THE AMERICAN IDEAL OF CHARACTER.
MR. HENRY JAMES, Junior, has betrayed no single pur- pose so clearly in his various more or less 'elaborate sketches, as that of in some sense glorifying the American char- acter. Messrs. Macmillan have just republished one of the earliest, and certainly in many respects one of the ablest, of his books, " The American," the chief object of which obviously is to contrast strongly what Mr. Henry James regards as the simpler and suppler type of character which he considers dis- tinctively American, with the many finely-grooved and chased, but for that very reason too much specialised and limited types of character,—even where they are not stripped of all their natural human width in the process of this grooving and chasing,— which are the most expressive products of European civilisation. But though " The American" is Mr. Henry James's most careful vindication of his preference for the American character over
the other types best known to him, you can see the same general conceptions pervading his other sketches. " The Europeans " is conceived with exactly the same drift. Even the better of the two Europeans is painted as quite inferior in largeness of nature to the American wife whom he woos and wins ; while the worse of the two is a mere foil to the simplicity and naturalness of the American society she invades. In the " International Episode," again, the two American ladies are painted as finding even the best English society either too narrow or too insincere for them. And again, in " Daisy Miller," Mr. Henry James has made a most careful and skilful study of a kind of American girl whose complete innocence of evil, and yet intrepid hunger for experience, brings down upon her the most unworthy suspicions from a society penetrated by the assumptions of conventional European usage. But in "The American," certainly, the challenge to all the older societies to produce anything at once so manly and so large,—we were going to say so massive, but with- draw the word, as not, perhaps, exactly hitting Mr. Henry James's idea,—is explicit. If that very curious and elabo- rately-executed story means anything at all, it means that the American genius is far ahead of Europe, in power, breadth, and, above all, youth. When a degenerate American speaks of the United States as if they were a mere field of vulgarity, the hero "broke out and swore that they could put all Europe into their breeches-pockets, and that an American who spoke ill of them ought to be carried home in irons, and compelled to live in Boston." Now, in an ordinary American's mouth, that would be mere " tall talk." But in one of Mr. Henry James's heroes, it is much more ; it is meant to convey a definite asser- tion, of which almost all the same author's books are in- tended as illustrations. And the assertion may be said to be this, or something very like this, — that in the United States, especially in the West, human nature has thrown off the cramping detail which is suitable only for special occasions, special atmospheres, special scenes, and special places, and has assumed that pliant capacity for everything human, that absolute inability to freeze and crystallise into small and definite moulds, which poets might suppose to have characterised humanity in its primeval form, if the records of pre-historic times did not teach that the primeval life of man was squalid, narrow, and barbarous, and that only after ages of severe social pressure has it been pos- sible for man to spring to his full stature, under the freer sky of a new world.
Whether this be so or not, it is certainly what Mr. Henry James tries to impress on us in " The Americans." The hero of that story, Christopher Newman, is intended for the ideal of modern life. He is properly a Newman or new man, and is named Christopher, after Columbus, because he undertakes the converse task of returning from the New to explore the Old World. He is elaborately contrasted with a family which com- bines the oldest and bluest blood of the French and Eng- lish aristocracies, a family whose fairest flower he desires to win as his bride,—and both the strongest and the fairest members of that family are made to show in some sense poor in comparison with him. Even the beautiful Madame de Cintre herself, whose loveliness, spiritual and per- sonal, is wholly cast in the finest European moulds, is painted as at once feeble and superstitions, when compared with the man whom she had hoped and intended to marry,—as totally unequal to the task of setting herself free from the iron tyranny of a tradi- tional subjection to parental caprice. Christopher Newman's cha- racter is successively compared with the aristocratic stateliness and self-regard of caste-idolatry, with the timidity and shrinkingness of traditional docility, with the subtlety, keenness, and frivolity of French wit, with the cynical enterprise of French unscrupu- lousness, and with the empty and dissolute good-nature of English rank ; and, as compared with each and all, he is made to look like a man with all his potentialities unexhausted, beside men " cabined, cribbed, confined " to modes of thought and life more or less conventional and irrational. By the side of this discoverer from the New World, the Old World, with all its rich complexity, shrinks into a certain pettiness and insignificance.
To define Mr. Henry James's ideal a little more clearly. His typical American had, we are told, in his face " that vagueness which is not vacuity, that blankness which is not simplicity, that look of being committed to nothing in particular, of stand- ing in an attitude of general hospitality to the chances of life, of being very much at one's own disposal, so characteristic of many American faces. It was ow friend's eye that chiefly told his story ; an eye in which innocence and experience were singularly blended. It was full of contradictory suggestions ; and though it was by no means •the glowing orb of a hero of romance, you could find in it almost anything you looked for.
Frigid and yet friendly, frank •yet cautious, shrewd yet credulous, positive yet sceptical, confident yet shy, extremely intelligent and extremely good.-humoured, there was something vaguely defiant in its concessions, and something profoundly re- assuring in its reserve." This is the man who comes to Europe " with a sort of mighty hankering, a desire to stretch out and haul in." When he is introduced to his chief enemy, the old Madame de Bellegarde, an English Earl's daughter, and a French Marquis's widow, Newman says to himself :—" She is a woman of con- ventions and proprieties ; her world is the world of things im- mutably decreed. But how she is at home in it, and what a paradise she finds it ! She walks about in it as if it were a blooming park, a garden of Eden; and when she sees `this is genteel' or `this is improper' written on a milestone, she stops ecstatically, as if she were listening to a nightingale or smelling a rose." Newman's other enemy, the eldest son of this old lady, the Marquis de Bellegarde, is described " distinguished to the tips of his polished nails ; there was not a movement of his fine perpendicular person that was not noble and majestic. New- man had never yet been confronted with such an incarnation of the art of taking oneself seriously ; he felt a sort of impulse to step backward, as you do to get a view of a great facade." Newman, on the other hand, never takes himself seriously. He is large, but he is vague. What he dislikes in others he appears not to condemn on principle, but simply to reject as unpleasant to himself. The two moral crises through which he goes are both carefully described, and in both he simply passes from a purpose of revenge to a feeling that revenge is low, and is not for him, without the slightest explicit recognition that he was in danger of a sin, or had repented of it. In the first case, he owes a business man a grudge, feels awfully savage, and is bent on depriving him of a chance of gaining sixty thousand dollars, in a way his enemy would feel. " I jumped into a hack, and went about my busi- ness ; it was in this hack,--this immortal, historical hack,—that the curious thing I speak of occurred. It was a hack like any other, only a trifle dirtier, with a greasy line along the top of the drab cushions, as if it had been used for a great many Irish funerals. It is possible I took a nap ; I had been travel- ling all night, and though I was excited with my errand, I felt the want of sleep. At all events, I woke up suddenly from a sleep, or from a kind of reverie, with the most extraordinary feel- ing in the world,—a mortal disgust for the thing I was going to do. It came upon me like that,'—and he snapped his fingers,` as abruptly as an old wound that begins to ache. I couldn't tell the meaning of it. I only felt that I loathed the whole business, and wanted to wash my hands of it. The idea of losing that sixty thousand dollars, of letting it utterly slide and scuttle, and never hearing of it again, seemed the sweetest thing in the world. And all this took place quite independently of my will, and I sat watching it as if it were a play in the theatre. I could. feel it going on inside of me. You may depend upon it, there are things going on inside of us that we understand mighty little about." It is a part of the character,—a part of its excellence, in Mr. Henry James's eyes,—that this does go on without any concurrence of Newman's in the matter. He is too big to have a real conscience. And it is the same in relation to the revenge he plans on the Belle- gardes, for their treatment of him in this story. He revels at first in the idea of it. Then he thinks it may make a fool of him, and delays it indefinitely. Then, after some months, he goes and sits down in Notre Dame He was very tired; this was the best place he could be in. He said no prayers ; he had no prayers to say. He had nothing to be thankful for, and he had nothing to ask ; nothing to ask, because now he must take care of himself. But a great cathedral offers a very various hospitality, and New- man sat in his place, because while he was there he was out of the world He leaned his head for a long time on the chair in front of him ; when he took it up, he felt that he was himself again. Somewhere in his mind a tight knot seemed to have loosened. He thought of the Bellegardes ; he had almost for- gotten them. He remembered them as people he had meant to do something to. He gave a groan, as he remembered what he had meant to do ; he was annoyed at having meant to do it ; the bottom suddenly had fallen out of his revenge. Whether it
was Christian charity or unregenerate good-nature—what it was in the background of his soul—I don't pretend to say ; but Newman's last thought was that of course he would let the Belle- gardes go." And the author's idea seems to incline to the notion that it was mere unregenerate good-nature. For in the last sen- tence but one of the book, the chief confidante of Newman is made to say, " My impression would be that since, as you say, they defied you, it was because they believed that, after all, you would never really come to the point. Their confidence, after counsel taken of each other, was not in their innocence, nor in their talent for bluffing things off; it was in your remarkable good- nature. You see they were right." There is something evi- dently in the easy laisaer-faire of unfathomable good-nature which Mr. Henry James regards as larger and better, at all events as more American—more suitable to the New World— than Christian charity. Newman's morality is depicted as the happy accident of a large nature, something which " loosens knots " within him, without his even giving his mind to the evil he is bent upon. And in like manner, his exhortations to others are mere vague expressions of distaste to what they propose that is wrong, not expressions of anything re- sembling principle. The ideal American of Mr. Henry James is, in fact, intended to embody all the higher principles of moral civilisation, but to embody them only as an inheritance de- rived from his ancestry in the form of a kind of blind uncon- scious tact or good taste, which he will not venture to repre- sent, even to himself, as imposing a law of obligation, or to press on any one else except as a counsel of common-sense.
Our criticism on this ideal of character shall be brief. It comes simply to this,—that if the much prized pliancy and flexibility and width of character claimed as characteristic of the New World, consists only in the happy facility for inheriting, as a sort of vital tact, the essence and substance of all the old moral laws and creeds, and so gaining the practical advantage of them without any of the didactic stiff- ness caused by conscious belief in them, the American ideal is rather one of moral good-luck than of moral lucidity. No security, clearly, can be felt that within the large, loose, pliant, easy-going good-nature which Mr. Henry James ad- mires so much, there shall be secreted some talisman which unlooses the " tight knots " of the passions without the least regard to any conviction or creed, and this, too, at precisely the right moment,—just in time to save the character from a great degeneration. Yet without such security, the flexibility and pliancy and complete freedom from strait-laced conviction, which seems to be so much admired, is mere limpness and laxity, threatening to be fatal to society at large, and admit- ting of far easier and more rapid corruption than the com- parative narrowness of over-rigid and too definite creeds.
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