Edmund Wilson
THE LAST PHASE OF HENRY
JAMES~
IN
1904, for the first time in twenty years, Henry James revisited
America. The chief results of his trip were
The American Scene
and
a novel,
The Ivory Tower,
left unfinished at his death. In his late
novels written before his return it has always been the American
characters who have gotten the better of it from the moral point of
view-scoring heavily off a fascinating Italian prince, an equally fas-
cinating French lady and a formidable group of middle-class English
people. Yes: there
was
a beauty and there was also a power in the
goodness of these naive and open people, which had not existed for
Flaubert and his group. It
is
something different and new which
does not fit into the formulas of Europe. What if Lambert Strether
had
missed in Woollett, Mass., many things that he would have en-
joyed in Paris: he had brought to Paris something it did not have.
And the burden of the book on
William Wetmore Story and His
Friends,
which was also written during this time-rather
different
from that of his early book on Hawthorne-is that American artists
might much better stay at home.
In his other unfinished novel, the fantasia called
The Sense of the
Past,
he makes a young contemporary American go back into eight-
eenth-century England. Here the Jamesian ambiguity serves an ad-
mirable artistic purpose. Is it the English of the past who are the
ghosts or is it the American himself who is a dream?-will
the mo-
ment come when
they
will vanish or will he himself cease to exist?
And, as before, there is a question of James's own asking at the bottom
of the ambiguity Which is real-America or Europe? It was, how-
ever,in the novel, the American who was to remain real. (It is curious
to compare
The Sense of the Past
with
A Connecticut
r
ankee in King
Arthur's Court,
with which it really has a good deal in common.)
For, in spite of the popular assumption founded on his expatria-
tion, it is the American who finally dominates in I{enry James.
And his warmest tributes to American genius come out of these
later years. Though he could not, in
Notes of a Son and Brother,
• From a longer study of Henry James.
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