It is as if each new departure revealed a new significance in this early novel, uncovering a new debt that increasing artistic mastery owed to an American apprenticeship. Although James paid the debt promptly each time it came due, the sense of continuing obligation clearly puzzled him, for to each reworking of the novel he attached a condescending, sometimes openly contemptuous, account of what seemed to him its artistic weaknesses. What could the infinitely delicate maneuverings of Lambert Strether’s moral consciousness owe to the bold strokes of Newman’s impulsive good nature, or the rich ambiguities of The Golden Bowl to the melodramatic simplicities of The American? How could this vindication of American generosity have set James on the path to Europe, and how could that path, from the New World to the Old, have led him to the future of the novel rather than back into its romantic past?

To retrace this journey is to negotiate the passage from the idea of America as something necessarily different from the rest of the world to that of its having made a difference in the whole world. Although the contest between Newman’s modern energies and the Bellegardes’ ancient formality does not distinguish James’s novel from most of the important fiction and poetry written in England throughout the nineteenth century, the theme is nevertheless American in that the debate over the relative primacy and value of these two opposed ideas was precipitated by the discovery of America. It arose in the Renaissance as a quarrel between the “ancients” and the “moderns” concerning the ability of established forms of knowledge to accommodate this new and original discovery, and it grew increasingly urgent throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as the tide of revolutionary energies loosed by the discovery gradually undermined the structures of knowledge and belief that had sustained Western civilization for nearly two thousand years. By the time James arrived 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 European contemporaries, 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 new discovery, until he comes at last to see that this unfolding world is both the cause and adequate symbol of his own evolving soul. As an agent of change, Newman is less a static type of American character than an enaction of the American consciousness, that curious, energetic, ambitious, and infinitely elastic spirit of moral originality that was loosed upon the Old World by the discovery of the New.

The result of this conflict between the static moral form of the novel and its energetic moral action is a measure of confusion about Newman’s true nature and what he is supposed to represent. On the one hand, we can only commend his refusal to blackmail the Bellegardes. The national reputation for fair play is perfectly safe in his keeping. On the other hand, we may feel that his “good nature” is also his greatest weakness. Newman makes his final pilgrimage from the new, American Paris on the Right Bank, across the dark river, and into the underworld of the medieval city where his Ideal lies entombed because he desired her.