BOOKS
423
seems betrayed by his dichotomizing when he goes to the length of saying
that for this novelist "Europe is form without spirit, America spirit with·
out form." There are so many instances in which that vague contrast
would not hold that it is more profitable to consider Nuhn's handling of
The Golden Bowl,
the one work of James to which he devotes a detailed
scrutiny. In dealing with "the enchanted kingdom" of Maggie Verver, he
bears down hard upon the fairy-tale "make-believe ending," and, to bring
out the unreal element in the glowing aura of Maggie's love, he writes a
brilliantly ingenious passage on how the story might have been told from
Charlotte Stant's point of view. That story would have brought to the
surface realms of the unconscious which James did not probe, and by
revealing aspects of unrecognized sexual pathology in the overly close
relations of Maggie and her father, it might well have ended by turning
"the lovely princess" into "the bad witch."
It
is too bad that Nuhn did not provide more such specific analyses,
since his wider generalizations about James are often dubious. He is con·
siderably less adequate on Adams, for here he intrudes the fallacy which
has so frequently distorted modern criticism: that the man "is more
important than his work." In the case of an intellectual like Adams such
a proposition is preposterous, inasmuch as the only relevant image we can
have of him is that which his writings provide. Nuhn further restricts the
value of this chapter by the device of substituting the part for the whole,
by concentrating upon-and overreading-the poem to the Virgin of
Chartres, as though it was Adams' central performance. He thereby sym·
bolizes the main issue of Adams' life as a choice "between the Mothers
and the Fathers." The masterly
History of the United States During the
Administrations of Jefferson and Madison
is hardly more than mentioned,
though this work alone would greatly modify the conception of Adams'
dependence upon Europe.
The most interesting point in the chapter on Eliot is Nuhn's conten·
tion that
The Waste Land
"is not tragic," that it amounts to being one of
the long series of poetic "descents into hell," but that there is no proper
tragic resolution and release. This might raise the absorbing question of
why so many American writers have possessed a tragic sense without
having been able to write full tragedy, of why our frequent structure has
been an engulfing descent into the maelstrom, even in the case of
Moby
Dick.
Nuhn almost entirely disqualifies himself as a commentator upon
such questions by another lapse in method, the most serious with which
his pages can be charged. He proceeds on the naive basis that since a
symbolist poem yields different levels of meaning,
it
is fair game to find
in
it anything you choose. Consequently he reads into Eliot's lines every
stray association of his own. The dog-star means the ascendancy of natu·
ralism or democracy, the "fiery points" of the hair of the society woman
in
"The Game of Chess" suggest the nimbus of the Goddess of Liberty,
Stetson might "on a chance" be Pound and the one-eyed merchant Joyce,
while the Elizabethan bird-call "jug jug" connotes "inspiration out of
