ing but hands, manipulating, repressing, reproving, pushing, pulling, exploiting hands, can doubt that, in all this, James was inspired by the sacred terror of his own individuality? The characters in his early novels are not as a rule quite sure of what they want in Europe, though they all exist for the sake of getting there. What they are sure of is that they want to escape from America—and they never do quite escape: the "strange inevitable tentacles" that James himself still felt as a man of seventy are always trying to drag them back. Hands reach for them over the sea; their friends pursue them; peremptory letters follow them, imploring them to return. Who can forget Isabel Archer's efforts to shake off those importunate well-wishers, Henrietta Stackpole and Casper Goodwood, who are always reminding her of her "old ideals" and of her proper destiny as a "bright American girl"? Or the letters that follow the young painter Singleton, appealing to him as "son, brother, fellow-citizen"? Or Roderick Hudson's family, watching him from across the ocean, ever ready to intervene if he makes what they consider a false step? Or, to go forward to The Ambassadors, Strether's attempt to get Chad back from Paris, and Mrs Newsome's attempt to get Strether? From the first page of The Ambassadors to the last one seems to feel that ship, waiting, under full steam, in Boston Harbor, to speed away at a moment's notice and fetch Strether home. And what does America signify to these characters? The destiny of Jim Pocock, to put it in a phrase, vulgarization; that is to say, the eclipse of all their finest possibilities: Strether; we recall, has hoped that Jim Pocock would come to Paris—it would so clearly reveal to Chad the sort of life to which they are all trying to induce him to return. . . .
Can one doubt that in these fables James was expressing his own fears? . . . But let me make one further observation. Jim Pocock's face is the same face of horror that Spencer Brydon encountered when the ghost of his American self dropped its hands.
