The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

James' firsthand experiences were, necessarily, mostly those of a tourist, namely scenic objects, landscapes, buildings, the faces and behavior of strangers, and his own reflections on what these objects stood for. Unlike his modern rival at con­veying the sense of Place—D. H. Lawrence—James was no naturalist; one is not convinced that he knew one bird or flower from another. He sees Nature as a city-bred gentleman with a knowledge of the arts, and by accepting this fully, turns it to his advantage in his descriptive conceits.

. . . the social scene, shabby and sordid, and lost in the scale of space as the quotable line is lost in a dull epic or the needed name in an ageing memory.

The spread of this single great wash of Winter from latitude to latitude struck me in fact as having its analogy in the vast vogue of some infinitely selling novel, one of those happy volumes of which the circulation roars, periodically, from Atlantic to Pacific and from great windy state to state, in the manner as I have heard it vividly put, of a blazing prairie fire; with as litde possi­bility of arrest from "criticism" in the one case as from the bleating of lost sheep in the other.

. . . the hidden ponds where the season itself seemed to blend as a young bedizened, a slightly melodramatic mother, before taking some guilty flight, hangs over the crib of her sleeping child.

But it is in his treatment of social objects and mental con­cepts that James reveals most clearly his great and highly original poetic gift. Outside of fairy tales, I know of no book in which things so often and so naturally become persons. Buildings address James:

Un hon mouvemeni, therefore: you must make a dash for it, but you'll see I'm worth it.

James addresses buildings:

You overdo it for what you are; you overdo it still more for what you may be; and don't pretend above all, with the object lesson supplied you, close at hand, by the queer case of Newport, don't pretend, we say, not to know what we mean.

Buildings address each other:

Exquisite was what they called you, eh? We'll teach you, then, little sneak, to be exquisite! We'll allow none of that rot around here.

At Farmington, the bullying railroad orders taste and tra­dition

—ofF their decent avenue without a fear that they will "stand up" to it.

From Philadelphia the alluring train:

disvulgarized of passengers, steams away, in disinter­ested empty form, to some terminus too noble to be marked in our poor schedules.

Again, since "The Faerie Queene, what book has been more hospitable to allegorical figures? At Mount Vernon:

the slight, pale, bleeding Past, in a patched homespun suit, stands there taking the thanks of the Bloated Pres­ent, having woundedly rescued from thieves and brought to his door the fat, locked pocket book of which that personage appears to be the owner.

At Baltimore the Muse of History descends in a quick white flash to declare that she has found that city "a charming patient."

In Richmond the Spirit of the South reveals herself for a vivid moment,

a figure somehow blighted and stricken discomfortably, impossibly seated in an invalid chair, and yet facing 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, an abnormal sign.

In Florida the American Woman is waiting to state her case in the manner of a politician in Thucydides:

How can I do all the grace, all the interest, as I'm ex­pected to? Yes, literally all the interest that isn't the mere interest in the money . . . All I want—that is all I need, for there is perhaps a difference—is, to put it simply, that my parents and my brothers and my male cousins should consent to exist otherwise than occuldy, undis- coverably, or, as I suppose you'd call it, irresponsibly.

When the "recent immigrant," to copy the Jamesian nomen­clature, compares his own impressions with those of the "rest­less analyst," he is immediately struck by how litde, on the one hand, America has changed in any decisive way—the changes, great as they are, seem but extensions and modifica­tions of a pattern already observable thirty years ago—and, on the other, by the irrevocable and catastrophic alterations in Europe.