The aesthetic attitude, in general or in particular, represented in matters of taste through aesthetic ideas and value judgments postulates a certain literary logic. And this literary logic reveals itself a sense of morality, philosophy, or moral aesthetic consciousness through the moments of act and thought demonstrated in the characters invented in literary works. Henry James, among many others, offers a very special cultural paradigm for transnational argument because of his diverse ways of shaping transatlantic relations in terms of aesthetic consciousness. And this international paradigm produced varied expressions referring to Henry James as “an American expatriate,” “an Anglicized American artist,” “a Europeanized aesthete,” “a cosmopolitan intelligence,” “a bohemian cosmopolitan” to designate his literary career and its characteristics shaped in Europe. The implications of these expressions — absence, déraciné, ubiquity, or transformation—are worth considering since they are relevant to the question of James’s cultural stance challenged by the arguments for national belonging problematized by the critics for more than a hundred years. Such expressions can resonate with Transatlantic Sketches, James’s first collection on travel and cultures in 1875 which heralded his long “expatriation” ever afterward. The publication of Transatlantic Sketches is quite symbolic since the “transatlantic sketches” projected by the title of the book was envisioned by James to arouse a sense of perspective transcending national boundaries, his life long  question of self-distantiation.

James’s temperament of mind, far from being always identified with shared values within an ideological framework, never avoided friction with fixed ideas but rather absorbed it fully for another friction which intervenes in his house of fiction. My question arises here regarding his cultural belonging or dislocation: where is the place of his mind or what could be his ultimate destination after such a long way of self-distantiation from a moral standpoint?

In this essay, I’d like to define a place or rather the place of James’s literary mind by proving a certain “sympathetic justice” for his literary logic. For this purpose, I’ll try to examine: how James used transatlantic perspective, a spatio-temporal assessment to formulate his moral aesthetic consciousness; and how the aesthetic framework functions in assessing his literary logic of aesthetic consciousness.

To start with the first argument, I’ll analyze some essential aspects of aesthetic consciousness of his characters to postulate a persona capable of theorizing James’s aestheticism conditioned by the transatlantic context. For the second argument, I’ll examine how the persona functions in formulating a proper cultural stance of James’s aesthetic consciousness in transatlantic perspective to illuminate the way of how Jamesian individuality reflects the American mind.

This process of theorizing a place of James’s own will lead, I hope, to our discovering James’s ultimate destination on the assumption that it’ll prove or create a certain “sympathetic justice” for his humanist aestheticism, a Jamesian absolute morality.

One of the most natural and poignant questions regarding James’s transatlantic position might be the will to combine two worlds, the old and the new, which is represented in the ways of shaping connections with cultural heritage. To start our argument with the character’s free will like Newman’s, Isabel Archer’s and Mrs. Gracedew’s, let’s make a brief chronology that will help us to assess the ways to look at James’s literary position regarding its transnational and transforming itineraries.

We can figure out one of the features of James’s transnational and transforming itineraries as regards the publication and literary genre through the above chronology which coves three decades (1870’s, 1880’s, 1890’s) or more, covering 1900’s (with its continuous variation of Summersoft), ranging from the publication of The American to the theatrical performance of The High Bid. The chronology, divided into two parts: the first one for the publication of The American and The Portrait of a Lady (1887-1881); the second one for the genealogical history of The High Bid (1895-1907), illuminates two distinctively different phases of transatlantic perspective in terms of cultural combination through James’s characters and his own transforming pursuits.

Newman’s interest in Claire doesn’t lie in her own human mind but in her appropriateness, coming up to the high mark, to his own mise-enscène of a well-made plot of life, of cultural combination. Thus, consequently the case with Claire and Newman ends by being severed and positioned respectively in his or her own cisatlantic world. Isabel Archer has a strong confidence in her aesthetic consciousness, in her evaluation and her judgement. And the whole process of marriage is justified from her own moral aesthetic vision of cultural combination of the old and new worlds, but goes wrong and distorted by Osmond’s hidden purpose of the marriage with Isabel. The High Bid shows a different character of cultural combination compared to the examples of Newman’s marriage project and Isabel’s marriage to Osmond since the “love interest” is not in the center, nor in the process, but reserved for a union until the very end.2 James’s idea of Mrs. Gracedew derives from her purely humanist aestheticism regarding the preservation of historical heritage. Mrs. Gracedew’s pure passion as an initiative in the English social affairs transforms the heritage into a universal property and her knowledge and vision of cultural heritage expand themselves as humanist aestheticism giving full scope to her imagination. She thus transforms the whole prospect of English cultural heritage elevating it as something for all and all for that, a universal property. Nothing should intervene in its becoming a wholeness: a pure moral aesthetic consciousness as James’s “incorruptibility  of purpose” (Dwight 439), an absolute morality.

1James’s conception of the character Mrs. Gracedew goes back to 1895 (or earlier) when she first appeared in Summersoft. The play Summersoft has not been printed during his life while “Covering End” “a close paraphrase of it [Summersoft] in story form” was printed in The Two Magics in 1898, and readapted into a drama The High Bid in 1907.

Take a closer look at the initial conception of Mrs. Gracedew, the heroine of our concern, firstly postulated above as a persona capable of theorizing James’s aestheticism:

James’s American woman, “intensely American in temperament . . . but with an imagination kindling with her new contact with the presence of a past,” must represent the idea of “attachment to the past, of romance, of history, continuity and conservatism.” The outline of her action is given as follows:

An American woman in “the affairs of an old English race”—this situation would give a clue for our argument on the questions of “How she steps in” and how this affects American mind and her aesthetic consciousness. Given the situation and perspective likewise, I’ll examine the meaning of her “stepping in” by analyzing its relationship with James’s own cultural position between the old and new worlds to argue her being as a persona capable of theorizing James’s aestheticism.

Mrs. Gracedew is a persona who “must represent the idea of attachment to the past, of romance, of history, continuity and conservatism” with “an imagination kindling with her new contact with the presence of a past, a continuity.” James tries to find the way to render it by making her “step in,” the “action” of the play, to show her enthusiasm “which repairs and redeems — which rescues and restores” (CN 114). Mrs. Gracedew’s very personal aesthetic consciousness with historical mind is rather spontaneously, immediately inspired without any deductive concern in the whole process of the bid. It’s likely that James found a persona for his argument to define a proper cultural stance of his aesthetic consciousness in a transatlantic context: a persona represented as a real meaning of cultural combination and that of a universal inheritance arriving at a certain final stage of cisatlantic-transatlantic conflict in his whole literary life between two continents.

At any rate, then, what is the meaning of her personal aesthetic consciousness validated by its social and historical context? Carlson argues about the question of sacrifice by bringing Rowe’s argument of it3 as “one of the main actions Jamesian women can undertake” focusing upon the sacrifice elevated into salvation in James’s works (Carlson 413). What’s more important for our topic is to look at the ways of how James delineates sacrifice or salvation through woman in action in a specifically transatlantic condition since there’s a certain radical growth of James’s vision of American mind “beyond our Anglo-Saxon ken” (Dwight 441).

The action is represented through her manner, especially through her speech of value judgment as well as her knowledge and historical consciousness of cultural heritage. Henry James seems to have given her a real power of speech dramatically persuasive in the end even though Mrs. Elliott, who played the role of Mrs. Gracedew in The High Bid, worried about her dialogue being less persuasive than that of Captain yule.

Gertrude Elliott felt that the audience did not feel with her when she delivered her great appeal for the preservation of the past to Captain Yule. That’s the reason why she wrote to James to render Mrs. Gracedew’s point of view unconvincing to the audience:

Henry James’s position vis-a-vis Gertrude Elliott’s regarding a possible modification is so “adamant.”

To James, the subject must be treated on Mrs. Gracedew’s grounds and in Mrs. Gracedew’s spirit rather than to make or modify her dialogue “rhetorically convincing” (Murphy 66) as Elliott wished to change it. Here, we need to examine again the dialogue in question to observe the argument raised by the actress Elliott and the critics of our time in terms of the rhetorical logic in a play. B. Murphy pointed out the fragile aspect of The High Bid as follows: “Consistency between dialogue and character was more important to him than a rhetorically convincing argument for this point of view” (66), while the question of convincing for James is something to be developed in the process of dramatic logic. Look at the dialogue which follows the dialogue in question:

It’s “the Ages,” “the brave centuries” who have trusted us to keep humanity or to share the house with us all. It’s the power of the past personified dynamically to arrive at the concept of utility where we might recognize a spatio-temporal harmony, the harmony of human house of all ages with humanity itself to share with all.

It seems to be that the past evoked by the discourse of Mrs. Gracedew illuminates a certain philosophical basis of Henry James: a certain utilitarian concept of the art of the past dynamized. That’s how Mrs. Gracedew’s speech or dialogue embodies a dramatic logic what James hoped to construct “on Mrs. Gracedew’s grounds and in Mrs. Gracedew’s spirit.”5

Then, what could be the real meaning of the “high bid” realized by Mrs. Gracedew with her passion by stepping in to the English social dilemma?

It seems to be that the high bid of Summersoft or Covering End is closely related to a very special mind of the place or to a place of the mind: the human house as the hereditary property of “all Ages” cannot be bargained over the price of it with anyone of personal interest. It should keep its place as “the Ages” have trusted them. That’s the reason why Mrs. Gracedew is there “for an act of salvation” “to avert a sacrifice” of the mind of the place.

The dialogue “for an act of salvation” can be paralled with James’s speech on “The Question of Our Speech” for American women of the period. The dialogue of Mrs. Gracedew and the speech of James, periodically close to each other, emphasized by its meaningful importance upon the speech of American woman lead us to another dimension of the argument to be contextualized in James’s literary itinerary.

2James shows “a love interest” in his Notebooks. However, it does not serve as a momentum nor as a purpose of cultural combination, but it’s suggested at the end of the play.   3Rowe argues that “Facing a potentially angry audience at the very end, Olive offers herself sacrificially in the place of Verena, who has been swept away, ‘saved,’ by that imitation cavalier, the belated and displaced Southern   gentleman Basil Ransom.” This “activism” as “a sacrifice of ‘taste’” seems “the only ‘act’ available for such women in James, which may explain further why James has prompted such ambivalent responses from feminist critics” (Rowe  92).   4See also SS. 537; CE. 301-02.   5I brought this above argument regarding human home and dramatic logic from Roman (Kim 460-61), using the same quotations, to extend it for another argument about the speech of American woman in terms of cultural interaction in a transatlantic context.

Mrs. Gracedew, existing in different literary forms, might have been conceived to embody the question of speech since James’s literary itineraries of the 1890’s and 1900’s offer a logical context for the importance of woman’s speech of the period in America. It seems to be that the question of speech is consistently pursued and emphasized through the dialogues of Mrs. Gracedew in three different versions of The High Bid and James’s own speech delivered in 1904. Furthermore, the creation of Mrs. Gracedew varied in play form or in short story6 is well situated before, during, and after James’s speeches during his “American tour,” a very special aspect of “an American expatriate” in England. It is as if Mrs. Gracedew had been acting upon him mutually shaping a very intimate parallel between a dramatic persona and the author.

Thus, the question must be asked as to the way of how to characterize this parallel between James’s specifically American commitment and Mrs. Gracedew’s dramatic role as an American woman in action in England? Let’s look at the chronology (Table 1) again to examine the parallel from a different angle of view trying to make a new chronology (Table 2) from 1895, the year of writing Summersoft, until the time for the London production of The High Bid.

Table 2 shows a very peculiar concurrence between his writing activities and his actual life bringing different aspects to the fore: if James  used an English house as a motif for social dilemma in Summersoft, “Covering End” and The High Bid, he leased Lamb House (1897 September) for his life in England. If James tried to intensify his dramatic persona through her dialogue in different forms (between 1895 and 1907), he gave two lectures entitled “The Question of Our Speech” and “The Lesson of Balzac” during his American tour 1904-5. The dialogue of Mrs. Gracedew can be considered as follows: a) the “Voice” as physical one just heard from the back stage at the beginning of The High Bid giving a strong resonance of the subject of the “Voice”; b) the speech of an American woman on which James emphasized in terms of “human and social function” (QOS 57). The women can become themselves “models and missionaries perhaps a little even martyrs, of the good cause” (57) by being conscious of their speech. This hope of James for the American woman’s speech in great good cause seems to have been represented and embodied in the character of Mrs. Gracedew as if his cultural consciousness was put into her action. This form of theory practiced by Mrs. Gracedew in a good cause must be the same thing as an “imitation,” a mimesis “of formed and finished utterance wherever, among all the discords and deficiencies” (56) James commended to American students.

Mrs. Gracedew’s stepping in executed by positioning herself in modern transnational context manifests her will to preserve the place as it had been preserved as a continuity in human history. Her challenge to the dilemma of Covering End comes from her love for traditional human property to be shared in terms of “a large sympathy.” This large sympathy, “a comprehensive love of humanity,” can be found in James’s interest in London: “half the source of one’s interest in it [London] comes from feeling that it is the property and even the home of the human race and one’s appreciation of it is really a large sympathy, a comprehensive love of humanity” (London 522), even though “London is so clumsy and so brutal, and has gathered together so many of the darkest sides of life . . . like a mighty ogress who devours human flesh” (531).

Meanwhile, this interest in London does not result in the same appreciation as that of a very dynamic one morally executed by an American woman to save the home of the human race. James bestows such a convinced competence on her by giving her a speech of practical ethics as an American woman with a good cause. Therefore the gracious power of Mrs. Gracedew is not something for purchasing or acquiring to carry it away, to appropriate it for her own interest but something for preserving it, to make it stand continuously as it used to be for hundreds of years.

Here are two interesting anecdotes to be considered for the argument above regarding art and economy in view of aesthetic consciousness and its practical ethics: the first one is the British purchase of a painting by Veronese which J. Ruskin defended as a good bargain; the second one is about the American purchase of the “Catlin’s Indian Collection” as national duty manifested by the 1849 speech of Webster.7 James was quite cynical about Ruskin’s focus on the value making of the British purchase in terms of economic viewpoint. Dimock argues their [Ruskin and James] “difference” as “a different understanding of what constitutes ‘economy’ and ‘waste’ when art changes hands, when a powerful nation takes it upon itself to acquire beautiful objects from abroad” (Dimock 97). James’s attitude seems to reflect the sentiment or cultural consciousness against “the ubiquity of Ruskin”s authority over questions of art, representation, and the relation of each to morality for the generation that came to intellectual maturity in the 1850’s and 1860’s—the generation, in other words, in which Henry James came to maturity” (Freedman 91) in the United States. The second one is a speech for the purchase of  “Catlin’s Indian Collection”8 delivered by Daniel Webster in the Senate of the United States in 1849:

There is a possible parallel between Mrs. Gracedew’s speech and Webster’s: a parallel between Webster’s “important public act” and James’s idea of salvation of the home of the human race in terms of the preservation of “historical matters” for “the Ages,” “the continuation of mankind in the present age.” Both of them manifest strongly the accumulations and continuation of historical matters to preserve them in the place to which they belong.

As is generally known, the question of the search for an American voice to awaken national consciousness was prevailingly accentuated through the 19th century, more specifically during the Romantic period of the American Renaissance. James’s idea about the American speech or American voice can be aligned with this tradition of continuous pursuit of an American self manifested long time ago by R. W. Emerson in his “The Poet.” If Emerson said that “For all men live by truth, and stand in  need of expression. . . . The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression” (Emerson 243), calling upon American metres to deal with “its ample geography” which “dazzles the imagination” (262), James raised the question of “our speech” to the American women expressing his feelings on “our” civilization “strikingly unachieved,” and awakening “an acute consciousness” (QQS 56) to invite them to “the international concert of culture” (45). James’s idea of an American speech in a good cause must meet here with the vision of his brother William James, a rather metaphysical one, such as the “energy that becomes available through conversational encounter” and the “relationship that has transformative effects” (VJ “Intro” 16). James’s Mrs. Gracedew joins Henry and William by changing Yule’s mind through conversation. Doesn’t the  fact that Mrs. Gracedew persuades Yule to change his mind demonstrate the effectiveness of good American speech, as called for at the end of “The Question of Our Speech”?

If Jessica Berman points out that “James’s writings from his 1904-5 American journey bring this redefinition of American womanhood into the international arena, renewing and expanding his excursion into cosmopolitanism by arguing for its continued enunciation” (Berman 54), the initial conception of the persona of Mrs. Gracedew for Summersoft goes back toward 1895 (see Table 2) continuing to be re-created in later forms—in “Covering End” and The High Bid.9 The commitment of this American Mrs. Gracedew, not through marriage as a necessary condition for it but thoroughly through conversation with a good cause manifested in her speech by “stepping in” to the critical dilemma of a British historical heritage, brings a salvation of it “worthy of its great human and social function” (QOS 44). Doesn’t the fact that James worked on three versions of the story, straddling 1904-05, situates “The Question of Our Speech” and the three versions of The High Bid more centrally in  James’s oeuvre?

Examine again James’s literary itinerary of the period in question (see Table 2) focusing upon the details of the parallel between the persona of Mrs. Gracedew and Henry James from a different angle of view. Henry James, preparing the play Summersoft, conceived and planned with it for an American tour but which couldn’t be realized. William James said in his letter to Henry to “hold on the pulse of the great American public to which after all you must pander for support” (CWJ 1: 267) long before the playwriting. There is a parallel between James’s idea of the American performance of Summersoft (1895) and his American tour in 1904-1905 in terms of his American commitment in theory and practice even though The High Bid has been staged in Edinburgh (1908) and in London (1909). And his 1905 lectures in America fell between the composition of Summersoft and the actual performance of The High Bid. Furthermore, the fact that the character of Mrs. Gracedew of the play and the themes of the lectures or speeches hold up the American, especially American woman, shows a vivid concern in American woman’s speech. The character seems to act consistently with the author’s literary mind formulating James’s literary position in a transatlantic context while the author seems to expand the question of speech as a national exigency for the future America to demonstrate an American cultural identity, keeping its Euro-American transatlantic relationship, especially with England with “a sense of the life of people of our consecrated English speech” (London 522). Consequently, the speech represented as the dialogue of Mrs. Gracedew becomes a moral aesthetic force of her combining power of two cultures which crosses over personal consciousness, social criteria, national frontiers. That’s how James shapes his own cosmopolitan imagination manifesting her speech of interconnecting power of the two worlds: a Jamesian transatlantic amalgamation of aesthetic consciousness and philosophy of imagination.

If James “was to forward the cause of civilization: his very experience of the over-riding female had created permanent damage within himself in his relations with women: and in that marvellous way in which nature insists on compensations and solutions, his constant effort to repair the damage, to understand what had gone wrong, gave him the necessary distance and aloofness . . . that enabled him, of all novelists, to understand the writing of The Portrait of a Lady, and to create a whole generations of American girls” (Conquest 360), Mrs. Gracedew might cover histori-cally the whole generation of American girls to become a real subject by way of her speech of salvation revealing her true intention and making a high bid for a “human home,” ultimately by positioning herself not as cisatlantic but as transatlantic, the transnational one. There’s no more distance or aloofness of the author towards his character. It’s not by the manipulation of the writer through which we look into the consciousness of a female character but by her own speech which expresses “the cause of civilization” as something to be shared and preserved as “human home” in a very sustainable way. Something inside coming out of it as a form of dialogic truth makes her a woman in action. It’s not just inner voice but outer speech of it which try to “repair” the dilemma of human conditions culturally, historically transformed until now.

With Mrs. Gracedew, a persona who creates a culture of commitment in different cultural settings, social and cultural commitment is no more a question of appropriating but of preserving cultural values. And her performance, it is exactly like a poetic drama profound and sympathetic in its beautifully strong human voice. William James would have valued it, if he knew Henry James’s American heroine Mrs. Gracedew, as “sympathetic justice” (CWJ 1: 53) of universal truth.

6P. Lubbock refers to “Covering End” as one-act play “disguised as a short story” (LHJ II: 6). It’s quite possible to say likewise since James himself refers to it as “the little one-act play presented as a ‘tale’ at the end of the volume of the Two Magics” (Henry James to William James’s son, Henry. April 3rd, 1908. LHJ II: 96). “The Turn of the Screw” and “Covering End” were published under the title of Two Magics in London and New York in 1898.   7I discussed about Catlin’s exhibition at the Louvre Museum and its historical meaning in terms of cultural exchange between America and France to make American cultural consciousness come to the fore by bringing Webster’s historical stance itself as “an important public act” of cultural preservation of national heritage” (“Changing Aspects of Cultural Exchange between France and the United States: American Art and the Louvre Museum” 225). I use the argument here to assess a parallel to be contextualized in another argument on aesthetic consciousness and its practical ethics.   8Catlin said that he “made a collection of more than 600 portraits of Indians and paintings illustrating their modes of life” and he “made an Exhibition of the same in New York, in Paris, and in London. That Exhibition was very popular.  [. . .] At that time, however, the Senate of the United States was considering a Bill for the purchase of my collection, for the sum of 65,000 dollars. [. . .] Messrs. Webster, Seward, Foote, and the other Federal members were in favour of the appropriation, and voted for it; and the democratic members voted against it” (Ross 5).   9I made a long argument about these three works interpreting this case as a very special, unique one not only in terms of genre criticism but also on its significance in the literary theatre history (Roman 2, Chapter V).

Henry James began to get the question of the old and new worlds into shape by composing conflicting relationships in the Euro-American transatlantic conditions. But, as if the division of the literary genres gives a comparatively convenient framework for literary discourses, cultural differences between two worlds created a convenient cultural distinction  for his moral aesthetic discourse, finally attaining to a certain synthesis for a certain humanist aestheticism. For this kind of sympathetic synthesis James created a subjectivity, an American female being gifted with individuality who transcends individual, national distinctions. A question might be raised: why is this interconnecting role, the role to eliminate a certain spatio-temporal specification or separateness given to a female character? Doesn’t this reflect James’s own desire to strengthen his literary position within the Euro-American conditions? We can get a fair insight into James’s literary sociology of woman covertly connected to his own position in the transatlantic circumstances by considering James’s own position as a minor in Europe or in England being comparable to that of women in the nineteenth century patriarchal society.

The subject capable of connecting different cultural backgrounds and social conditions surpasses individual, social, national values of distinctions and meets with transatlantic requirements of a modern cooperation expanding human mind into a universal whole to share. Even though James said he was “deadly weary of the whole ‘international’ state of  mind─so that I ache, at times, with fatigue at the way it is constantly forced upon one as a sort of virtue or obligation” (CWJ 2: 96), such an “international state of mind” must have been reflected into the female character by entrusting Mrs. Gracedew with a cultural obligation. If James felt “deadly weary of the whole ‘international’ state of mind,” he seems to have transferred successfully the imposed “virtue” or “obligation” to Mrs. Gracedew, a character with an executive power envisioned and shaped by the author. Consequently the cultural obligation of James is realized aesthetically and ethically in Mrs. Gracedew as a form of practice, a self-representation of his literary logic through the persona. It’s here in which we can find no distinction between Henry “the knower as spectator” and William “the knower as actor,” between the “contrasting conceptions of knowledge” (Matthiessen 673). It is noteworthy that the year 1907 in which “your Pragmatism” and “my American Scene” meet familiarly and sympathetically — familiar and sympathetic since Henry James “simply sank down, under it [the spell itself (of interest & enthrallment) that the book cast upon me], into such depths of submission and assimilation that any reaction, very nearly, even that of acknowledgement, would have had almost the taint of dissent or escape,” and then he “was lost in the wonder of the extent to which all my life I have . . . unconsciously pragmatised” (LHJ II: 83).

Mrs. Gracedew, “intensely American in temperament,” should represent “the conservative element” stepping in to the crisis of English social heritage. Hence, the germ of the reversal in that crisis is inherent in her character. It’s the role of clearing up and salvation to be played out by her action “in the drama of an English social, an English family, crisis” (CN 113) intended by the author who will combine her American temperament with traditional function to furnish a solution in a dramatic structure. If James thought of the problem of presenting her in the play, it is the ambivalence of her temperament and the needed action to be realized as a transformative aspect from the transatlantic perspective. It’ll be interesting to regard this ambivalence as a special case for dialectical argument.

America and England are of two different cultures but are also two of the same Anglo-American macro-culture. If the British have a cultural heritage in consistency and continuity, the Americans formed a new culture through ruptures and variations of the consistency. But it’s Mrs. Gracedew, the American, who bridges the rupture and restores a historical consistency by stepping in at the critical moment of English social dilemma. Figure 1 below shows Mrs. Gracedew historically contextualized in the transatlantic perspective which may well be a matter of dialectical argument.

Mrs. Gracedew is historically contextualized: she’s not the person who grew up in English society but an American who might have come out of the very tradition and at the same time who must have completely new experiences. Her cultural stance can be explained by three dialectical stages of development: a) thesis: English society as static continuity; b) antithesis: problematic situation of the society and its question of sustainability represented by Captain Yule’s modern concept of English property and Mrs. Gracedew’s dynamic view of the static continuity; c) synthesis: English cultural heritage turned into human property by Mrs. Gracedew, an experimental temperament with traditional assessment to furnish a solution for the crisis. By consequence, there could be no more “activism” such as “a sacrifice of ‘taste’” (Rowe 93) but the power of  executive faculty of salvation represented in her character as both national and transnational, a modern international role of the new age. Here we find that her being American equals a new kind of cosmopolitanism.

Even though the theme of salvation is conditioned specifically in the transatlantic context, the meaning of it expands itself towards universal humanity through Mrs. Gracedew’s purely aesthetic vision. That’s how James solves the question of transatlantic separateness reconciling the vision of the new and the old, making them coexist in the universal  human property. Here comes a poetic truth of her moral aesthetic capacity challenging to the social dilemma to meet with aesthetic sense of historical mind. It seems to be that James feels oneness or sameness with Mrs. Gracedew since her aesthetic mind and ethical practice proved the truth of it. If Stowe and Margaret Fuller “produced themselves . . . as female transatlantic subjects on the literary, social, and political scene” (Stowe 160), as William Stowe argues in his “Transatlantic Subjects,” James created Mrs. Gracedew, an American character, as a female transatlantic subject on the English cultural social scene which might be her other frontier.

The question of woman’s speech to James must have been rather a national exigency for modern America to promote a certain cultural development keeping its transatlantic relationship with Europe, especially with England as people of “our consecrated English speech” (London 522), even if Theodora Bosanquet defined Jamesian literary realism: “Just as it was not ideas about but impressions of common human behavior and interaction that occupied his artistic mind, so it was not, finally, the superficies of national identity that held his artistic interest” (Bosanquet 27). In his letter to William James (October 29th 1888), we take a look at how his identity consciousness reveals itself in his literary practices from a transatlantic cultural perspective.

Here’s how to view James’s identity consciousness: a sense of unity relying on “a big AngloSaxon total” rather than on “the English & American worlds.” And literature which “affords a magnificent arm” for treating the life of the two countries “as simply different chapters of the same general subject” can change and reshape people’s perspectives on things. And another question arises: how to locate this consciousness of “a big AngloSaxon total” when we consider his cultural stance as cosmopolitan  or universal? Given the anglophone Atlantic, James’s intercultural conflicts seem to reflect, or conform to the Atlantic history which could be defined as: both (the United Kingdom and the United States) “can be seen in retrospect to have conjoined statehood with a fictive nationalism” (Armitage 20). And James’s mind seems to reside in such a “fictive” nation of “conjoined statehood,” or rather somewhere in between the transatlantic cultural perspectives where the history of cultural heritage continues, or continuously convertible, consequently, his artistic mind can become stable and at the same time fluid and dynamic. A simultaneous feeling of national identity and transcending it manifests “James’s expatriatism” which “proclaims his nonidentity and alien stance,” a “cosmopolitan nonidentity” (Posnock 191). It comes as a surprise  to learn that James is a precursor to today’s theories on nationalism, someone whose cosmopolitanism transcends national identity when considering the concept of a nation coined by B. Anderson as “an imagined political community” (6) or P. Giles’s recent study of transformative relationships of mutual influence between writers from Great Britain and the United States in terms of cultural transnationalism. In that theoretical perspective, James’s creating a “big AngloSaxon total” would be another way of transcending nation. There is no place for practical appropriation of artistic mind to make it as one’s own or to carry it away but the place of its own to share with others making it flow into human mind. Here is the zone, a zone of “ambiguity” with ambiguous points of interaction, where James’s literary mind corresponds synthetically to the real practice of humanism.

American mind in a very special transatlantic cultural context to be a universal one—this is a unique American position or temperament with conservatism democratized which is represented by Mrs. Gracedew as a practice of humanity for “a big AngloSaxon total.” Her action as the highest expression of aesthetic consciousness, the practice of humanity realized by Henry James in the form of preservation of cultural heritage in crisis is not regardless of our modern question for a sustainable world of humanism. If The American is “a very modern novel; with no flavor of the past and no prophecy of the future, but on the exact level of the present” (Hayes 37), The High Bid is a play with a strong flavor of the past and real prophecy of the future plunging into the dilemma on the level of the eternal present. It’s James’s literary logic or philosophy combined with imagination, represented in the persona of Mrs. Gracedew, which attains to a practical ethics of humanity.

This metaphor of literary mind practiced and realized in the form of humanity from transatlantic perspective brings Henry James into a universal arena in which he deserves to have us to define his “poetic justice” as “sympathetic justice” of humanist aestheticism.

10The fact that there is no space between two parts (“AngloSaxon”) in the Correspondence led me to examine James’s letter (MS_Am_1094_(2039) conserved in the Houghton Library, Harvard University. But I didn’t know whether there was a hyphen hidden between the two parts or not; certainly it’s well-hidden if it’s there. Such an ambiguity made me conclude that the hyphen is underneath the o, implied or purposefully elided. I am grateful to Susan Halpert at the Houghton Library for helping me verify the above quotation in the manuscript.