The Cult of Experience
American Writing
Philip Rahv
•
In
EVERY ATTENTIVE READER
of Henry James remembers
that
highly dramatic scene in
The Ambassadors-a
scene singled out
by its ·author as giving away the "whole case" of his novel-in
which Lambert Strether, the elderly New England gentleman who
had come to Paris on a mission of business and duty, proclaims
his conversion to the doctrine of experience. Caught in the spell of
Paris, the discovery of whose grace and form is marked for him
by a kind of meaning and intensity that can be likened only to the
raptures of a mystic vision, Strether feels moved to renounce pub–
licly the morality of abstention he had brought with him from
Woollett, Mass. And that mellow Sunday afternoon, as he mingles
with the charming guests assembled in the garden of the sculptor
Gloriani, the spell of the world capital of civilization is so strong
upon the sensitive old man that he trembles with happiness and
zeal. It is then that he communicates to little Bilham his newly
acquired piety towards life and the fruits thereof. The worst mis·
take one can make, he admonishes his youthful interlocutor, is
not to live all one can.-"It doesn't so much matter what you do
in particular so long as you have your life.
If
you haven't had
that what
have
you had? ... Live, live!"
To an imaginative European, who is unfamiliar with the pro–
hibitive American past and with the long-standing American habit
of playing hide and seek with experience, Strether's pronounce–
ment in favor of sheer life may well seem so commonplace as
hardly to be worth the loving concentration of a major novelist.
While the idea that one should "live" one's life came to James as
a revelation, to the contemporary European novelists this idea had
long been a completely assimilated and natural assumption; expe–
rience to them was the medium in which they tested and created
values, whereas to him it represented something more than that-
412
