Passionate Pilgrim"), whose
mania for the past also blinded him to the value of the
present. Ralph has Searle's natural passion for the old,
in spite of the fact that there is still little in America
to account for that passion or to develop it (17, 23). A
New Yorker in the succession of Searle, Jackson Lemon, and

Milly Theale, Ralph somehow becomes cosmopolitan without

 

 

 

 

352
ever leaving the country. James is apparently still using
his version of the American Adam, the fresh New Yorker as
the intellect best able to comprehend Europe (cf. 31).
Quoting from Ralph's "An Essay in Aid of the Reading of
History," Aurora Coyne is amazed at the insight Ralph has,
achieved "in this place, which denies the old at every turn
and contains so few such objects or surfaces" (34). The
essay, read by his English cousin, wins him a fine old

London house in Mansfield Square for an inheritance. Ralph

 

decides to live in it to cultivate a sense of the past.
When Aurora exclaims that "the sense of the past ig your
sense," denying his need to develop it further, Ralph re~
plies that his perception lacks intensity in America. He
must go abroad (32—33).

If Ralph goes to England, however, he will leave
Aurora behind, for she has had some mysterious experience
in Europe which prevents her return (15). She has decided
to be an American; for her, going to Europe was a "fool's
errand" (26). So she and Ralph make a covenant with each
other: he will go to England, she will stay in the States;
and if either crosses the sea again, he must not violate
his true self to do it (3536). James has set up two ex-
tremes-which are both at fault--Ralph the passionate pilgrim
worshiping Europe and the old, Aurora the modern devotee of
America and the adventurously new-~and will proceed to
reconcile them in the remainder of the novel. A parable is

9

clearly in the making.

 

 

353

So far Ralph's interest in the old seems unusual but
not quite obsessive. His sense of the past reflects James's
general concern with consciousness in the late fiction.
When Ralph reaches Europe, however, the "backward vision"
he is noted for (34) begins to take on tones of perversion.lo
Wanting to "recover the lost moment" may be just nostalgia,
but wanting to "feel the stopped pulse" of his ancestor

has a touch of the morbid (48). Ralph is verging on necro-

philia when he voices such sentiments, including philosophi-

 

cal ones like the following: "It was when life was framed

).11 He

in death that the picture was really hung up" (48
has the obsessive's passion for detail. In London he wanted
to sense "the very smell of that simpler mixture of things
that had so long served; he wanted the very tick of the old
stopped clocks," the hour of daily events, the "temperature
and the weather and the sound, and yet more the stillness,
from the street . . . and the slant on the walls of the
light of afternoons that had been," and even "the unimagin-
able accidents" that documents never contain (48). Some-
what like the historical novelists James criticizes so
strongly, Ralph wants the impossible, to sense the past as

if he had lived it.12

He yearns to be "contemporaneous and
present" with the past, to be taken by the "old ghosts"

for one of themselves (49). Like Spencer Brydon in "The
Jolly Corner," he lurks at night outside the house he has
inherited, avoiding the light which is symbolic of the

present: "The streetlamp was a disfavour to the dark

 

 

354
backward into which Ralph loved to look" (52). All the
"founts of romance" are loosed in his soul. Like Isabel
ArCher he wishes the house were haunted (53), and in his
fervor he mistakes the hall for Jacobean, much older than
it actually is (63). He virtually worships when he is in
the holy of holies, the third and innermost drawing room,
"the most consecrated corner of the house," featuring a
portrait of his ancestor (75). Gradually he begins the

dangerous practice of looking inward rather than out, and

 

James uses subtle descriptions of light and air to convey
the fine changes in his perception:

He looked out only to look in again under the
charm of isolation and enclosure, of being
separated from the splashed Square and its
blurred and distant life much more by time than
by space; under the charm above all of the
queer incomparable London 1ight-—unless one
frankly loved it rather as London shade—awhich
he had repeatedly noted as so strange as to be
at its finest sinister, and which just now
scattered as never before its air over what
surrounded him. However else this air might
have been described it was signally not the
light of freshness and suggested as little as
possible the element in which the first children
of nature might have begun to take notice. Ages,
generations, inventions, corruptions had pro-
duced it, and it seemed, wherever it rested, to
have filtered through the bed of history. (65)

The "children of nature," the old American Adams, would not
inhabit such a place, but Ralph is far beyond these. He
feels as though he has found a "conscious past, recog—
nizing no less than recognized" (65), and senses the
"animating presences" of a palpably visitable past, one far
enough away to be strange but close enough to be still

imaginable:

 

 

 

355

They were of an age so remote and yet of an
imagery so near. None of the steps were miss-
ing and the backward journey took no turns. It
wasn't for Ralph as if he had lost himself, as
he might have done in a deeper abyss, but much
rather as if in respect to what he most cared
for he had never found himself till now. As
the house was his house, so the time, as it
sank into him, was his time. (66)

He is imbibing the influences that will make possible his
backward transmigration into an ancestor situated at the

13

dawn of the modern era (77). He is so ultra-sensitive

that he vibrates at "a mere panel in a wainscot, a mere

 

seam in a curtain." For the first time he realizes that
if he dips all the way into his obsession, he may not
emerge again at all (70).

Ralph's sense of the past is improving--he knows now
that the hall is not Jacobean (85), and he feels that he
has outgrown his essay (93)--but his sense of the present
is disappearing. He looks at his watch at intervals, but
nothing happens (80). He is gaining his sense of the past

at the price of his sense of reality and the present. In

 

order to gain a complete sense of the past, Ralph must lose
his identity. As he explains to the American ambassador,
whom he visits just before disappearing into the past for
six months, "'The point is that I'm not myself. . . . I'm
somebody else'" (97). He is strangely lucid about the
whole matter, recognizing his obsession: "I have been
ridden all my life . . . by the desire to cultivate some
better sense of the past than has mostly seemed sufficient

even for those people who have gone in most for cultivating

 

 

 

 

356
it" (103). He thinks he has caught his ancestor in the
act of yearning for the prophet's vision, which is the
reason for the figure in the portrait facing the wrong di-
rection. Ralph is clearly a "victim of the sense of the
Past," and his ancestor is'a "victim of the sense of the
Future" (112). As Ralph enters his house after taking
leave of the ambassador on the steps, his sense of time
goes through one more obvious distortion:

Our young man was after that aware of a position
of such eminence on the upper doorstep as made
him . . . see the whole world, the waiting, the
wondering, the shrunkenly staring representative
of his country included, far, far, in fact at
last quite abysmally below him.

Ralph's recession into the past is represented by his
warped sense of distance, like looking through the wrong

end of a telescope. James continues to record the dis-

tortion:

Whether those had been rapid or rather retarded
stages he was never really to make out. Every-
thing had come to him through an increasingly
thick other medium; the medium to which the
opening door of the house gave at once an ex-
tension that was like an extraordinarily strong
odour inhaled-~an inward and inward warm reach
that his bewildered judge would literally have
seen swallow him up; though perhaps with the
supreme pause of the determined diver about to
plunge just marked in him before the closing of
the door again placed him on the right side

and the whole world as he had known it on the

wrong. (114-15)
In his notes James plots a revision of this passage which
will show Ralph using the knocker instead of the latch key,
to allow "a minute's further intensity of focussing" (303).

James is trying to catch the minutely changing quality of

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

357

Ralph's consciousness as his sense of the present recedes
into the past. Ralph has apparently lost all his old
identity, having exchanged places with his ancestor (cf.
302), and mistakenly believes that he has the right per-
ception of time and the rest of the world is in the wrong.14

Once inside, however, Ralph is gradually disenchanted,
for he has not left all his old identity behind. True, the

family history "emerged to distinctness" for him for the

first time (133), and impressions strike his quivering

 

sensibility readily enough, but something is wrong. At one
point, when one of his comments loses them, the Midmores
seem "some mechanic but consummate imitation of ancient
life, staring through the vast plate of a museum" (213).
Again like the historical novelist, Ralph has enough modern
identity left to make the introduction of anachronisms
inevitable, which falsifies the effect he wishes to pro-
duce.15 His modern identity is weird to the Midmores.

Every time he Speaks, they all listen with rapt attention

 

(239-40). Something about him is haunting them, is causing
a strange malaise (cf. Notebooks, 300). Part of the problem
is "some disparities between his and their connection with
the past"; he has a generalized knowledge reinforced by
books, while "they had the advantage of their perch upon
aCcumulations and continuities more substantially and above
all more locally determined" (283). He is working by
"inspiration" rather than experience (187), a particularly

unsettling faculty when it envisions a vase in a house that

 

 

 

 

358
Ralph has not yet visited (247)!

More important is Ralph's growing awareness of his
schizophrenia. Part of him remains incurably modern,
breaking into his perceptions until he is "at last fairly
dizzied by a succession of perspectives" (238). Once again
he loses his sense of time; during one interval in his con-
sciousness, he is totally unaware of what transpires (268).
In addition "certain passages of his recent past were af-
.fecting him by this time as almost superlatively ancient"
(284). He finds that he likes the wrong girl, the one
that strikes him as "modern, modern!" (280), rather than the
one his ancestor would have preferred. The idea of being
trapped into marrying the other girl shakes him, and he
begins to consider how to get out. In the notes to the
unfinished work, James explains the feeling that will
ultimately develop in Ralph as "the horror of the growing
fear of ngt being saved, of being lost, of being in the
past to stay, heartbreakingly to stay and never know his
precious Present again" (294). On this reversal of feeling
rests the main moral of the work and the main plot struc-
ture. His modern self won't leave the 1820 identity alone.
He "finds his identity, the one he wears for the occasion,"
fairly well, but is always "at the same time watching him-
.self . . . being both the other man and not the other man,
being just sufficiently the other, his prior, his own, self,
not to be able to help living in that a bit too" (300).

This "watchful and critical" self grows and grows. In fact

 

 

 

 

 

 

359

little by little by little he begins to live
more, to live most, and most uneasily, in what

I refer to as his own, his prior self, and less,
uneasily less, in his borrowed, his adventurous,
that of his tremendous speculation, so to speak——
rather than the other way round as had been the
case at first. When his own, his original, con-
quers so much of the ground of that, then it is
that what I've called his an uish gets fuller
possession of it . . . (3003

For Ralph has an "ineffaceable margin of independence," a
"clinging taint of modernity," that causes him to deviate
"of necessity, from what would have happened in the other

fellow's place and time" (322). He naturally prefers Nan

 

to Molly, "it being by his fine modern sense that the ex-
quisite, delicate, the worthy-herself-to-be—modern younger
girl has affected him, in utter defiance of any capacity
on the other fellow's part to appreciate or conceive any
such value in her" (322-23). Soon Ralph realizes that he
is more refined than his forbears, more distinguished, more
clever, better mannered, and even better toothed (295).

His preferences are reversed; now the future he left is

 

"ripeness, richness, attraction and civilization, . . .
virtual perfection" compared to the world of the past

(337).16

James planned to have Ralph come out of his six—month
plunge just as Aurora comes to Europe, having undergone and
overcome a similar psychological stress. Ralph has cured
his worship of the past, Aurora has renounced her repudiation
of it. Clearly, even with the strain of the war, James is

no reactionary. Living in the past is still far less

   

 

 

 

 

 

360

attractive to him than living in the present. He does not

waste his final years with despair and nostalgia. His

time perspective is balanced once agin, just as it had

been in the previous century.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes

lLubbock's comments preface the final group of letters
in his edition, Letters, II, p. 380, from which I am quoting
James's reactions to the war.

2Matthiessen, p. 133, thinks Lubbock's judgment of
Egg Ivory Tower is shallow, but agrees that Thg_Sense 2;
Egg Past "constituted a mode of escape." Stone, with some
arguments similar to mine even though he is dealing with
the theory of relativity at work in the age, disagrees with
Lubbock on both novels, pp. 219-20.

3For a similar symbolic treatment of bland American
architecture, see pp. 23, 42, 75-76.

4Among the many evidences of this fact, consider the
references to him on pp. 74, 123, 192-93, 200, 216, 226,
248, 258.

5Alexander Cowie, The Rise g£_the American Novel (New
York, 1951), pp. 725-267—describes the novel as an exact
counterpart of Thg Sense 2; the Past, "a study of malad—
justment in the present, placed in an American setting"
comparable to Ralph's maladjustment in the past placed in
a European setting. For the hero of The Ivory Tower, "life
in the world he knows (the modern worIET is so wanting in
significance that he becomes inert in the midst of a cor-
ruption he can neither conquer nor condone." Consequently
the work is a strong protest against contemporary American
society.

6But consider, Wegelin, p. 165, who sees the novel in
terms of the growing social fusion of Europe and America:
"The Europeanized Fielder is balanced by Rosanna Gaw, the
last of James's American girls; and the novel was to close,
apparently, on a union of the two, representing a wisdom
Kgiting culture and idealism, the virtues of Europe and
cries."

7See Cargill, pp. 479, 486.

8Wegelin, p. 192, indicating an important change in
the focus of the international theme.

9cr. Walter E. Wright, T_h_e_ Madness 9; gig, p. 171, and
Matthiessen, p. 135. Wegelin, p. I92, n. 20, feels that
"Ralph and Aurora are latter—day variants of the passionate
pilgrim and the social critic of an earlier day; and their
story was to dramatize, apparently, a reconciliation of the
two familiar American attitudes toward Europe-~a purpose

361

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

362

9(cont.) which receives emphasis from the fact that
James employs a modification of the old theme of the Ameri-
can claimant." Wegelin's description clarifies the impor—
tant change in emphasis in the international theme from.a
reflection of Americano-European relations to an attempt to
resolve the differences between the old passionate pilgrim
and the critic. The argument takes place totally among
Americans, pro-European "reactionaries" and pro-American
"progressives." To James, of course, both are at fault.
Bewley, p. 71, stresses the connection of the novel with
the old international theme: ". . . the nature of the
double identity belonging to Ralph Pendrel belongs equally
to the present and the past, to America and to Europe. It
is nothing less than a symbol into which the whole American
problem under the two aspects that have been considered here
is compressed." In fact, as I argue, James is still criti-
cizing both Europe and America.

10

lle. David W. Beams, "Consciousness in James's 'The
Sense of the Past,'" Criticism, V (1963), pp. 160, 166.

lsz. James's comments to Sara Orne Jewett in Edel,
Letters, pp. 234-35.

Pointed out by Andreas, p. 104, among others.

 

13The time Ralph returns to is not the eighteenth
century, as some critics have mistakenly.presumed, but the
nearer past of 1820. As James remarks in the Notebooks,
pp. 365-66, "Turning it over I don't see why 1820 shouldn't
respond to my need without the complication of my going
further back. I want the moment of time to be far enough
off for the complete old-world sense, and yet not so far
as to be worrying from the point of view of aspects, ap~
pearances, details of tone, of life in general; accordingly
if I see my 'present' hour as really recent, as of 1910,
say, I get.upwards of a century of 'difference,"which is
in all conscience enough--with the comparative nearness so
simplifying certain apprehended difficulties." Egg Sense
of §Q§_Past is not a violation of James's preference for a
“visitable" past not far distant from the present. Among
the erring critics is wright (p. 170); among the more cares
ful, Cargill (p. 487).

 

l4Beams points out, p. 150, a very interesting change
in technique at this point: "As Ralph enters the house of
the past, James enters Ralph's mind dedicated to the past.
As Ralph comes into relation with the portrait James for-
sakes the scenic for the 'picture' technique, involving
the more radical center of consciousness. Past and present
are thus sharply discrete in method."

   

 

 

 

363

15Wright, p. 173, notes of Ralph that "His situation
is not basically different from that ofga novelist, who,
if he is sincere, may find himself living in a fictional
world which refuses to bend to his will." Cargill, in fact,
p. 487, thinks James is implicitly attacking historical
novels: "The main object of his attack, however, was the
widespread veneration of the past, any past, as evidenced
by the enormous popularity of historical fiction at the
turn of the century."

16Cargill, p. 483.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

364

Conclusion

The superficial similarity of "A Passionate Pilgrim"
cannot obscure how far James has traveled in his interna-
tional wanderings. Since the two are so dissimilar in the
use of point of view and portrayal of experience, the
parallels in the plots only highlight the contrasts. James
is still concerned with the proper attitude an American

should take toward Europe in order to inherit its value

 

without pawning his critical intellect, and the dangers of

failure are evident in each story. But the significance

 

has broadened over the interval. The issue becomes the
stance a modern man should take toward all human history,
how he should envision reality and live it. Bewley's old
formulation of the international theme as "Europe versus
America" and "past versus present" should be a description
of the development of the theme rather than a description
of concurrent emphasis. Likewise James's techniques in
portraying the sense of the past, first as the sense of
external detail and then as a function of consciousness,
have made great progress. The following summary of the
development of this chapter should clarify my conclusions
and their implications.

Early versions of the international theme like "A.
Passionate Pilgrim" are based on the sense of the past as

the proper perception of local color-~usually formulated

 

 

 

 

365 _
as whether the American can find his true heritage in old
rural England or can truly appreciate Paris. In a few
cases the plots resemble those of the worst romances: can
a rich young man from a little mining town in:the West find
happiness with a poor but noble Frenchwoman? But the cos-
mopolitan James cannot long remain limited by the romance
and implied nationalism of these narrow international
stories. Though Europeans may be dulled to their heritage,

having lost the truly appreciative sense of their past,

 

they are nevertheless products of that past, and perhaps
the major value of the fresh and Adamic American is that
he can wake up Europeans to a proper sense of their cul—
ture. Such Americans contribute most not by cutting them-
selves off from the past in pristine independence, but by
incorporating the best of all nations and times into their
characters, and by working toward an intelligent social
synthesis. James saw himself as one of these Americans.
Combating the opposite American tendency to worship
the past, however, just as he fights the movement to reject

it entirely, James argues against the dilettantes who import

 

all wisdom from the Old World, or who, like some historical
novelists even at the turn of the century, find value only
in the past. He feels both urges within himself, but tries
to balance, temper, and reconcile the two. Just as he
fights the literary conventions of romance, so he fights
the romantic American temperament in his early fiction, and

the sense of the past becomes the ability to distinguish

 

 

 

366
what is valuable and real in customs and conventions from
what is sentimental and false. Soon, in the English period,
a fine sense of the past becomes a model for all national-
ities, a natural step in the development of a perceptive,
mature consciousness accompanied by and inseparable from
the development of moral and aesthetic sense. The past
changes from a matter of ruins, monuments, and provincial
customs, to part of a continuous stream of time and cul-*

ture influencing the present and building the future.

 

Having perceived this organic relation between the

 

present and the past, James cultivates it in as many ways
as possible, such as by mildly satirizing distortions and
lacks of the sense of the past, and by testing the chances
for its proper development through widespread growth of a
cosmopolitan sense of the past. He begins to take for
granted the growing unity of educated people in all cul—
tures, the similarity in their perceptions of the past

and its value. Consequently the international theme begins
to transcend its national elements, and becomes*a portrayal

of comparative deve10pment rather than an exploitation of

 

contrast. Soon the theme is so much part of the background
that "theme" is an inaccurate name for the elements at work.
All is subsumed into the portrayal of maturation, and a
fine sense of the past is both an evidence and a necessary
accompaniment of maturity. Awareness is all. The major
external social thrust of the old international theme is
thus parried by the growing importance of the portrayal of

 

 

 

367

consciousness. The theme has developed so consistently that
James has a sense of its conventions being brittle, made to
be broken, and he begins to treat it like romance--as a
calcified portion of the past which has outlived its useful- I
ness and needs-to be revived through imaginative variation.

The result of these tendencies in the international
theme is most apparent in the major phase. Nationalities
become interchangeable parts; external traits of character
give way to internal traits of consciousness; until eventu-
ally James's characters, seen from the outside, have fewer
qualities of type than of archetype. The old attempt to
define American and European character blurs, and his
figures become idealizations woven from strands of litera-
ture as much as from direct observation. Partly because
James's sense of the American past is fading, he general-
izes the sense and his American characters. Nationality
becomes an expedient rather than a subject in its own right,
and the past becomes less the past of history than the vast
conceptual realm of the infinite number of moments which
have always preceded the present. The resulting depth of
the past in the major novels is remarkable. For while
James portrays directly only a "visitable" past, a thin
veneer of time chosen to reveal the utmost continuity, he
now gives the reader a sense of greater depth in time, a
sense that what he is witnessing is an age-old pattern of
human activity. Though perhaps not exploiting the full

implications of his archetypes, James nevertheless moves

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

368
in the direction of myth.

Furthermore, his characters become nearly consummate
observers of the past, heirs and heiresses of all the ages,
the most perceptive consciousnesses possible. The reader
learns to judge James's characters by their sense of the
past, for it becomes the touchstone of maturity, culture,
and virtue. In the finest examples of the portrayal of con-
sciousness, the character's personal sense of the past plays

a crucial role in producing awareness and, consequently, in

 

determining behavior. Fine consciousness becomes the

ability to assimilate immediate impressions, compare them

 

with past experiences, and generate viable assessments of
the nature of the present and one's relationships in it.
The past is continually reinterpreted in the light of
present events and yigg,ygggg; the past is constantly
present in the mind for comparison and contrast.

James also manipulates the reader's sense of the past
in his finest novels, setting up parallel scenes and
mnemonic devices that only the reader can perceive. Con-
sequently the alert reader's superior knowledge, controlled
by the author, influences his continuing assessments of the
characters. The reader observes growing awareness, revisions
in the characters' sense of the past and the present; and
must make similar amendments of his own sense as the work
progresses. The ability of the mind to romanticize,
rationalize, and otherwise distort the past becomes abun-

dantly clear. Both the conscious and the subconscious

 

 

 

 

 

 

369
effect of the past on the sense of reality are exposed to
the reader, as striking scenes are recalled or worked
through explicitly and implicitly again and again by the
major characters, each time with a fuller significance.
Finally, since these parallel images remain in the reader's
mind, carrying strong thematic and psychological signifi-
cance, the recurrent imagery becomes nearly symbolic in the
complex web of associations James builds.

The end of the major phase, caused by his return to
America, is triggered by the cultural shock James feels in
comparing twentieth-century America to the country he knew
twenty years before. He feels betrayed by his old memories,
idealized by time. The discontinuity is more than his sense
of the past can quickly accommodate, and he works through
several tales and Th3 American §ggpg before his reassessment
of the past fits his experience of the present. He por-
trays this shock in the alienation of certain Americans
from their country, in stories revealing how a man may be
expatriated by time just as surely as by distance. The
tales criticize the present by comparing it with the past,
and by using characters who want both to preserve the past
and adapt to the present, the tales establish the ground-
work for James's final treatment of the sense of the past
as a philos0phical and psychological problem. James in—
dulges in some nostalgia and might-have-beens, but then
once more reaffirms his cosmopolitan identity and a recorded

sense of the past. After virtually burying the old

 

 

 

 

 

370
international theme as an irrelevant pursuit, he regains
enough of the confidence of the major phase to work out a
revised version of it. He is continually reassimilating
the past and adapting it to the present-~which is a fair
definition of the artist's new responsibility.

But just after he gets into a major novel on this new
basis, the European half of the international theme is pulled
out from under him. His personal sense of the past is once
more upset as the culturally mature continent he has known
erupts in barbaric war. James now confronts the spectre of

despair, and writes the work which gives its title to this

 

study, making explicit as a topic the faculty which has
formed so great a part of his work for so long. Involved

in his struggle is the value of his fiction and even the
value of intelligence, for if his sense of the past has been
so wrong, then most of his work must be irrelevant and use-
less as the picture of his age which he had haped to create.
He could give up and return to the safety of past illusions,
or simply wallow in despair; but he decides to make the
sense of the past his subject as well as his method, judging
its worth even as he portrays it. Leaving one revision of
the international theme, ghgjgzggy,ggw§g, in which he had
attempted to come down from the idealized heights of the
major phase, James tackles the deepest issue in his mind:
is life worth living in the present, or is it tolerable
only through the fine vicarious re-creation of a secure

past? Once again his struggle to unite past and present

 

 

 

J¥_

371
conquers the disjunction. The sense of the past is worth-
less unless tied to the present. In spite of its previous

errors, James reaffirms the sense of the past, for while it

 

is imperfect and fallible, that faculty is the only major
assimilator of knowledge, the only faculty which can give
any order at all to the infinite chaos of immediate ex-
perience. However painful, the only life that can be

lived is the present; however fallible, the only guide to

it is the sense of the past.

 

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“fl__¢_____‘i _ , , ,7, 7—_____———_—_— ,, 1—

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”“1113”,?W1] 'jifl“ ff