188
PARTISAN R'EVIEW
following year, it suggests that he was still the triumphant American in
England,
his
claim to detachment uncompromised,
his
"point of
view" intact. The attitude was admirable, it had promoted
his
success so far, but it could not last short of his remaining in a state of
continuous initiation. Those who argue that he might have kept
it up, either by returning to America or by going into a noble
seclusion abroqd, are saying in effect that he should have remained
a perpetual youth or been some other person. James himself did the
greater thing. He ceased to argue with life, so far as he could; he
took the conditions of his genius for granted, so far as he could.
His intimate associations with America made any prolonged stay
there unthinkable, as he was always to find on his rare transatlantic
visits. To be ruled by ghosts was irresponsible; but he could act
upon a deeper responsibility, which was finally to embrace some
poSsible form of life and take his chances on his point of view.
This
was what he did-again to the limit of
his
capacity; and the point .
of view certainly underwent a blurring; the clairvoyance gave way to
a search, sometimes patient and sometimes frantic, for enlighten–
ment in a denser medium. That search vexed the Brahmin equanimity
of his youthful mind, it infused
his
language with images of terror and
strangeness, with words like "abysmal" and "unspeakable"; it made
him
a great writer. Meanwhile the medium was dense not because it
was English-English ways were more accessible to
him
than Amer–
ican ones-but because it was life, and he had accepted it, and
because he could no longer pretend to find life-"the cold Medusa–
face of life"--easily scrutable.
Significantly, too, he overdid the social regimen, accepted too
many engagements. Complaints of the resultant fatigue and boredom
and interruption of work fill his letters and notebooks. Yet he does
not judge the life by its excesses and for twenty years he continues
in harness, abusing the privilege of society in order to be assured that
it is still
his.
Serenity, in other words, he rarely knew except in hours
of work. While his enjoyment of the surface of life was franker,
his
compunctions turned inward and deepened. For it is not suggested
that
his
old feeling of estrangement-the "otherness" commemor–
ated in
his
memoirs-had vanished, but only that he had found a
basis on which use could be made of
it
and
his
further develop–
ment as an artist made possible. He claimed to be an outsider
still,
