ABSTRACT

It is possible to see the terms of this synthesis, as changed between 1900 and 1914, through the problems posed in The American Scene and not quite adjusted to the demands of a particular fiction. The sense of size and scope and emptiness and movement, and the sheer vertiginous contingency built into the conditions of American life, appalled and challenged. One feature of the most prodigious form, at least in the Preface to The Ambassadors, was the mixture of scope and personal order. Here is the supreme instrument for interpreting ourselves in all of the vastly multifarious aspects of our social and our inner worlds.