MR. HENRY JAMES ON AMERICA.*
MB- HRtiltY James has issued to a highly curious world the first instalment of his impressions of America. The visit of such an inquirer to his native land after an absence of a quarter of a century is a notable event in the history of letters. Of late we have had many impressions of America, in which the manifold life of a vast continent was apt to condense itself into a few epigrams. Mr. James knows too much to begin with to attempt any facile generalisations. He has his former memories as a standard of comparison, and such an equipment would have given the ordinary traveller material for a neat antithetical summary. But Mr. James is far too acute and far too sincere to be content with such a surface view. In this book he is still groping among strange things, catching sight of a shape here and there, but for the most part only conscious of an immense and amorphous environment. It is the most original book of travels we have ever read, and to the careful reader one of the most illuminating. The faults we have to find with it are only the faults which cling to all Mr. James's recent work. He is exceedingly difficult to read. In one page be will have sentences shapely and musical, and sentences which come to an end only by the grace of God. He is apt to hang too often on the same metaphor, and he has an inordinate love of the adverb "quite," and of words like " virtuee," " values," and "precious." The first pages of all give one an example of the author at his tortuous worst, and then we are transported to the New England highlands, where the descriptions of landscape are a model of luminous and exquisite prose. The style varies much, but one thing never varies,—the sustained intellectual power of the analysis.
No casual reader can get even a glimmering of Mr. James's meaning. His reasoning is close, his perceptions subtle and evasive, and his conclusions often surprising, so that be must be read sentence by sentence and page by page. He does not make the path easy for his followers, for while he has many brilliant generalisations, they remain unconnected, still in the baggage of the traveller rather than set out in the museum on his return. He is, as he calls himself on many occasions, the "restless analyst," "the ancient contemplative person," and his quest is always for the truth. He never says a thing for the mere sake of saying it brilliantly, though brilliance is often enough in attendance. Though he is far removed from the ordinary impressionist, phrases could be selected from his pages which would make a brilliant impressionist picture. But he is too philosophic to rest content with word-painting when the heart of the matter still awaits discovery. In land- scape, in character, in customs, he seeks for guiding principles, for the type, the characteristic. Sometimes it evades him, and he leaves in bewilderment ; sometimes, as at New York, it is almost too simple to be interesting. At the Waldorf- Astoria, for instance, "the air swarms, to intensity, with the characteristic, the characteristic condensed and accumulated as one rarely elsewhere has had the luck to find it." Mr. James, it will be perceived, is a moralist above all things. He is not content when he is told that America is this or that in material statistics. He still asks : " What does it all mean, what is its virtue, its value ?"
First for Mr. James's conclusions. Mr. Wells was very clear in his verdict. The power and the will to create went down to the profit account of America with civilisation, and "State-blindness" to the lose. Mr. James reaches the same general conclusion by far subtler means, and he works out his doctrines to a fractional result impossible with Mr. Wells's more
• fl, doterima Scone. By Relay Jamie. London Chapman and Han. [Ha ad. net.]
hasty methods. We may best describe his plan by calling it the detection of tendencies rather than the chronicle of facts. He sees forces in movement, and devotes himself to their analysis, leaving their immediate material effect for more superficial students. In America one may observe how the "short-cut" works, and "if there be really any substitute for roundabout experience, for troublesome history, for the long, the immitigable process of time." A little later he sees the will to grow everywhere, "at no matter what or whose expense." This, it will be observed, is not quite Mr. Wells's "will to create," for it involves destruction of the past, and growth, unlike creation, implies no conscious object. At the Universities he is struck suddenly by the fact that the women in America are monopolising all the "distinc- tions," in the physiological sense, and be is impressed by the wonderful possibilities the thing has for the art of the novelist. The alien leaves him bewildered. He meets him everywhere, and penetrates to his own East Side haunts in his quest for enlightenment ; but he can come to no conclusion save that these newcomers have all the air of having acquired something new, and of having lost much of their former identity. They are both a kind of American and a kind of Italian, and their future is dark. Anyhow, the fact of their numbers makes Mr. James sigh for "the luxury of some such close and sweet and whole national consciousness as that of the Switzer and the Scot." On the question of poverty he admits the general betterment, but doubts its continuance in the face of the new anti-social forces. Freedom in the United States may end by being only " freedom to grow up blighted." On the worship of money and the position of woman Mr. James tells the old tale: travellers do not differ in their reports on these matters :—
" To make so much money that you won't, that you don't ' mind' anything—that is absolutely, I think, the main American formula. Thus your making no money—or so little that it passes there for none—and being thereby distinctly reduced to minding, amounts to your being reduced to the knowledge that America is no place for you."
And the fact that America produces no kind of man in large quantities except the business man, while the woman, created by a woman-made society, is wholesomely differentiated, leads to some curious speculations about the end of it all. Mr. James surveys the scene where Democracy, unfettered and colossal, is having her own way, and is left questioning. America, having no past, hopes for a future; but of what stuff is the future to be ? It is a great lonely land of which civilisation has only scratched the surface. The sense of "margin" presses in on him and gives him hope ; but when he con- siders the ugliness of the scratching he again despairs. There are two lessons; quite obvious and simple, but singularly neglected, which America has got to learn. One is that "production takes time, and that the production of interest, in particular, takes most time." The other is the very old truth that the whole material world is unprofitable if the soul be lost. "In the early American time, doubtless, individuals of value had to wait too much for things ; bat that is now made up by the way things are waiting for individuals of value." We apologise for the banality of the act in putting Mr. James's subtleties into a crude moral ; but that, after all, is the gist of them.
We have little space to notice the other aspect of the book, the wholly delightful travel sketches. Out of the bland and lingering sentences pictures-of landscape build themselves up with clear outline and all the atmosphere of reality. We have already noticed the beautiful New England pictures, where the dominant note, says Mr. James, is the country's "amiability." Memories of Lowell and Mr. Howells and Washington Irving give Mr. James occasion for certain charming pages. Thence he goes to New York, whose character is extravagance, pulling down to make larger, and building nothing intended to endure. The poor pilgrim wanders in the elder New York, and sees in Washington Place and certain ()la buildings the ghosts of a once civilised past. He finds that the great hotels provide just the "prodigious public setting" which the modern city life demands : "an expression of the gregarious state breaking down every barrier but two,"—i.e., wealth and reasonable respectability. Then we pass to memories of old Newport and an acid picture of the new ; to Boston, where his com- plaint is the opposite of that of Mr. Wells ; to Philadelphia, where he is charmed by the Quakerish gentility of the city and awed by the scandals of its public life; to Washington, where the men are allowed to rank almost with the women ; and lastly, to the South. The chapters on Richmond and Charleston are perhaps the most wonderful in the book, for in the South Mr. James has a more congenial task, since it is the decline of civilisation which he analyses, not its advance. Take such a passage as this,— "The place was weak= adorably ' weak ; that was the word into which the whole impression flowered, that was the idea, evidently, that all the rest of the way as well would be most
brought home I can doubtless not sufficiently tell why, but there was something in my whole sense of the South that projected at moments a vivid and painful image—that of a figure somehow blighted and stricken, diseomfortably, impossibly seated in an invalid-chair, and yet fixing one with strange eyes that were half a defiance and half a deprecation of one's noticing, and much more of one's referring to, any abnormal sign. The depre- cation, in the Southern eyes, is mush greater to-day, I think, than the old lurid challenge ; but my haunting similitude was an image of the keeping-up of appearances, and above all of the maintenance of a tone, the historic `high' tone, in an excruciating posture."
And so this very candid and analytical traveller finally comes to an anchor among the palm-trees of Florida, and leaves us with the news that be has not done with the States, and that it is now the turn of California and the West. Mr. James writes with such urbanity and so genuine a love for the land that the moat nervous patriot could not take offence at his pages, while to a certain limited class of readers they will be v. source of acute intellectual pleasure.
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