THE CULT OF EXPERIENCE
413
romance, reality, civilization, a self-propelling, autonomous value
inexhaustibly alluring in its own right. This attitude to experience
in James is often overlooked by readers ·who are excessively im–
pressed (or depressed?) by his oblique methods and effects of
remoteness and ambiguity. Actually, from the standpoint of the
history of the national letters, the lesson taught by James in
The
Ambassadors,
as in many of his other books, must be understood
as no less than a revolutionary appeal. It is a veritable declaration
of the rights of man-not, to be sure, of the rights of the public, of
the political man, but of the rights of the private man, of the rights
of personality, whose openness to experience provides the sole
effective guaranty of its development.
Strether's appeal, in curiously elaborated, varied, as well as
ambivalent forms, pervades all of James's work; and for purposes
of critical symbolisation it might well be regarded as the composi–
tional key to the whole modern movement in American writing.
No literature, it might be said, takes on the qualities of a truly
national body of expression unless it is possessed by a basic theme
and unifying principle of its own. Thus the German creative mind
has in the main been actuated by philosophical interests, the
French by the highest ambitions of the intelligence unrestrained
by system or dogma, the Russian by the passionately candid ques–
tioning and shaping of values. And since Whitman and James the
American creative mind, seizing at last upon what had long been
denied to it, has found the terms and objects of its activity in the
urge toward and immersion in experience. It ·is this search for
experience, conducted on diverse and often conflicting levels of
consciousness, which has been the dominant, quintessential theme
of the characteristic American literary productions-from
Leaves
of
Grass
to
Winesburg, Ohio
and beyond; and the more typically
American the writer-a figure like Thomas Wolfe is a patent
example-the more deeply does it engulf him.
More adequately, I believe, than any other factor that could
be cited, it is this preoccupation that accounts for some of the
striking peculiarities of modern American writing: its unique
indifference, for instance, to the larger cultural aims implicit in
the esthetic rendering of experience-to theories of value, to the
wit of the speculative and problematical, and to ideas generally.
In
his own peculiar way even an artist as supremely aware as James
