HEIRESS OF ALL THE AGES
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assumption that to James the ·country of his birth always signified
failure and sterility. Edmund Wilson is surely right in contending
that it is America which really "gets the better of it in Henry
James." Such an interpretation is consistent with his return to
the theme of the heiress at the turn of the century, with his
honorific treatment of her, his enamored tone and laudatory report
of her aims and prospects-her aims and prospects being not
merely those of a typical Jamesian aspirant but of an American
emissary endowed with a character "intrinsically and actively
ample ... reaching southward, westward, anywhere, everywhere."
As the years passed James's awareness of the American stake in
the maintenance of civilization grew increasingly positive and
imposing. In his later writings old Europe serves once more as
the background for young America, and his restored interest in
the nuclear fable of the passionate pilgrim is now worked out on
a more ambitious scale and with more intricate artistic intentions.
His last great novels are remarkable, too, for the resurgence in
them of that native idealism-that "extraordinary good faith"–
the effect of which in his early fiction was to link him with the
classic masters of American literature. In
The Wings of the Dove,
The
Ambassadors,
and
The Golden Bowl
the motives and standards
of this idealism are applied to the mixed disorder and splendor
of the "great world," now no longer simply admired from afar
but seen from within.
But the question whether the ultimate loyalty of James is
claimed by Europe or America is hardly as meaningful as it has
appeared to some of his interpreters. For actually his valuations
of Europe and America are not the polar opposites but the two
commanding centres of his work-the contending sides whose
relation is adjusted so as to make mutual assimilation feasible.
It is the only means by which the Jamesian idea of heritage can
be
brought to fruition. What his detractors can never forgive him,
however, is his bursting the bounds of that autarchic Americanism
of which Whitman is the chief exponent. Never having fallen into
the habit of "glowing belligerently with one's country," he is able
to invest his characters with an historic mission and propel them
into spheres of experience as yet closed to them at home. They are
the people named as the Ambassadors-and the nationalist critics
who make so much of his expatriation should be reminded that
