Some American Masks

We hear a reader praising this or that writer with the puzzled affection to which American literature frequently drives its admirers, we think of the famous phrase about the “complex fate” of being an American, we say to ourselves, yes, how well Henry James understood our peculiar anxieties. It was James, too, in the same statement, who warned against our putting too high a value on Europe. Taken together, the two parts of his observation are likely to seem either obvious or gnomic. Obvious, universal, and hopelessly dull if he is telling the American Character to take care of its own interests: but what else can he mean? One may suggest that James is speaking of a certain kind of American, the artist, and cautioning us to stay on the lookout for disguises. In America, nothing goes by so easily as a change of dress, yet in art such changes have permanent effects on the wearer. That James himself never shook off a rather advanced case of Europe in the head need not really...