The American (4 page)

Measured against James’s own standard,
The American
is less American than, say, Blake’s
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
or Carlyle’s
Sartor Resartus
, both of which had caught the vigorous New World spirit of moral adventure and its powers of creative action. But if
The American
did not itself achieve that “vast intellectual fusion and synthesis” of Old World forms and New World energies, there is no doubt that the novel helped James to define the conditions of that achievement. The Henry James who wrote the novel was
en route
from the New World to the Old, but the novel he wrote was taking him from the Old World, in which legendary moral form and amoral human energy confronted each other across an estranging Atlantic, to the New World that was born with the discovery of America. Like the Newman who emerges from his Parisian adventure, the Henry James who emerges from the novel is neither an American nor a European in the old, differentiating sense. A sojourner in both places, but at home in neither, he has risen above Old World geography into a lonely region where form and energy,
detached from their native hemispheres, circle about each other endlessly in the powerfully energetic and highly formal dance of modern art.

—William Spengemann

CHECKLISTS OF CRITICISM

McColgan, Kristin P., ed.
Henry James, 1917-1959: A Reference Guide.
Boston, 1979.

Scura, Dorothy M., ed.
Henry James, 1960-1974: A Reference Guide.
Boston, 1979.

COLLECTIONS AND EDITIONS

The Novels and Tales of Henry James: New and Complete Edition.
Edited by Percy Lubbock. 35 vols. London, 1921-23.

The Complete Tales of Henry James.
Edited by Leon Edel. 12 vols. London, 1962-65.

The Complete Plays of Henry James.
Edited by Leon Edel. Philadelphia and New York, 1949.

Henry James: Autobiography.
Edited by F. W. Dupee. New York, 1956.

The Letters of Henry James.
Edited by Leon Edel. 3 vols. (to 1895). Cambridge, Mass., 1974-80.

The Notebooks of Henry James.
Edited by F. O. Matthiessen and K. B. Murdock. New York, 1947.

Miller, James E., Jr.
Theory of Fiction: Henry James.
Lincoln, Neb., 1972.

The Scenic Art: Notes on Acting and the Drama.
Edited by Allan Wade. New Brunswick, N.J., 1948.

The Painter’s Eye: Notes and Essays on the Pictorial Arts by Henry James.
Edited by John L. Sweeney. Cambridge, Mass., 1956.

The Art of Travel: Scenes and Journeys in America, England, France, and Italy from the Writings of Henry James.
Edited by Morton Dauwen Zabel. New York, 1958.

BIOGRAPHY AND GENERAL STUDIES

Dupee, F. W.
Henry James.
Garden City, N.Y., 1956.

Edel, Leon.
Henry James.
5 vols. Philadelphia, 1953-72.

Krook, Dorothea.
The Ordeal of Consciousness in Henry James.
Cambridge, 1962.

McCarthy, H. T.
Henry James: The Creative Process.
New York, 1958.

Powers, Lyall H.
Henry James: An Introduction and Interpretation.
New York, 1970.

CRITICISM ESPECIALLY REVELANT
TO
THE AMERICAN

Anderson, Charles R.
Person, Place and Thing in Henry James’s Novels.
Durham, N.C., 1977.

Cargill, Oscar.
The Novels of Henry James.
New York, 1961.

Kelley, Cornelia P.
The Early Development of Henry James.
Urbana, Ill., 1930; rev. ed., 1965.

Poirier, Richard.
The Comic Sense of Henry James: A Study of the Early Novels.
New York, 1960.

Veeder, William.
Henry James: The Lessons of the Master: Popular Fiction and Personal Style in the Nineteenth Century.
Chicago, 1975.

STUDIES OF JAMES AS AN AMERICAN
AND AS A EUROPEAN WRITER

Grover, Philip.
Henry James and the French Novel: A Study in Inspiration.
New York, 1973.

Leavis, F. R.
The Great Tradition.
London, 1948.

Lubbock, Percy.
The Craft of Fiction.
London, 1921.

Matthiessen, F. O.
American Renaissance.
New York, 1941.

Porte, Joel.
The Romance in America.
Middletown, Conn., 1969.

Rourke, Constance.
American Humor.
New York, 1931.

Spender, Stephen.
Love-Hate Relations: English and American Sensibilities.
New York, 1974.

Williams, Raymond.
The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence.
New York, 1970.

The American
exists in a bewildering array of printed forms, from the earliest version, which appeared in serial form in the
Atlantic Monthly
between June 1876 and May 1877, to the most recent commercial edition. Of those published in James’s lifetime, however, only two can be considered fully authorized texts: the first English edition, published by Macmillan and Company in 1879, which is the earliest version that James is known to have seen in proof, and the New York Edition of 1907, which he revised extensively in the style of his late novels. The respective merits of these two very different versions have been endlessly debated over the years, in accompaniment to the dispute concerning the “American” and the “modern” Henry James. Since my notion is that
The American
is James’s prelude to the modern, I have elected to present the novel in its earlier, “unmodernized” form. The text that follows, then, is that of the 1879 Macmillan Edition, emended to incorporate a number of typographical corrections made by Macmillan’s editors in preparing the 1883 uniform edition and by James when he prepared the New York Edition; a change in the paragraphing of a passage at the end of
Chapter XI
, as proposed by Hershel Parker (“An Error in the Text of Henry James’s
The American,” American Literature
38 [1965]: 316-18); and two or three minor alterations of my own, which are explained in the notes.

O
n a brilliant day in May, in the year 1868, a gentleman was reclining at his ease on the great circular divan which at that period occupied the centre of the Salon Carré, in the Museum of the Louvre.
¹
This commodious ottoman has since been removed, to the extreme regret of all weak-kneed lovers of the fine arts; but the gentleman in question had taken serene possession of its softest spot, and, with his head thrown back and his legs outstretched, was staring at Murillo’s beautiful moon-borne Madonna
²
in profound enjoyment of his posture. He had removed his hat, and flung down beside him a little red guide-book and an opera-glass. The day was warm; he was heated with walking, and he repeatedly passed his handkerchief over his forehead, with a somewhat wearied gesture. And yet he was evidently not a man to whom fatigue was familiar; long, lean, and muscular, he suggested the sort of vigour that is commonly known as “toughness.” But his exertions on this particular day had been of an unwonted sort, and he had often performed great physical feats which left him less jaded than his tranquil stroll through the Louvre. He had looked out all the pictures to which an asterisk was affixed in those formidable pages of fine print in his Bädeker;
³
his attention had been strained and his eyes dazzled, and he had sat down with an æsthetic headache. He had
looked, moreover, not only at all the pictures, but at all the copies that were going forward around them, in the hands of those innumerable young women in irreproachable toilets who devote themselves, in France, to the propagation of masterpieces; and if the truth must be told, he had often admired the copy much more than the original. His physiognomy would have sufficiently indicated that he was a shrewd and capable fellow, and in truth he had often sat up all night over a bristling bundle of accounts, and heard the cock crow without a yawn. But Raphael and Titian and Rubens were a new kind of arithmetic, and they inspired our friend, for the first time in his life, with a vague self-mistrust.

An observer, with anything of an eye for national types, would have had no difficulty in determining the local origin of this undeveloped connoisseur, and indeed such an observer might have felt a certain humorous relish of the almost ideal completeness with which he filled out the national mould. The gentleman on the divan was a powerful specimen of an American. But he was not only a fine American; he was in the first place, physically, a fine man. He appeared to possess that kind of health and strength which, when found in perfection, are the most impressive—the physical capital which the owner does nothing to “keep up.” If he was a muscular Christian,
⁴
it was quite without knowing it. If it was necessary to walk to a remote spot, he walked, but he had never known himself to “exercise.” He had no theory with regard to cold bathing or the use of Indian clubs; he was neither an oarsman, a rifleman, nor a fencer—he had never had time for these amusements—and he was quite unaware that the saddle is recommended for certain forms of indigestion. He was by inclination a temperate man; but he had supped the night before his visit to the Louvre at the Café Anglais
⁵
—someone had told him it was an experience not to be omitted—and he had slept none the less the sleep of the just. His usual
attitude and carriage were of a rather relaxed and lounging kind, but when, under a special inspiration, he straightened himself, he looked like a grenadier on parade. He never smoked. He had been assured—such things are said—that cigars were excellent for the health, and he was quite capable of believing it; but he knew as little about tobacco as about homœopathy.
⁶
He had a very well-formed head, with a shapely, symmetrical balance of the frontal and the occipital development, and a good deal of straight, rather dry brown hair. His complexion was brown, and his nose had a bold, well-marked arch. His eye was of a clear, cold gray, and, save for a rather abundant moustache, he was clean-shaved. He had the flat jaw and sinewy neck which are frequent in the American type; but the traces of national origin are a matter of expression even more than of feature, and it was in this respect that our friend’s countenance was supremely eloquent. The discriminating observer we have been supposing might, however, perfectly have measured its expressiveness, and yet have been at a loss to describe it. It had that typical vagueness which is not vacuity, that blankness which is not simplicity, that look of being committed to nothing in particular, of standing 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 our 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 reassuring in its reserve. The cut of this gentleman’s moustache, with the
two premature wrinkles in the cheek above it, and the fashion of his garments, in which an exposed shirt-front and a cerulean cravat played perhaps an obtrusive part, completed the conditions of his identity. We have approached him, perhaps, at a not especially favourable moment; he is by no means sitting for his portrait. But listless as he lounges there, rather baffled on the aesthetic question, and guilty of the damning fault (as we have lately discovered it to be) of confounding the merit of the artist with that of his work (for he admires the squinting Madonna of the young lady with the boyish coiffure, because he thinks the young lady herself uncommonly taking), he is a sufficiently promising acquaintance. Decision, salubrity, jocosity, prosperity, seem to hover within his call; he is evidently a practical man, but the idea, in his case, has undefined and mysterious boundaries, which invite the imagination to bestir itself on his behalf.