The reader of this oblique polemic against misspent wealth will immediately understand what he is not going to be given in this treatment of a weekend at the seaside: there is no mention of the host of the party, his house, or the other guests, including Twain. Anyone familiar with James's countless letters to his friends and family knows that James took an interest in gossip as hearty as the next man's. According to Leon Edel, in the The Master (1972), the fifth volume of his monumental biography of James, he wrote to his brother, the psychologist and philosopher William James, explaining his delay in traveling to New Hampshire, in which he talks of the recently widowed Twain as "Poor dear old Mark Twain" who "beguiles the session on the deep piazza" (237). But none of this made it into The American Scene. In part, the absence of journalistic information about his stay in New Jersey can be attributed to James's stated abhorrence of making a public show out of his own or anyone's (that is, any real person's) private life. Perhaps even more powerfully at work in the books is what, in Quentin Anderson's apt phrase, is James's "imperial self. " As in his novels, James's style in describing his trip across Raritan Bay—both the structure of his sentences and his characteristic methods of responding to the environment—dominates the scene. The writing is, in the current phrase, all about him, or more exactly his inward experience and what he makes of it. As in much of James's late writing, the degree of responsiveness by the writer to the elements of the scene, the sheer quantity of "thinking" and expressed discrimination, is almost inhumanly excessive; there simply isn't any room for anyone else on the scene.  ³  The corollary to James's hyperactive imagination is that the American businessmen creating the culture to which these pages are a response, are insufficiently thoughtful. They move too fast and look too resolutely forward to understand what it is they're accomplishing. In an image he will make use of again, he notes that their form of "the expensive . . . is like a train covering maximum ground at maximum speed and pushing on, at present into regions unimaginable" (363).

James of course knows what he is doing, and not doing, as he transforms his experiences into the sentences that make up this book, and he has given the reader fair warning of what to expect. In the preface, he explains the plan he had in mind when he wrote the book: "I would take my stand on my gathered impressions, since it was all for them, for them only, that I returned; I would in fact go to the stake for them. " We shouldn't misread the hyperbole here. James, living in the times of Pater, Swinburne, and Oscar Wilde, did not associate with writers commonly thought of as comprising an esthetic movement, who cultivate a desire for fine sensation. The philosopher Stuart Hampshire, in an essay on James's fiction in Modern Writers(1969), usefully argues that James has more in common with Balzac and Zola—that is, high-volume producers who can get the job done—than with Flaubert and Pater, known for their energetic strivings for the right word. James is not at all precious, though he sometimes is accused of being so, as for example in H. G. Wells's ill-mannered parody of him in Boon (1915).

Impressions, as they variously appear and are commented on in James's fiction, essays, letters, and notebooks, are good for more than the experience of having them. Exactly what impressions are good for is not easy to say, though James tries, and in any case their value may better be demonstrated than explained. This is what James suggests in his preface, immediately after stating his willingness to suffer martyrdom: "which is a sign of the value that I both in particular and in general attach to them and that I have endeavoured to preserve for them in this transcription" (353). Impressions, for James, only achieve their full value through expression, or "transcription. " They can, in a sense, be stored away for later use, but they don't yield up their full worth until they are in fact used in the act of writing them down. This is a complicated business to depict, made all the harder because, from James's own account in these pages on New Jersey, the most poignant moments of experience for him as an artist come neither from gathering impressions nor from writing them down but from a state of awareness poised between the two events. It is the consciousness of knowing you have perceived something that you can then later put to use. In this vignette at Deal, the richness of James's artistic consciousness consists in the recollection of looking forward to writing about the past: "It was perhaps this simple sense of the treasure to be gathered in, it was doubtless this very confidence in the objective reality of impressions, so that they could deliciously be left to ripen, like golden apples, on the tree—it was all this that gave a charm to one's sitting in the orchard, gave a strange and inordinate charm both to the prospect of the Jersey shore and to every inch of the entertainment, so divinely inexpensive, by the way" (361).

For all his expressions of gratitude toward the affluent young men making their way to their "'homes,'" James makes it clear that his artistic ownership of the scene—his ability to use it for his writing—is in every way to be preferred to theirs. In expressing this preference, he is showing the effects of his education and family culture, as he would describe it in a notable passage of his memoir A Small Boy and Others (1913). In a discussion of a seemingly bizarre school he and William attended in New York in the 1850s, James describes the attitude they were instructed to take toward their experiences:

As I reconsider both my own and my brother's early start . . . it is quite for me as if the authors of our being and guardians of our youth had virtually said to us but one thing, directed our course but by one word, though constantly repeated: Convert, convert, convert! With which I have not even the sense of any needed appeal in us for further apprehension of the particular precious metal our chemistry was to have in view. I taste again in that pure air no ghost of a hint, for instance, that the precious metal was the refined gold of "success"—a reward for effort of which I remember to have heard at home no good word, nor any sort of word, ever faintly breathed. It was a case of the presumption that we should hear words enough abundantly elsewhere; so that any dignity the idea might claim was in the first place not worth insisting on, and in the second might be overstated. We were to convert and convert, success—in the sense that was in the general air—or no success. And simply everything that should happen to us, every contact, every impression and every experience we should know, were to form our soluble stuff; with only ourselves to thank should we remain unaware, by the time our perceptions were decently developed, of the substance finally projected and most desirable. (214)

We can imagine how such unspecific direction, simply to "convert, " might cause feelings of anxiety rather than liberation in a child, especially when, as James explains elsewhere in this chapter of the memoir, their father, the redoubtable Henry James Senior, held up for mockery more commonly understood codes of behavior. Henry Junior tells us that his father deplored "prigs, " that he warned his children against trying to be obviously virtuous, and that he abruptly removed them from any school the moment it showed signs of following any method of instruction that a child might want to grasp and conform to.  ⁴ 

One might suppose that a father valuing the imaginative effort of conversion, however defined, would be gratified if his children turned away from commonplace forms of American commercial success to become artists of one kind or another. In fact, even the pursuit of painting, William's first vocation, was too materialistic an occupation in the eyes of Henry senior, as numerous histories of the James family have shown. It may be that in urging his children to "convert, " the father, a student of metaphysics and social thought, was thinking of the kind of pervasive transmogrification of reality reflected in the works of the Swedish mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg. Swedenborg's vast prophetic writings postulate, among other things, that every detail of the material world on Earth has a spiritual counterpart in Heaven and is susceptible of a spiritual interpretation. This aspect of Swedenborg's method influenced many English and American writers in the nineteenth century, including Emerson, who wrote of him in the "The Poet"e; (1842): "Swedenborg, of all men in the recent ages, stands eminently for the translator of nature into thought. I do not know the man in history to whom things stood so uniformly for words. Before him the metamorphosis continually plays. Everything on which his eye rests, obeys the impulses of moral nature. The figs become grapes while he eats them. When some of his angels affirmed a truth, the laurel twig which they held blossomed in their hands. The noise which, at a distance, appeared like gnashing and thumping, on coming nearer was found to be the voice of disputants. The men, in one of his visions, seen in heavenly light, appeared like dragons . . . . "  ⁵ 

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