The American Read Free Page B

on the scene, in the 1870s, the struggle had reached its crisis. In Europe and in America alike, the forces of reaction had retired behind the barricades of traditional belief, while the modern barbarians proceeded to sack the palaces of government, religion, and art.
    Given the historical origins of James’s theme, his dramatization of it as the invasion of a feudal barony by a democratic American adventurer seems wonderfully appropriate. What keeps it from seeming peculiarly American is that the contest between Old World forms and New World energies is resolved in the novel entirely on Old World terms. If the Bellegardes wrong Newman by reverting to their ancient principles, he triumphs over them by refusing to pursue his ambition beyond the bounds of his conscience. American “good nature” manifests itself not in a decisive action that creates its own moral value but in a refusal to act, and it is no accident that Newman’s decision is wholly agreeable to the Bellegardes. The resolution is Old Worldly in a structural sense as well. In surrendering his power over the Bellegardes to the moral form of his “good nature,” Newman shapes his actions to the moral form that James imposed upon the novel long before he wrote it. Although Newman discovers the limits of his good nature in his desire for revenge, he cannot overstep those limits if the novel is to arrive at its conclusion with its moral, the superiority of American conscience, still in hand.
    That James should have conceived his American tale in this Old World form is perfectly understandable. At that moment, he was preparing to flee America for Europe, a place that held powerful and complex associations for him. Like most of his American and Europeancontemporaries, James thought of the Old World and the New as essentially different places: the Old World as the unaltered past, the world as it was before the discovery of America, and the New World as a radical departure from that past, with no ties to it. According to this geography, Europe might provide either a fixed point from which to measure modern progress or a place to escape the drift of modern history. In either case, it constituted a timeless standard against which the history of the New World could be judged. What is more, having been taught from infancy to identify America with commerce and Europe with art, James quite naturally associated art more closely with traditional forms than with energetic actions. Ideally, he knew, art should achieve a perfect fusion of form and action, a marriage of the Old and New worlds. But since the proof of Newman’s character depends on his losing Claire, and since James knew from the beginning that they would make “an impossible couple,” Newman must achieve that reconciliation on his own, by showing that his conscience restrains evil actions even more effectively than do the traditions of the Bellegardes.
    At the same time, there runs throughout the controlling form of
The American
a powerfully subversive energy that continually threatens to do what James would one day insist a novel
should
do: burst the settled bounds of the author’s prior intentions and propel the action beyond the well-kept paths of literary convention into the unpredictable, morally ambiguous world we actually inhabit. Although Newman manages to retain the good nature required by the foreordained outcome and moral of the story, James would never forget the effort this consistency had cost him. For Newman is by his very nature inconsistent. As Claire tells him, “You were born—you were trained to changes.” Like Christopher Columbus, for whom he is named, and the Elizabethan merchant-adventurers, to whom he is often compared,Newman is one of those daring entrepreneurs whose ambition is to change the world and his own place in it. Like them, he does not conform to the world. He invents and perpetually reinvents it in the process of exploring it, inventing and reinventing himself with each