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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
A great deal of criticism has celebrated Henry James's historical imagination or his lack of it; very little criticism has explored with any precision the sophisticated grasp of history that James exhibits in his novels and the various uses to which he puts his sense of history. Henry James himself had a passion for history and he sought it everywhere. Early in his writing career, in his biography of Hawthorne, James pointed out that ‘it takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature’. Much later in his career, in The American Scene, James described his own ‘Hunger for History’ explaining that ‘history is never, in any rich sense, the immediate crudity of “what happens”, but the much finer complexity of what we read into it and think of in connection with it ’. In its underlying form The American is not the kind of novel to compel one to reflect upon the ethos of a civilization or the social history of a culture, certainly not in the ways that Balzac's La Comédie Humaine or Tolstoy's War and Peace does. Nor is it the kind of novel that calls our attention to large historical trends. Yet to grasp the full stringencies of the story one should possess a strong historical awareness; for this novel provides an interesting example of how well James understood the historical implications of his subject.
1 Several critics have commented in passing on the relationship of Henry James's fiction to history. Ezra Pound showed an early appreciation of James as a cultural historian in his recognition in James's work of ‘the whole great assaying and weighing, the research for the significance of nationality, French, English, American’ and in his casual remark that James ‘has written history of a personal sort, social history, well-documented and incomplete’. ‘James, Henry’ [1918], Literature in America, ed. Rahv, Philip (New York, 1965), pp. 233–8Google Scholar. W. C. Brownell's remarks that James's works betray little evidence of interest in ‘the course of history’ and that James himself lacked ‘historic fancy’ (American Prose Masters, New York, 1929, pp. 384–91Google Scholar) were taken up and refined by Newton Arvin who observed that Henry James ‘was almost wholly wanting in historic imagination, though he had plenty of historic fancy’. ‘Henry James and The Almighty Dollar’, American Pantheon (New York, 1966), ed. Aaron, Daniel and Schendler, Sylvan, p. 155.Google Scholar
2 Hawthorne (London, 1879), reprinted by Cornell University Press, 1956, p. 2.Google Scholar
3 The American Scene, ed. Howe, Irving (New York, 1965), p. 182.Google Scholar
4 James, Henry, The American (Riverside Edition: Boston, 1962), p. 128.Google Scholar I have chosen this edition because it reprints the text of the 1879, or first authorized English, edition. The preferability of this text to the 1907 or New York edition has been convincingly argued by Roy Harvey Pearce in his Riverside introduction and by Gettman, Royal in ‘Henry James's Revisions of The American’, American Literature, 16 (1945), 279–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Subsequent references to this edition are noted simply by page numbers in parentheses.
5 Seignobos, Charles, The Evolution of The French People, trans, by Phillips, Catharine A. (New York, 1932), pp. 298–365, 377–82Google Scholar. See also Guignebert, Charles, A Short History of The French People (New York, 1930), vol. II, pp. 415–636.Google Scholar
6 Sédillot, Réne, An Outline oj French History, trans, by Hopkins, Gerard (New York, 1953), p. 322.Google Scholar
7 James, Henry, Hawthorne, p. 74.Google Scholar
8 Tawney, R. H., The Acquisitive Society (New York, 1920).Google Scholar
9 Lerner, Max, The Unfinished Country (New York, 1959), p. 260.Google Scholar
10 James, Henry, Hawthorne, p. 24.Google Scholar
11 Maritain, Jacques, The Creative Imagination in Art and Poetry (New York, 1960), pp. 180–10.Google Scholar
12 Levin, David, History As Romantic Art (Stanford, 1959).Google Scholar
13 Levin, David, In Defense of Historical Literature (New York, 1967).Google Scholar
14 Rahv, Philip, The Myth and The Powerhouse (New York, 1965), p. 13.Google Scholar
15 Lynn, Kenneth, The Dream of Success (Boston, 1955), p. 253.Google Scholar