ABSTRACT
If one deep truth shown by the American journey that inspired The American Scene was of the necessary limit that the country imposed on the possibility of interpretation, there was, somewhere in the `great margin', a sense of a supreme challenge to representation. The whole transformation of American life, the creation of a new form of power in the great tycoons, meant a new form of dramatic presence ± perhaps a dimension of character ± which the new wealth opened to the novelist. We have already seen a passing but uneasy mention in The American Scene of the alteration of Newport. And omnipresent there is at least one `lesson of Balzac',23 that money lies at the heart of so much of social behaviour. But Balzac's world of property, enterprises, inheritance, lawyers, speculators, and so on was transformed for James in his American journey, by the scale of the new America's social and economic transformations and its volatility. It was enormous quantities of money, made quickly, expended on the goods, houses, projects we have noted: grand, lavish, often vulgar, and impermanent.
