What Swedenborg offered to Emerson and Henry James Senior, apart from any particular theological message, is an understanding that all of nature and experience is susceptible of transformation into a symbol, metaphor, or a sign of meaning. On this view, anyone can derive imaginative or emotional sustenance from his surroundings, if he looks at them the right way. That seems to be the younger James's view as well, though he comes to the subject from the perspective of fiction rather than philosophy or religion. Writing, or more generally "art, " has become for him a way to construct or complete his own life while also serving as an object lesson for the reader in how he can do it for himself.

It is noteworthy that James, when writing about conversion in his memoir, stays far from any vocabulary of artistic creation. He resorts to the terms of chemistry, though with a distant allusion to alchemy as well. This avoidance might be taken as a way to protect his own chosen way of life as an artist from the predictable disapprobation of his father, who was nonetheless dead thirty years before he wrote the passage. It is certainly the case that in other contexts in his late writing, where his father plays no part, Henry Junior makes free use of terms like "art" and "artist" when exploring the forms of creative responsiveness that preoccupy him. The words occur all over his letters. One poignant example occurs in a letter written 21 March 1914, to his lifelong friend Henry Adams. After receiving a copy of Notes of a Son and Brother, Adams wrote a response to James, which does not survive. But we know that he didn't think well of the book; after reading it, he told his paramour Mrs. Cameron: "Poor Henry James thinks it all real and still lives in that dreary, stuffy Newport and Cambridge with papa James and Charles Eliot Norton. "  ⁶  In his missing letter to James, Adams seems to have implied that James was wasting his time by thinking back to their shared youth and attempting to make it live again, even if only in language. James wrote back to justify his efforts:

My dear Henry,

I have your melancholy outpouring of the 7th, and I know not how better to acknowledge it than by the full recognition of its unmitigated blackness. Of course we are lone survivors, of course the past that was our lives is at the bottom of an abyss—if the abyss has any bottom; of course too there's no use talking unless one particularly wants to. But the purpose, almost, of my printed divagations was to show you that one can, strange to say, still want to—or at least can behave as if one did. Behold me therefore so behaving—and apparently capable of continuing to do so. I still find my consciousness interesting—under cultivation of the interest. Cultivate it with me, dear Henry—that's what I hoped to make you do, to cultivate yours for all that it has in common with mine. Why mine yields an interest I don't know that I can tell you, but I don't challenge or quarrel with it—I encourage it with a ghastly grin. You see I still, in presence of life (or of what you deny to be such), have reactions—as many as possible—and the book I sent you is proof of them. It's, I suppose, because I am that queer monster the artist, an obstinate finality, an inexhaustible sensibility. Hence the reactions—appearances, memories, many things go on playing upon it with consequences that I note and "enjoy" (grim word!) noting. It all takes doing—and I do. I believe I shall do yet again—it is still an act of life. But you perform them still yourself—and I don't know what keeps me from calling your letter a charming one! There we are, and it's a blessing that you understand—I admit indeed alone—

Your all-faithful,
Henry James
(419-420)

The tones here modulate beautifully as James expresses his multiple motives for writing. Without in the least taking offense at what we presume to be Adams' attack, James defends his own efforts as a writer, acknowledges Adams's depressive doubts about the value of the whole enterprise of recollection, and tries to rouse Adams out of his funk. Granted, the sentence in which James describes himself as "that queer monster the artist, an obstinate finality, " with its campy self-dramatization, can be pulled out of context and used to support arguments for labelling James an esthete. But overall, this is a letter of supreme self-reliance and tough-mindedness, written in the evident hope that the writer can instill some backbone in his correspondent. It is art that provides the means for resisting the decay of life in old age or the decay of culture into chaos. And acting as an artist, which consists of responding to, interpreting, and recreating the world you find yourself in, is a refreshment of life available to everyone.

William James had a limited appetite for his brother's late writing. But he does find a way to praise Henry's perseverance. He wrote with exasperation to Henry after reading, or beginning to read, The American Scene on 4 May 1907 :

You know how opposed your whole 'third manner' of execution is to the literary ideals which animate my crude and Orson-like breast, mine being to say a thing in one sentence as straight and explicit as it can be made, and then to drop it forever; yours being to avoid naming it straight, but by dint of breathing and sighing all round and round it, to arouse in the reader who may have had a similar perception already (Heaven help him if he hasn't!) the illusion of a solid object, made (like the 'ghost' at the Polytechnic) wholly out of impalpable materials, air, and the prismatic interferences of light, ingeniously focused by mirrors upon empty space. But you do it, that's the queerness! . . . In this crowded and hurried reading age, pages that require such close attention remain unread and neglected. You can't skip a word if you are to get the effect, and 19 out of 20 worthy readers grow intolerant. The method seems perverse: "Say it out for God's sake, " they cry, "and have done with it. "  ⁷ 

For all his impatience with what he took to be Henry's side-long approach to his topic, William admits the power of Henry's accomplishment, nonetheless: he finally allows that "the verve and animal spirits with which you can keep your method going, first on one place then on another, through all those tightly printed pages is something marvelous" (233).

The last chapter of The American Scene, on James's travels to Florida, consists of six sections in the American edition. But the British edition includes a seventh, in which James provides a summation of his response to America as he rode a Pullman car north. By this point in his travels, James's criticism has darkened and become mordant, as the evidence of the failure of American culture accumulates for him, and he goes beyond the wistful sense of missed opportunities he experienced among the houses and businessmen at the New Jersey shore. As his train moves, at nightfall, through the wilds of Florida, James sets down in writing what the repetitive sounds of the Pullman car seems to say to him (in tones inevitably reminding the modern reader of the Little Engine That Could): "See what I'm making of all this—see what I'm making, what I'm making! " James replies with an indignation quite rare in his published writing, aimed directly at the failures of the forms of culture overtaking the continent as represented by the railroad, the failure consciously and honorably to exploit its own resources:

I see what you are not making, oh, what you are ever so vividly not . . . . No, since I accept your ravage, what strikes me is the long list of the arrears of your undone; and so constantly, right and left, that your pretended message of civilization is but a colossal recipe for the creation of arrears, and of such as can but remain forever out of hand. You touch the great lonely land—as one feels it still to be—only to plant upon it some ugliness about which, never dreaming of the grace of apology or contrition, you then proceed to brag with a cynicism all your own. You convert the large and noble sanities that I see around me, you convert them one after the other to crudities, to invalidities, hideous and unashamed . . . . This is the meaning surely of the inveterate rule that you shall multiply the perpetrations you call "places"—by the sign of some name as senseless, mostly as themselves—to the sole end of multiplying to the eye, as one approaches, every possible source of displeasure. (734-735)

As much as this passage might be taken as prediction of Gertrude Stein's complaint about there being no "there there" in Oakland, California, it also affirms the continuing truth of Emerson's report in the "The Poet" written sixty years before: "We have yet had no genius in America, with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our incomparable materials, and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the times, another carnival of the same gods whose picture he so much admires in Homer . . . . America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres" (465). But this is not a simple truth. James himself possesses a tyrannous eye, the verve and animal spirits needed to convert his American experience, if not to convert the entire country—if that could be done. His style forms an extended argument for, and an exemplification of, how to make something out of the raw material of existence, how not to let your resources go to waste. Even William, resistant as older brothers can be to learning from younger ones, came to accept the lesson of Henry's style. In a letter to Henry of 6 October 1907, he allows that The American Scene "will last, and bear reading over and over again—a few pages at a time, which is the right way for 'literature' fitly so called" (242).

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