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In 1835 Tocqueville, discussing America and Russia, made the following remarkable prediction: ‘Their starting-point is different and their courses are not the same; yet each of them seems marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe.’ It is impossible to furnish exact dates but by the end of the nineteenth century the western frontier was closed and the drift of American power and attention was back toward the old-world. It started with reverent pilgrimages, but as their power and responsibility have grown it has provided such massive plans for support and salvation as Marshall Aid. The fate and behaviour of the American — specifically the rich, innocent American — in Europe, provided Henry James with his most fruitful theme, and in most of his international novels the innocent American either succumbs to or flees from experienced Europe. So much is commonplace. But in his last complete novel it seems to me that he disclosed equivocal qualities in that very innocence which hitherto he had tended to exploit mainly for its romantic potential (as with Milly Theale, for instance). I am suggesting that The Golden Bowl contains definite hints of what we might call a reassessment of innocence, a subtle examination of the ambiguous effects of the dangerous power of the American in Europe — dangerous because of the unique combination of innocence and wealth which constituted that power. Adam and Maggie Verver ‘sway the destinies’ of the Prince and Charlotte in a way that justifies Tocqueville’s prognostication, and in a way which I think indicates that James had come to realize that American innocence was now eligible for reappraisal. Innocence victimized is stock melodrama — but innocence triumphant was a new, challenging and perhaps disturbing theme. A theme which was apter for this century than perhaps he ever fully realized. I believe that a re-examination of the innocence of Adam and Maggie will bring this out.

     There is plenty about Adam (starting with the name) that suggests the traditional innocence. He is ‘the best man’ the Prince has ever seen: he is ‘natural’ and has ‘no form’. Yet there are equivocations from the start. The Prince says to Maggie: ‘I’m like a chicken, at best, chopped up and smothered in sauce . . . your father’s the natural fowl running about the bassecour.’ The Prince is slaughtered and served up from the start, while Adam seems to possess a crude, if hidden, energy. He likes ‘large spaces’ and even in the thick of society somehow he and Maggie still ‘moved slowly through large, still spaces’ — this recalls the Whitman Adamic figure ‘detached in measureless oceans of space’. To Mrs Assingham, a voyeur busy-body, Adam is like ‘a sick baby’, while even Maggie often thinks of him as ‘her child’, even, once, comparing him to her doll. All the characters emphasize his retained youth: it is he who is ‘really young’ while Charlotte is ‘really old’, in fact he is ‘always, marvellously, young’. Reiteration makes it an almost mystical quality. In one of his meditations the Prince thinks of Adam as ‘a little boy’, ‘an infant king’ — but, we say to ourselves, kings are higher than princes: it is a warning note. Again, he is ‘a revelation of simplicity’ and because of this the ‘marvellous enamel’ of his ‘firm outer shell’ must be preserved. Enamel suggests polish and purity — but also coldness and hardness. Similarly he always wears a ‘flawless white waistcoat’ and yet the whiteness seems not only vulnerable amid ‘the many-coloured human appeal’ of society, it comes to seem almost bloodless, ominous — inhuman. His innocence, Mrs Assingham decides, ‘will pull them through’. It is worth adding that it also pulls Charlotte back to an America she detests — pulls her by the neck. To preserve his innocence he is ‘exquisitely humbugged’ and Charlotte considers him ‘blind’. Yet constant reference is made to his eyes. They have ‘the outlook of a pair of ample and uncurtained windows’ and they seem to admit ‘the morning and evening in unusual qualities’: they ‘wander without fear’ and are ‘unblinking’. This might be the disconcerting stare of the blind — but often one has the feeling that he can see everything, in the light or in the dark. And those unblinking eyes are terrifying. He says little but ‘stares hard’ at other people talking: and in one of James’s rare excursions into his mind we find him meditating on his visual rights. ‘His freedom to see . . . what could it do but steadily grow and grow.’ His speech, which consists mainly of pauses and repetitions of what Maggie says, may be the result of dumb simplicity, or it may be full of sinister laconic irony. What is audible — at least to Maggie — is his ‘perpetual hum of contemplation’. Pylons look inert and passive, but when you put your ear to them you hear that faint hum of enormous concealed power. Rather frightening. And so is Adam. The reference to power is not irrelevant. Adam realizes that ‘as he had money, he had force’ and everyone needs his ‘power’. Financially all the main characters depend on him: as Maggie says, ‘Everything that touches you, everything that surrounds you, goes on — by your splendid indifference and your incredible permission — at your expense.’ The irony is clear — he both pays and is taken advantage of: but in a subtler way we come to feel him as the unmoved mover of all things in the novel. His strength is emphasized as much as his inaction.

     The images that halo around Maggie are more dense and complicated: it is as though James attaches to her everything he wants to say about the innocent American girl. She is ignorant, the Prince says that she knows nothing about him: Mrs Assingham notes her ‘incapacity to doubt’ and stresses that ‘she wasn’t born to know evil’ — a fact which Maggie seems to corroborate by saying ‘I’ve never had the least blow’ and exclaiming at one point ‘I don’t want to know,’ the knowledge in question being at once specific and general. The question, as the Assinghams discuss it, is whether this ignorance is a ‘danger’ or ‘an element of positive safety’. She is also described as blind and passive. Her imagination is ‘sealed’, her senses closed to the ‘fact of evil’. She ‘lets things go’, ‘makes too easy terms for one’, is not ‘selfish enough’. Significantly, on one occasion ‘she was passed about . . . like a dressed doll’. Like all innocents she seems not to be a part of society, ‘though whether through being above it or below it, too much outside it or too much lost in it, too unequipped or too indisposed’, the Prince cannot decide. The stance is maintained. She is a detached spectator of the important card game near the end of the novel, because ‘cards were as nought to her’ and she is always ‘out of the party’. But the card game in James becomes an important image of society itself — the game of social living which has strict rules of relationships and secrecies and permits only limited darings: thus we feel Maggie to be hovering, always, just out of the social game. This expands to Mrs Assingham’s opinion that she is ‘outside of ugly things’. Even at the end she still feels herself to be standing outside ‘the glass’ of the Prince and Charlotte’s relationship. For this reason she still retains her essential innocence even when possessed of knowledge of evil: the knowledge doesn’t seep down into her, doesn’t even stain her. James clinches the ‘pre-social’ nature of Maggie by a daring image. She has to improvise like ‘a settler or trader in a new country’.

     But James also surrounds Maggie with religious associations. ‘The Blessed Virgin and all the Saints have her in their keeping,’ asserts the Prince, and when we hear of the silver cross she wears out of sight next to her skin, we feel it has carismatic protective power. There is one description of Maggie with her son which certainly invites an association with Renaissance pictures of the Virgin and child, and when Mrs Assingham goes to visit Maggie on the occasion of her discovery of the golden bowl she strikes her ‘like some holy image in a procession’ and an explicit comparison is made — she has become ‘the miraculous madonna’. It is further suggested that she is a sacrificial victim. As she sees Charlotte approach her for the climactic interview which is to settle all their fates, she realizes that she will have to ‘pay’ for all of them; carry, that is, the sins of the social world on her shoulders. And when she looks yearningly at Adam for some support in her hour of greatest need, only to find that he is not looking at her and will not help her, it would seem that James intends a faint echo of the crucified Christ abandoned by his Father. At one point the imagery touches on a level of violence which would seem disproportionate to the actual scene: as Charlotte approaches for that crucial interview, Maggie feels ‘her head was already on the block’ and she is only not sure ‘whether or no the axe had fallen’. It is worth recalling that in his notebook James commented on Milly Theale in the following way: ‘She is like a creature dragged shrieking to the guillotine — to the shambles.’ But Milly died, as all good sacrificial victims should. Maggie lives, very actively, on. She has other qualities which are important for the working out of the situation of the novel: an ‘intensity of conscience’ and ‘a passion for order and symmetry’. It is this passion for order which prompts her to pick up the shattered fragments of the golden bowl in what is perhaps the most symbolic gesture of the book, for the crack in the bowl is the fault which runs through all their relationships and when the truth is out — when, that is, the bowl lies shattered on the floor — then there is nothing to hold the fractured pieces together ‘but Maggie’s hands’: it is she who will hold them all together, who is responsible for maintaining ‘the sacred equilibrium’ of society which James revered so much. Divine saviour, slaughtered innocent, resourceful settler—it is an amazing range of imagery for the girl who is described as ‘very, very simple’ by the sophisticated Prince.

     But unlike Adam, Maggie does collide with knowledge, has to assimilate it and act upon it. (Though, as I suggested, the assimilation is curiously cerebral.) Her epistemological adventure has the effect of jogging and nudging the images of her sacred pre-social innocence, though none of them are finally overturned or cancelled out. Her blind passivity, for instance, conceals a strenuous ‘intensity of observance’. Right at the start the Prince says ‘You see too much,’ though, typically, he adds, ‘when you don’t see too little.’ There are references to her straining her eyes: when, for instance, she questions Mrs Assingham about the pre-marital relationship of the Prince and Charlotte, her eyes ‘all the time pressed and strained’. By the end it is her very lucidity of vision, ‘her clearness’, which seems to save them all: the blind doll becomes the omniscient puppet-master. Her motive — a central one in all James — is ‘her deeper need to know where she “really” was’, ‘where she was going’. Her position is exactly that of the innocent Laura Wing in A London Life who peers through the dim light of the Opera House trying to distinguish the truth of her sister’s dubious behaviour in the opposite box: and characters as different as Maisie and Strether continually strain their eyes in an effort to read the clues correctly, to make the correct inferences from ambiguous data, to orient themselves in strange social territories. What Maggie also discovers is that knowledge is ‘a fascination as well as a fear’ so that she feels some genuine excitement as well as a sense of duty in taking up the position of ‘sentry’ — on guard for all of them. And just as the Prince and Charlotte seem to fade gradually from an active into a passive rôle — so Maggie, deciding that she has been hitherto too passive, becomes by the end of the book the most active character. But knowledge in her case also leads to a need to abandon her old naturalness and practise careful deception on Adam — the ‘diabolical deception’ for ‘sacred ends’. In fact she ‘practises’ on all of them — the deceived becomes the deceiver. Yet James makes this seem at times an heroic duplicity — which is why the Madonna images never quite fade from our minds. She steps up to the footlights on the stage of society and becomes a virtuoso performer (there are many circus images in the book and at one point Maggie has become a bare-back rider’; significantly, Adams has no ‘affinity with the footlights’). And the performance is sanctified because it prevents a disruption of established social relationships. It is the enamel of society as well as Adam’s enamel that must be preserved. To fulfil her divine mission Maggie has to enter ‘the labyrinth’ or descend into ‘the well’, ‘the mine’—all three images occur. But although she seems, like all Jamesian innocents, utterly helpless in her first tentative fumblings through the novel darkness, she finally emerges leading the Minotaur by the nose. The ‘holy calm’ of the social surface is not ruffled but underneath a complete shift of positions has been enacted. At the end Maggie knows more than anyone. Maggie is in charge. It is the Prince and Charlotte who are left in the labyrinth: Charlotte is ‘off in some darkness of space’ and the Prince, although he seems to occupy his old position at Maggie’s side, is really in a ‘grey medium in which he helplessly groped’. They seem to regress from experience to innocence (Mrs Assingham calls them ‘innocent victims of fate’), to fall from light back into darkness. Maggie’s progress is in the reverse direction. One might almost use the image of intersecting cones.

     Hints of the Americans’ increasing control crescendo throughout the book. Early on, Charlotte explains to Mrs Assingham that she and the Prince are ‘placed’ by the preference of Maggie and Adam for each other’s company. She seems to mean, rather cynically, that they are thus ‘thrown together’: but by the end of the book they will be placed in a rather different way, placed exactly where the others want them. And placed for good. Even when they seem to be most free to arrange their illicit relationship they are, as the Prince vaguely realizes, all ‘in Mr Verver’s boat’. And it is not they who hold the tiller. Charlotte might at first seem to be a subtle schemer who steers Adam towards marriage — but in the Prince’s view Adam and Maggie had deliberately ‘brought her on . . . to do the worldly for them’. She is more the hired actress than the shrewd opportunist. In Mrs Assingham’s opinion it is Maggie and Adam who ‘impose their forms’ on Charlotte and the Prince. One is even allowed to feel that the latter couple were driven to adultery by forces beyond their own volition. And once Maggie discovers their guilty secret her sense of control becomes more conscious and explicit. She suddenly realizes that ‘she might still live to drive (them all) about like a flock of sheep’ — the sacrificial lamb is also the dominating shepherd — and we feel the stiffening of purpose in her. ‘There was no limit to her conceived design of not letting them escape.’ There is even a note of something like glee in her conviction that ‘they’re paralysed, they’re paralysed’. ‘I make them do what I like’ she all but boasts to Mrs Assingham and it is that lady who decides that ‘it will be Maggie herself who will mete out’ all the punishments.

     Her ‘sense of possession’ becomes a ‘perpetual throb’ and even at the height of her ‘blameless egoism’ (which is described as ‘magnificent’) she is ‘as a little pointed diamond’. ‘The Princess showed something of the glitter of consciously possessing the constructive, creative hand’ — both the hardness, the inexorable cutting edge, and the sharp brilliance of the diamond are hinted. And by the end Maggie seems, indeed, to be running the whole show — putting on the play. The pathetically inept performer grows into the relentless author. At the time of that crucial card game she is thrilled ‘with the idea of the prodigious effect she had at her command’ and as she looks at the empty room where she is to have the decisive talk with Charlotte she sees it as ‘a stage awaiting a drama’ and she gains strength from the thought of ‘all the possibilities she controlled’. Maggie’s ‘revenge’ — the word is, tellingly, used only once — is not a matter of a sharp knife and a dark alley: it lies in her ‘compassionate patronage’. Her revenge is in saving them — on her own terms. What has happened, as she sees it, is that the Prince and Charlotte have ‘lost the key’ to their values while she — it is her own word — ‘bristles’ with values of her own. The Prince follows her tacit instructions ‘as he might have received a bunch of keys or a list of commissions’ and there is something barbed (if not barbarous) about her silent domination of the closing scenes. The difference between Maggie and the first innocent American that James sent to Europe is clearly stated. As Maggie watches the famous card game she realizes that the way ‘usually open to innocence outraged . . . would have been to give them up’. But in her case ‘giving them up was, marvellously, not to be thought of’. When Christopher Newman came face to face with the mischief of decadent Europe he simply shrugged his American shoulders, rattled the American money in his pockets, and gave them all up. Maggie, marvellously, won’t. But whether we should marvel at her divine heroism or the hard brilliance of her art is left equivocal. The results of the combined art of Maggie and Adam (both are spoken of as weaving spells) are clear. Adam, inscrutable hands in inscrutable pockets, leads Charlotte away by ‘a long silken halter looper around her beautiful neck’. The halter is invisible, of course, but we see it. And to see it is surely to see its cruelty. (On one occasion when Maggie hears the trapped Charlotte taking some people round Adam’s gallery she fancies that Charlotte’s high voice sounds ‘like the shriek of a soul in pain’.) The Prince, on the other hand, becomes ‘as fixed in his place as some statue’, a statue which Maggie superintends. Interestingly enough, at the start of the book Maggie had seemed like a statue to her father — once again there is a reversal of rôles. The innocents step down off their pedestals and put their plans into action: the result is to turn the two experienced Europeans into museum pieces. Right at the end, before the two couples separate, Maggie and Adam stand back and watch the Prince and Charlotte having tea in one of their sumptuously furnished rooms. To their eyes the unfortunate couple look like ‘the kind of human furniture required, aesthetically, by the scene’. ‘To a lingering view,’ James adds, ‘they might have figured as concrete attestations of a rare power of purchase,’ and Adam’s last cryptic comment is surely clinchingly sinister. ‘Le compte y est. You’ve got some good things.’ Whatever else happens in this dense novel, one major theme must be that Maggie and Adam turn Charlotte and the Prince into ‘human furniture’, into ‘things’. They may, as the book also suggests, have ‘saved’ them, but only by automatizing them. It may be an aesthetic redemption to be turned into a work of art, but it is also a dehumanization, a death.

     In his preface to The American, James wrote: ‘Great and gilded the whole trap set, in fine, for his wary freshness, and into which it would blunder upon its fate.’ James’s novels are continually engaged in following ‘the wary freshness’ of innocence into ‘the gilded trap’ of complex society. In The Golden Bowl society still contains ‘bristling traps’ though, like most of the traps in James’s world, they are ‘all smothered in flowers’ (we may recall that Eve succumbed to an ‘ambush hid among sweet Flours’); the departure from the old theme lies in the persons finally trapped. At one point indeed we are told of Maggie flapping her wings and desiring flight from her ‘gilded cage’, but it is stated as a past condition. At the end it is Charlotte who is ‘a prisoner looking through bars’, ‘richly gilt bars’ as Maggie sees it. And she sees it by walking to freedom round ‘the cage’. True, Charlotte does break out of her cage for one last attempt to gain her freedom (the crucial talk with Maggie), but she is baffled and returns to imprisonment. And there she will remain, we gather, ‘for ever and ever’. The Prince is also seen by Maggie as being in ‘prison’ and ‘caged’, and once again it is with a ‘thrill’ that she notes how he is ‘straitened and tied’ by her superior manipulation of the situation. Admittedly Maggie visits and comforts him in prison — the image is sustained — but then, as we learned, her revenge was a subtle thing: it was to consist of ‘compassionate patronage’.

     To anyone who might emphasize the fact that James does imply that Adam is a sacrificial lamb and Maggie a scapegoat, I would point out the shrewd insight of the worldly Mrs Assingham: ‘There’s no imagination so lively, once it’s started, as that of really agitated lambs. Lions are nothing to them, for lions are sophisticated, are biases, are brought up from the first, to prowling and mauling.’ An incontrovertible point of the book is that at least one of the lambs does get agitated, turns into ‘a timid tigress’, and finds herself to be more than a match for the biases lions of an older society: the lions are rounded up, charmed to a stillness, and deprived of their teeth. The lambs, the innocents, the American are triumphant where they had hitherto always been more or less defeated.

     Whatever James’s full intentions in this novel were, he certainly detected the remorseless cruelty of the victory of innocence. How conscious that spirit of conquest is in Maggie and Adam, how aware they are of the equivocal results of their saving power and grace — this perhaps is left unsettled. But I think James saw it. Innocence invested with power and riches can become a sinister, even a dangerous, thing: dangerous not in spite of but because of that very innocence — thus formulated, the theme of the novel might seem to adumbrate the international position of America since the first world war. Its power and riches have at times saved Europe (intervention in World War II — Marshall Aid) but the very innocence with which that power has been used has at other times seemed culpable. The cult of innocence was strong in the nineteenth century — particularly in America. Our century has had to reconsider the assessment of innocence very carefully and I think that James, who in many ways contributed to the cult, in his last book has perceived that innocence, no matter how benevolent and pure, may contain its own kind of sinister threat.

II

In 1907, three years after the first edition of The Golden Bowl, James published The American Scene, a book which contained his meditations on his homeland, revisited after years of aculturation in Europe. Not unexpectedly he felt alienated and dispossessed, he was shocked by the ‘huge American rattle of gold’ which only seemed to underline the spiritual impoverishment and bankruptcy of values he everywhere discerned. But more interesting in relation to my point about The Golden Bowl are those remarks which increase the equivocations lurking around Adam Verver’s ‘innocence.

     Here is the Prince discussing the moral sense with Mrs Assingham (‘you others’ refers to Adam and Maggie, the Americans as opposed to the continentals).

     ‘. . . I should be interested,’ she presently remarked, ‘to see some sense you don’t possess.’

     Well, he produced one on the spot. ‘The moral, dear Mrs Assingham. I mean, always, as you others consider it. I’ve of course something that in our poor, dear, backward Rome sufficiently passes for it. But it’s no more like yours than the tortuous stone staircase — half-ruined into the bargain! — in some castle of our quattrocento is like the “lightning elevator” in one of Mr Verver’s fifteen-storey buildings. Your moral sense works by steam — it sends you up like a rocket. Our is slow and steep and unlighted, with so many steps missing that — well, that it’s as short, in almost any case, to turn round and come down again.’

     The opposition of the elevator and the staircase was one to which James returned in The American Scene — and through these images he says most of what he wants to say about the differences between America and Europe. Saddened to see so many old buildings being torn down, to see valuable clusters of old associations disappearing into rubble, to be replaced by the harshly modern anonymous skyscraper which defined all attempts at veneration and historic respect, James imagined the new spirit of New York boasting in the following way. ‘You may have a feeling for keeping on with an old staircase, consecrated by the tread of generations — especially when it’s “good”, and old staircases are often so lovely, but how can you have a feeling for keeping on with an old elevator? . . . You’d be ashamed to venerate the arrangement in fifty floors, accordingly, if you could.’ Later, having come to hate travelling in elevators, James drew out some of the implications of what he called ‘the great religion of the elevator’.

     ‘To wait, perpetually, in a human bunch, in order to be hustled, under military drill, the imperative order to “step lively”, into some tight mechanic receptacle, fearfully and wonderfully working, is conceivable, no doubt as a sad liability of our nature, but represents surely, when cherished and sacrificed to, a strange perversion of sympathies and ideals. Anything that breaks the gregarious spell, that relieves one of one’s share, however insignificant, of the abject collective consciousness of being pushed and pressed in, with something that one’s shoulders and one’s heels must dodge at their peril, something that slides or slams or bangs, operating, in your rear, as ruthlessly as the guillotine — anything that performs this office puts a price on the lonely sweetness of a step or two taken by one’s self, of deviating into some sense of independent motive power, of climbing even some grass-grown staircase . . .’

     The elevator is more than a symbol of the ruthless, remorseless mechanical efficiency with which America treated its inhabitants: its brutal speed and violent directness also reveal the American predilection for the ‘short-cut’ in the creation of a society.

     American society, like the American moral sense, was going up ‘like a rocket’. Adam indeed is like a silent impresario-cum-speculator who was trained in ‘the great religion of the elevator’ — and to him the inhabitants of the half-ruined old staircases of old Europe, like the Prince, must cede the initiative and control. The elevator was ‘an almost intolerable symbol of the herded and driven state’ which characterized the American way of life: and ‘herded and driven’ is just about what Charlotte and the Prince are, by Adam and Maggie. Europe has been pushed into the American lift.

     The skyscraper itself seemed to James to offer a sinister hint of the way America was going. ‘The fatal “tall” pecuniary enterprise rises where it will, in the candid glee of new worlds to conquer’ — and surely that last phrase is not inapplicable to Adam and Maggie, those ‘stage pirates’ who came to ‘rifle the Golden Isles’ and who ‘wink at each other and say “Ha-ha!”’. Clearly James felt that while Europe was rich in ‘embodied and consecrated forms’, in America an irresistible pecuniary power ‘beat its wings in the void’. The possibility that American money might try to fill the American void with the time-perfected forms and products of Europe came home to him when he visited the Metropolitan Museum.

     ‘Acquisition — acquisition if need be on the highest terms — may, during the years to come, bask here as in a climate it has never before enjoyed. There was money in the air, ever so much money — that was, grossly expressed, the sense of the whole intimation. And the money was to be all for the most exquisite things . . . Here it is, no doubt, that one catches the charm of rigours that take place all in the aesthetic and the critical world. They would be invidious, would be cruel, if allied to personal interests, but they take on a high benignity as soon as the values concerned become values mainly for the mind. . . .The thought of the acres of canvas and the tons of marble to be turned out into the cold world as the penalty of old error and the warrant for a clean slate ought to have drawn tears from my eyes. . . . The Museum, in short, was going to be great, and in the geniality of the life to come such sacrifices, though resembling those of the funeral-pile of Sardanapalus, dwindled to nothing.’ Adam Verver’s museum was going to be ‘great’, was to be a triumph of ‘acquisition on the highest terms’: what James showed in his novel, and what seems to worry him suspiciously little here, is that such acquisition could indeed be ‘cruel, if applied to personal interests’, for Adam’s museum really contains Charlotte and the Prince: they, distinctly, are two of its ‘good things’. James, the ashamed American, wanted ‘art’ and ‘forms’ for his country on almost any terms: it was James the novelist who revealed the inhumanity latent in the acquisition.

III

Now that Tocqueville’s prophecy has so emphatically come true and America has to set about subjecting the non-communist world to its influence quite consciously, we are getting terser, less subtle, but more immediately urgent reassessments of innocence. Graham Greene’s Quiet American, for instance, ends up murdered not because of his intentions, which were good, but because of his innocence which made those intentions lethal among a people he could not understand. Greene’s point is this: ‘Innocence always calls mutely for protection, when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world meaning no harm.’ The English journalist narrator who is experience-wise sums up the American idealist Pyle who was innocent-harmful. ‘He’ll always be innocent, you can’t blame the innocent, they are always guiltless. All you can do is control them or eliminate them. Innocence is a kind of insanity.’

     Lederer and Burdick managed to reach even President Eisenhower with their outraged exposure of American behaviour in Asia called The Ugly American. There are two kinds of American in the book. The good ones — who try and understand and sympathize with the foreigners of Asia and who are pragmatic saviours with their technological know-how and tact: and the bad ones — who can be summed up by the cartoon of Ambassador Louis Sears which appeared, fictionally, in the Asiatic paper, the Eastern Star. ‘The cartoon showed a short, fat American, his face perspiring, and his mouth open like a braying mule’s, leading a thin, gracefully built Sarkhanese man by a tether round his neck towards a sign bearing two of the few Sarkhanese words the ambassador could recognize — “Coca-Cola”.’ (The tether provides an amusing echo of the one by which Adam led Charlotte off to her eternal dungeon.) James’s theme has become a contemporary problem—the problem of innocent wealth having, in effect, to save and support a significant portion of the rest of the world, and at times showing itself to be dangerously unprepared for the task. But this was not quite the state of affairs in the first decade of this century. Then American wealth and influence were unchecked by any imposed responsibilities and the question was not so much of salvation as of spoliation. The old and pessimistic Mark Twain wrote this in 1906:

     ‘For good or for evil we continue to educate Europe. . . . Something more than a century ago we gave Europe the first notions of liberty it had ever had and thereby largely and happily helped to bring on the French Revolution and claim a share in its beneficial results. We have taught Europe many lessons since. But for us, Europe might never have known the interviewer; but for us certain of the European States might never have experienced the blessing of extravagant imposts; but for us the European Food Trust might never have acquired the art of poisoning the world for cash; but for us her Insurance Trusts might never have found out the best way to work the widow and orphan for profit; but for us the long-delayed resumption of Yellow Journalism in Europe might have been postponed for generations to come. Steadily, continuously, persistently, we are Americanizing Europe, and all in good time we shall get the job perfected.’

     That the power and influence of America over Europe was — and is — for good and evil is as subtly implied in The Golden Bowl as it is loudly asserted in The Ugly American. And if contemporary criticism of culpable American innocence seems now to be more urgent and astringent it is only because, to return to Tocqueville’s prophecy, few people can have much doubt as to who, finally, for the good of civilization, must prevail.