HEIRESS OF ALL THE AGES
237
her she seemed grateful for the hint. ... I thought she was meant
for something better. It occurred to me it would be a kindness
to take her about and introduce her to the world." The American
Cinderella thus precipitated from the town of Albany into the
"great world" knows exactly what she must look forward to. "To
be
as happy as possible," she confides in Ralph; "that's what
I came to Europe for." It is by no means a simple answer.
On
a
later and more splendid occasion it is to be repeated by Maggie
Verver, who proclaims her faith, even as the golden bowl crashes to
the ground, in a "happiness without a hole in it . . .the golden
bowl as it
was
to have been ... the bowl with all our happiness
in
it, the bowl without a crack in it." This is the crowning illusion
and pathos, too, of the heiress, that she believes such happiness
to be attainable, that money can buy it and her mere good faith
can sustain it. And even when eventually her European entangle–
ments open her eyes to the fact that virtue and experience are not
so charmingly compatible after all, that the Old World has a
fierce energy of its own and that its "tone of time" is often pitched
in
a sinister key, she still persists in her belief that this same
world will yield her a richly personal happiness, proof against
the evil spawned by others less fortunate than herself; and this
belief is all the more expressive because it is wholly of a piece with
the psychology of the heiress as a national type. The ardor of
Americans in pursuing happiness as a personal goal is equalled
by no other people, and when it eludes them none are so hurt,
none so shamed. Happiness, one might say, is really their private
equivalent of such ideals as progress and universal justice. They
take for granted, with a faith at once deeply innocent and deeply
presumptuous, that they deserve nothing less and that to miss it
is
to miss life itself.
The heiress is not to be humbled by the tests to which life
in
Europe exposes her. The severer the test the more intense
the glow of her spirit. Is she not the child, as Isabel proudly de–
dares, of that "great country which stretches beyond the rivers
and
across the prairies, blooming and smiling and spreading, till
it
stops at the blue Pacific! A strong, sweet, fresh odour seems
to
rise
from it...." The Emersonian note is sounded again and
apin
by Isabel. She is truly the Young American so grandly
pictured by the Concord idealist in his essay of that title, the
