Abstract
In The Golden Bowl Henry James reached the final vision of American values by portraying Maggie whose inherent qualities, especially her "passion for order," triumphed over Amerigo's personal power. James's primary concern in The American Scene is with the investigation of that vision on the actual American scene, which he visited shortly after the publication of the novel, and for the first time during twenty years. As a book of travel, The American Scene records how his civilized sensibility met with the actual American realities, human and social. If his novel is composed of the "story" as an action plus his, or his character's individual view of it, then The American Scene reveals more of his creative method of amalgamating life with consciousness than his novels. With less demand of fictional creation of plots and characters, James enjoys his boundless freedom of observing and interpreting of objects before him. Here, James is an Emersonian figure of Man Seeing in whom what he sees makes not only the stuffs of his consciousness, but also the stuffs of the book of his impressions. No example could speak more of what he calls the "terrible law of the artist" where "seeing" becomes "doing." It is easy to see that his numerous impressions of the great energy of a democratic, materialistic, and commercial society lead him to a search for the meaning of the American culture. This aspect of his cultural cirticism is closely related to his method, and indeed, that criticism could not have been rendered without his particular complicated style of verbal expression through which he represents his sense of the cultural "Style" of America. So, unless we have a full understanding of his method of creation and representation, we will misunderstand his criticism, not to speak of the subject of the book. As the phrase "felicity forever gone" shows, The American Scene can be read as a book of despair, because the pre-Civil War values in which James and his American innocents had been raised were lost as the result of the national worship of the god of business. His words of despair repeat what he said in Hawthorne by observing that America had not "items of high civilization." In revisiting America, he perceives again the "apparent void" to be the keynote of the scene. However, because of its overwhelming void, he is aware of the emergence of the new sense of values which is not found in Europe. That is to say, where the American sensibility struggles for a substitution for the European sense of tradition of life, he discovers the growth of the consciousness that simple and commonplace objects and institutions can be made to expand their functions and to bear rich and complex meanings. Here is an apology for the Jamesian consciousness. The subject of The American Scene is to consider by what and to what extent the substitution is being achieved throughout the country. Whatever meaning we may read out of James's judgment of the American energy, we must start with the acceptance of his "point of view and his relation to his subject," and by so doing can we evaluate the significance of his criticism of America.
