The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

James was, of course, well aware of this limitation; he knew that both his character and circumstances confined his resi­dence to a certain kind of house or hotel, his intimate ac­quaintance to a certain social class, and that such confine­ment might be an insuperable obstacle to writing a book of travel in which the author must try to catch the spirit, not of a particular milieu, but of a whole place, a whole social order. Nevertheless, the challenge, perhaps just because it was, for him, so particularly formidable, fascinated James from the first, and The American Scene is only the latest, most am­bitious and best of a series of topographical writings, beginning in 1870 with sketches of Saratoga and Newport.

Immature as these early American pieces are, they seem to me more satisfactory than the subsequent descriptions of Eng­land and Europe, even the charming A Little Tour in France

(1886). Confronted with the un-American scene, he seems prim and a little amateurish, as if he were a conscien­tious father writing letters to an intelligent daughter of four­teen; as guidebooks, the European travelogues are incomplete, and as personal impressions, they are timid; the reader is conscious that the traveler must have seen and felt a great deal more than he says, and refrained either from a fear of shock­ing or from a lack of confidence in his own judgment; but even as a young man, James was unafraid of America as a subject: puzzled often, angry sometimes, yes, but quite certain of what he felt and of his right to say it.

In letters directly and in his novels by implication James makes many criticisms of the English, but he would never have been so outspoken about them as he is, for instance, about the habits of American children of whom he writes in 1870:

You meet them far into the evening, roaming over the piazzas and corridors of the hotels—the little girls espe­cially—lean, pale, formidable. Occasionally childhood confesses itself, even when maternity resists, and you see at eleven o'clock at night some poor litde bedizened pre­cocity collapsed in slumber in a lonely wayside chair.

And again in 1906:

. . . there were ladies and children all about—though indeed there may have been sometimes hut

the lone breakfasting child to deal with; the little pale, carnivo­rous, coffee-drinking ogre or ogress, who prowls down in advance of its elders, engages a table—dread vision! and has the "run" of the bill of fare.

All who knew James personally have spoken of the terror he could inspire when enraged, and one of the minor delights of The American Scene is that the stranger occasionally gets a glimpse, at a fortunately safe distance, of what these out­bursts must have been like—the unhurried implacable ad­vance of the huge offensive periods, the overwhelming allitera­tive barrage, the annihilating adverbial scorn.

The freedoms of the young three—who were, by-the- way, not in their earliest bloom either—were thus bandied about in the void of the gorgeous valley without even a consciousness of its shrill, its recording echoes . . . The immodesty was too colossal to be anything but in no- cence, but the innocence on the other hand, was too colossal to be anything but inane. And they were alive, the slightly stale three: they talked, they laughed, they sang, they shrieked, they romped, they scaled the pin­nacle of publicity and perched on it, flapping their wings; whereby they were shown in possession of many of the movements of life.

Whom were they constructed, such specimens, to talk with or to talk over, or to talk under, and what form of address or of intercourse, what uttered, what intelligible terms of introduction, of persuasion, of menace, what de­veloped, what specific human process of any sort, was it possible to impute to them? What reciprocities did they imply, what presumptions did they, could they, create? What happened, inconceivably, when such Greeks met such Greeks, such faces looked into such faces, and such sounds, in especial, were exchanged with such sounds? What women did they live with, what women, living with them, could yet leave them as they were? What wives, daughters, sisters, did they in fine make credible; and what, in especial, was the speech, what the manners, what the general dietary, what most the mon­strous morning meal, of ladies receiving at such hands the law or the license of life?

Just what, one asks with nostalgic awe, would James have said if confronted with the spectacle of a drum-majorette?