But he returns empty-handed because he cannot violate his good nature to save her. The modern reader will not easily forgive Newman the precious “good nature” that is so necessary to his opinion of himself as a “good fellow wronged.” Instead of insisting, against all evidence to the contrary, that he is “not wicked,” he might better say, as does the American heroine of James’s “Madame de Mauves": “I believe that if my conscience will prevent me from doing anything very base, it will effectually prevent me from doing anything very fine.” The “fine” thing for Newman to do, surely, would be to acknowledge the baneful effect of his “good nature” on the lives of Noémie, Valentin, and Claire, and to sacrifice his good opinion of himself in order to repair some of the damage he has done. If he had used the letter, Mrs. Tristram assures him in the final scene, the Bellegardes would have capitulated and Claire might have been saved. That would not have been “good-natured,” which is to say morally consistent, but it would have been “fine,” which is to say morally beautiful. Above all, it would also be truer to Newman’s actual “type,” since no real American entrepreneur would hesitate for an instant to use his competitors’ own weapons against them.

Looking back on The American from the end of his career, James saw that in making Newman consistent he had made the novel untrue, and that in excluding all those interesting complications upon which, he said, the art of the novel depends, he had made it inartistic. Far from reverting to their ancient principles, a real family of impoverished nineteenth-century aristocrats, he came to see, would have welcomed the rich American aboard with his gold. But that, James said, “wouldn’t have been the theme of ‘The American’…to which I was from so early pledged.” If the Bellegardes gave in, they would not be “Europeans,” living embodiments of that Old World from which America had departed and to which both Newman and James sought to return. The old home, from which the Americans fell of their own accord (to paraphrase St. Augustine), would be seen to have fallen down while they were away from it. And if Newman blackmailed the Bellegardes, he would not be “good-natured.” Instead of having produced a superior conscience, New World history would be seen to have departed from moral principle altogether. If the novel were true, in sum, there would be no moral forms at all, neither Old World traditions nor New World conscience, just selfish expediency on one side of the Atlantic and rapacious appetite on the other.

It is hardly surprising that The American cannot admit what it discovers, let alone explain it. James left America to escape the consequences of modern history, and the novel was written to justify his flight by demonstrating his American loyalty through European artistry. How could the novel tell this literally earth-shaking truth: that the Old World of timeless forms is gone, swept away by the tide of modern history? The Old World is unrecoverable because we have destroyed it and inescapable because we are forever to blame. The New Adam can neither redeem the past by harrowing hell, nor recover his original estate, nor escape the consequences of his willful fall, nor, by pursuing the course of his desires, arrive at that “New Heaven and New Earth” which is the old home in its final, perfect form. The Old World and the New are not different places—the one forever old and forever available, the other progressing toward moral perfection. There is only one world, forever new and forever old, a world of vagrant human energies without a source, a direction, or a destination to justify them.

The new world that The American helped James to discover would require a new conception of artistic form. Reflecting upon the novel when he turned it into a play, James said, “I will never again move in the strait-jacket of a novel conceived from a point wholly non-scenic…forcing one into a corner of forever keeping to it…and yet violating it at every step.” Whereas Newman can “close the book” of his experience “and put it away,” a fictive action that is true to life can never achieve its final form. “Really, universally,” James came to see, “relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.” This new form, in turn, would require a new conception of character—not an unchanging conscience opposed to action but an evolving consciousness inseparable from action. And the depiction of this consciousness would require a new kind of language, not a description of actions in moral terms, but a symbolic action moral in its own right. The American had begun with a “non-scenic” moral plot that produced a necessarily consistent character. The Portrait of a Lady would begin with an unformed character whose life, unfolding out of her desires, would create the novel’s plot. And The Ambassadors would begin with an imaginative consciousness, whose changes “from hour to hour” would constitute its action and its meaning, its energy and its form, at once. Although each of these developments would carry James further away from The American, he would describe the xperience of writing these novels as the pursuit of “unforeseen developments” by a “rash adventurer” who has the necessary “courage” to face each “cruel crisis” in history, “from the moment that he sees it grimly loom”—words that go a long way toward explaining his sense of continuing obligation to the problematic energies of Christopher Newman.

When James was virtually unknown, at work on his very first novel, he hoped it might become “the great American novel” his countrymen were looking for. In the 1880s, at the peak of his popularity, he reaffirmed his ambition “to do something great,” to “prove that I can write an American novel.” And at the end of his life, with The Ambassadors behind him and his popularity beyond recall, he was still planning to write his “American novel.” Since nothing he produced seems to have quite satisfied his idea of this national masterpiece, it is impossible to know exactly what he had in mind. We can be sure that he was not thinking of something like Huckleberry Finn, for he once stated his desire “to write in such a way that it would be impossible to say whether I am at any given moment an American writing about England or an Englishman writing about America.” In James’s view, a true American novelist would be one who could stand in “the company of Balzac or Thackeray”—although he did not mean, of course, that Americans should try to imitate these writers. He did not believe that this great American novel had ever been written. But when it did appear, he was sure, it would do more than satisfy America’s craving for a national literature. It would contribute significantly to the art of the novel in general. “I think it not unlikely,” he said at the very beginning of his career, “that American writers may yet indicate that a vast intellectual fusion and synthesis of the various National tendencies of the world is the condition of more important achievements than any we have seen.