HEIRESS OF ALL THE AGES
245
duced by the novel's astonishing unfoldment, we seem to par–
ticipate in this renunciation of the world at the precise moment
when its alternative-i.e. the work of art-actually comes into
being, or, more accurately, is at last fully realized. Since in this
work the world is overcome only after it has been possessed, the
IDity of life and art is affirmed in it despite the author's attempt
to
divorce them by closing with a purely subjective account of the
artistic process. (No matter what Proust intended this account
to
mean, taken in its context it affects us as an ironic expression
of
the artist's triumph over his material, a mocking valediction
addressed to that recalcitrant angel-the objective spirit of reality
-with whom the artist grappled through the long night of creation
and,
having gotten the better of him, can now treat with disdain.)
But if in Proust art and life are unified by the contradiction
between them, in James they are initially combined in his root–
idea of experience. His passionate pilgrims, such as the heiress,
are driven, despite. all vacillations and retractions, by their need
lo
master the world (which is identified with experience and the
"real
taste
of life"), and in art they recognize the means by which
lhe
world becomes most richly aware of itself. As Americans
they
have come to it so belatedly that they can
ill
afford either
lhe
spiritual luxury or spiritual desperation of looking beyond
it
This is the reason, I think, that except for the early example
of
Roderick Hudson,
the theme of art and
artist~:;
enters signifi–
eantly
and independently only into some of James's short stories,
iD
which he deals not with his representative figures but with his
own
case as a professional writer somewhat estranged from society
by
his devotion to his craft. Though these stories testify to the
artistic idealism of their author, they can scarcely be taken as a
aerious challenge to the authority of the world.
Now at this point it should be evident that James's inability
1o
overcome the world, in the sense that most European writers
rllike caliber overcome it, is due not to his being too much of
it,
but, paradoxically enough, to his being too little of it. And
for that the explanation must be sought in his origins. For he
approaches the world with certain
presumptions of piety
that
clearly derive from the semi-religious idealism of his family–
background and, more generally, from the early traditions and
faith of the American community. But in James this idealism
