The American scene

by Henry James

I

It was, toward the end of the winter, fairly romantic to feel one’s self “going South”—in verification of the pleasant probability that, since one’s mild adventure had appeared beforehand, and as a whole, to promise that complexion, there would now be aspects and occasions more particularly and deeply dyed with it. The inevitability of his being romantically affected—being so more often than not—had been taken for granted by the restless analyst from the first; his feeling that he might count upon it having indeed, in respect to his visit, the force of a strong appeal. The case had come to strike him as perfectly clear—the case for the singular history, the odd evolution of this confidence, which might appear superficially to take some explaining. It was “Europe” that had, in very ancient days, held out to the yearning young American some likelihood of impressions more numerous and various and of a higher intensity than those he might gather on the native scene; and it was doubtless in conformity with some such desire more finely and more frequently to vibrate that he had originally begun to consult the European oracle. This had led, in the event, to his settling to live for long years in the very precincts, as it were, of the temple; so that the voice of the divinity was finally to become, in his ears, of all sounds the most familiar. It was quite to lose its primal note of mystery, to cease little by little to be strange, impressive and august—in the degree, at any rate, in which it had once enjoyed that character. The consultation of the oracle, in a word, the invocation of the possible thrill, was gradually to feel its romantic essence enfeebled, shrunken and spent. The European complexity, working clearer to one’s vision, had grown usual and calculable—presenting itself, to the discouragement of wasteful emotion and of “intensity” in general, as the very stuff, the common texture, of the real world. Romance and mystery—in other words the amusement of interest—would have therefore at last to provide for themselves elsewhere; and what curiously befell, in time, was that the native, the forsaken scene, now passing, as continual rumour had it, through a thousand stages and changes, and offering a perfect iridescence of fresh aspects, seemed more and more to appeal to the faculty of wonder. It was American civilization that had begun to spread itself thick and pile itself high, in short, in proportion as the other, the foreign exhibition had taken to writing itself plain; and to a world so amended and enriched, accordingly, the expatriated observer, with his relaxed curiosity reviving and his limp imagination once more on the stretch, couldn’t fail again to address himself. Nothing could be of a simpler and straighter logic: Europe had been romantic years before, because she was different from America; wherefore America would now be romantic because she was different from Europe. It was for this small syllogism then to meet, practically, the test of one’s repatriation; and as the palpitating pilgrim disembarked, in truth, he had felt it, like the rifle of a keen sportsman, carried across his shoulder and ready for instant use.

What employment it was thus to find, what game it was actually to bring down, this directed and aimed appetite for sharp impressions, is a question to which these pages may appear in a manner to testify—constituting to that extent the “proof” of my fond calculation. It was in respect to the South, meanwhile, at any rate, that the calculation had really been fondest—on such a stored, such a waiting provision of vivid images, mainly beautiful and sad, might one surely there depend. The sense of these things would represent for the restless analyst, more than that of any others, intensity of impression; so that his only prime discomfiture was in his having had helplessly to see his allowance of time cut short, reduced to the smallest compass in which the establishment of a relation to any group of aspects might be held conceivable. This last soreness, however—and the point is one to be made—was not slow, I noted, to find itself healingly breathed upon. More promptly in America than elsewhere does the relation to the group of aspects begin to work—whatever the group, and I think I may add whatever the relation, may be. Few elements of the picture are shy or lurking elements—tangled among others or hidden behind them, packed close by time and taking time to come out. They stand there in their row like the letters of an alphabet, and this is why, in spite of the vast surface exposed, any item, encountered or selected, contributes to the spelling of the word, becomes on the spot generally informing and characteristic. The word so recognized stands thus, immediately, for a multitude of others and constitutes, to expert observation, an all-sufficient specimen. “Here, evidently, more quickly than in Europe,” the visitor says to himself, “one knows what there is and what there isn’t: whence there is the less need, for one’s impression, of a multiplication of cases.” A single case speaks for many—since it is again and again, as he catches himself repeating, a question not of clustered meanings that fall like over-ripe fruit into his lap, but of the picking out of the few formed features, signs of character mature enough and firm enough to promise a savour or to suffer handling. These scant handfuls illustrate and typify, and, luckily, they are (as the evidence of manners and conditions, over the world, goes) quickly gathered; so that an impression founded on them is not an undue simplification. And I make out, I think, the reflection with which our anxious explorer tacitly concludes. “It’s a bad country to be stupid in—none on the whole so bad. If one doesn’t know how to look and to see, one should keep out of it altogether. But if one does, if one can see straight, one takes in the whole piece at a series of points that are after all comparatively few. One may neglect, by interspacing the points, a little of the accessory matter, but one neglects none of the essential. And if one has not at last learned to separate with due sharpness, pen in hand, the essential from the accessory, one has only, at best, to muffle one’s head for shame and await deserved extinction.”