The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

In writing The American Scene, the "facts" he selected to go on are, even for James, amazingly and, one would have thought, fatally few. Though he seems to have visited Chicago (and

_not to have "liked" it) he confines his chapters to the East Coast from Boston to Miami. The Far West, the Midwest, the Deep South are totally ignored. This is a pity because the regional differences of the United States are significant, though not, I think, so decisively significant as the professional regionalists insist. Today it would be quite fatal to neglect the states remoter from Europe, not so much as re­gions in themselves, but because some of the most essential and generally typical American facts, such as the film and automobile industries, the public power projects, the divorce mills, are regionally situated. Still, even in 1906, there were many things west of Massachusetts, the landscape of Arizona, the distinctive atmosphere of San Francisco, to mention only two of them, which would have "amused" "the resdess analyst," and in whose amusement his readers would have been very glad to share.¹

With the second limitation that James imposed upon him­self, however—his decision to reject all second-hand infor­mation and sentiment, to stick to those facts, however few, which were felt by him, however mistakenly, to be important, to be unashamedly, defiandy subjective—one can only whole­heartedly agree. In grasping the character of a society, as in judging the character of an individual, no documents, statis­tics, "objective" measurements can ever compete with the single intuitive glance. Intuition may err, for though its sound judgment is, as Pascal said, only a question of good eyesight, it must be good, for the principles are subtle and numerous, and the omission of one principle leads to error; but docu­mentation which is useless unless it is complete, must err in a field where completeness is impossible. James' eyesight was good, his mind was accurate, and he understood exacdy what he was doing; he never confused his observation with his in­terpretation.

The fond observer is by his very nature committed everywhere to his impression—which means essentially, I think, that he is foredoomed, in one place as in an­other, to "put in" a certain quantity of emotion and reflection. The turn his sensibility takes depends of course on what is before him; but when is it not in some manner exposed and alert? If it be anything really of a touch­stone, it is more disposed, I hold, to easy bargains than to hard ones; it only wants to be somehow interested, and is not without the knowledge that an emotion is after all, at the best or the worst, but an emotion. All of

¹ James originally intended, it appears, to write a second volume dealing; with the West and Middle West.

which is a voluminous commentary, I admit, on the modest text that I perhaps made the University Hos­pital stand for too many things. That establishes at all events my contention—that the living fact, in the United States, -will stand, other facts not preventing, for almost anything you may ask of it.

Where, in the United States, the interest, where the pleasure of contemplation is concerned, discretion is the better part of valor and insistence too often a betrayal. It is not so much that the hostile fact crops up as that the friendly fact breaks down. If you have luckily seen,

you have seen; carry off your prize, in this case, instantly and at any risk. Try it again and you don't, you won't, see.

Yet, if the vision had, necessarily, to be brief, it was neither poor nor vague, and only the most leisurely and luxuriant treatment could do justice to its rich possibilities. In the novels and short stories of the previous decade, James had been evolving a style of metaphorical description of the emotions which is all his own, a kind of modern Gongorism, and in The American Scene this imagery, no longer inhibited by the restraining hand of character or the impatient tug of plot, came to its fullest and finest bloom.

Indeed, perhaps the best way to approach this book is as a prose poem of the first order, i.e., to suspend, for the time being, ones own conclusions about America and Americans, and to read on slowly, relishing it sentence by sentence, for it is no more a guidebook than the "Ode to a Nightingale" is an ornithological essay. It is not even necessary to start at the beginning or read with continuity; one can open it at almost any page. I advise, for instance, the reader who finds James' later manner a Iitde hard to get into, to begin by reading the long paragraph about Lees statue which concludes the chap­ter on Richmond: this is, admittedly, a purple patch, but there are many others which match it.