234
PARTISAN REVIEW
this place and all this sad strange summer have been so full of
-and it penetrates one's soul and lodges there and keeps saying
that man wasn't made, as we think at home, to struggle so much
and to miss so much, but to ask of life as a matter of course
some beauty and some charm. This place has destroyed any
scrap of consistency that I ever possessed, but even if I must
say something sinful I love it!"
Rowland:
"If
ifs sinful I absolve you-in so far as I have
power. We should not be able to enjoy, I suppose, unless we
could suffer, and in anything that's worthy of the name of ex–
perience--that experience which is the real
ta.ste
of life, isn't.
it?-the mixture is of the finest and subtlest."
The pathos of this dialogue is the pathos of all the buried
things in the American past it recalls us to. It recalls us, more–
over, to one of the most telling and precise relations in our litera–
ture, that of the early James to Hawthorne.* Consider how this
relation is at once contained and developed in Mary's vision of
what life holds for those bold enough to ask of it as a matter of
course "some beauty and some charm." For Mary is essentially
a figure from a novel such as
The Blithedale Romance
or
The
Marble Faun
brought forward into a later age; and because of
the shift of values that has occurred in the meantime, she is able
to express in a mundane fashion those feelings and sentiments
that in Hawthorne are still somewhat hidden and only spoken of
with a semi-clerical quaver, as if from under a veil. In Mary's
confession the spectral consciousness of the perils of beauty, of
the evil it hides, is at long last being exorcised, the mind is being
cleared of its home-grown fears and mystifications. The reality
of experience can no longer be resisted: "Even
if
I say something
sinful I love it!" And having said it, she is absolved of her "sin"
by Rowland, who in this scene is manifestly acting for the author.
It is Rowland, too, who describes experience as the "real
taste
of life," thus disclosing its innermost Jamesian sense. For in this
sense of it the idea of experience is emptied of its more ordinary
meanings, of empirical reference, and made to correspond to pure
consummation, to that "felt felicity" so often invoked by James, to
something lovingly selected or distilled from life-all of which
• Among the first to notice the connection was William James. In 1870 he wrote
to his brother: "It tickled my national feeling not a little to note the resemblance
of Hawthorne's style to yours and Howells's.... That you and Howells, with
all
the models
in
English literature to follow, should involuntarily have imitated (aa
it were) this American, seems to point to the existence of some real mental
American quality."
