# Quote — Henry James, The American Scene

> The ample villas, in their full dress, planted each on its little square of brightly-green carpet, and as with their stiff skirts pulled well down, eyed each other, at short range, from head to foot; while the open road, the chariots, the buggies, the motors, the pedestrians — which last number, indeed, was remarkably small — regarded at their ease both this reciprocity and the parties to it. It was in fact all one participation, with an effect deterrent to those ingenuities, or perhaps indeed rather to those commonplaces, of conjecture produced in general by the outward show of the fortunate life. That, precisely, appeared the answer to the question of manners: the fact that in such conditions there couldn't be any manners to speak of; that the basis of privacy was somehow wanting for them; and that nothing, accordingly, no image, no presumption of constituted relations, possibilities, amenities, in the social, the domestic order, was inwardly projected. It was as if the projection had been so completely outward that one could but find one's self almost uneasy about the mere perspective required for the common acts of the personal life, that minimum of vagueness as to what takes place in it for which the complete "home" aspires to provide.

- Author: [Henry James](https://www.leafyquotes.com/henry-james.md)
- Book: [The American Scene](https://www.leafyquotes.com/henry-james/the-american-scene.md)
- Page: 10
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_American_Scene#Quotes) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/henry-james/the-american-scene/the-ample-villas

## More from this book

> What prevails, what sets the tune, is the American scale of gain, more magnificent than any other, and the fact that the whole assumption, the whole theory of life, is that of the individual's participation in it, that of his being more or less punctually and more or less effectually "squared." To make so much money that you won't, that you don't "mind," don't mind anything — that is absolutely, I think, the main American formula.

p. 237 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/henry-james/the-american-scene/what-prevails-what.md)

> It is of the nature of many American impressions, accepted at the time as a whole of the particular story, simply to cease to be, as soon as your back is turned — to fade, to pass away, to leave not a wreck behind. This happens not least when the image, whatever it may have been, has exacted the tribute of wonder or pleasure: it has displayed every virtue but the virtue of being able to remain with you. Its pressure and power have failed of some weight, some element of density or intensity, some property or quality in short that makes for the authority of a figure, for the complexity of a scene.

p. 454 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/henry-james/the-american-scene/it-is-of-the.md)

> He is confronted too often, to his sense, with the question of what may be "borne"; but what does he see about him if not a vast social order in which the parties to certain relations are all the while marvellously, inscrutably, desperately "bearing" each other? He may wonder, at his hours, how, under the strain, social cohesion does not altogether give way; but that is another question, which belongs to a different plane of speculation. For he asks himself quite as much as anything else how the shopman or the shoplady can bear to be barked at in the manner he constantly hears used to them by customers — he recognizes that no agreeable form of intercourse could survive a day in such air: so that what is the only relation finding ground there but a necessary vicious circle of gross mutual endurance?

p. 236 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/henry-james/the-american-scene/he-is-confronted.md)