HENRY JAMES: THE AMERICAN SCENE
IN the last story that he published, The Jolly Corner, James presents an expatriate like himself, Spencer Brydon, who, returning to New York after an absence of a quarter of a century, finds himself obsessed with thoughts of what his destiny might have been if he had remained in America. He still owns the old house on lower Fifth Avenue, the "jolly corner" in which he had passed his childhood: it is empty and deserted and full of dusty memories, and Brydon falls into the habit of passing his nights there, roaming through the great blank chambers and evoking the past. "It's only a question," he says to a friend, "of what fantastic, yet perfectly possible, development of my own nature I may not have missed. It comes over me that I had then a strange alter ego deep down somewhere within me as the full-blown flower is in the small tight bud, and that I just took the course, just transferred him to the climate, that blighted him at once and forever." And thereupon he becomes convinced that the old house is still haunted by the self who stayed at home. Who is he, what is he, what has he become, that abandoned, that American self? Brydon, invaded by the illusion, stalks the ghost; and at last, one night, in the first glimmering of the dawn, he becomes aware that it has actually taken form. Prowling about the house, he has himself opened a certain door; he returns to the room and finds it closed. Shall he open it? It comes over him that the other Brydon does not wish to be seen. He hesitates; he masters his curiosity; he turns away; he has decided not to pursue the reluctant spirit. He descends the stairs; then he perceives that the street door stands open. The figure is before him, against the wall, with its hands over its face. Brydon starts forward; the hands drop; it is a face of horror. And Brydon faints and falls upon the floor.
It is impossible to mistake the personal bearing of this story, impossible to question the implication of that face of horror which presents itself to Brydon. Who can doubt that it expresses a conviction which James himself had never outlived, a conviction that,
