The Main American Formula and the Frustrated Middle Sort by Henry James

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 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. Thus your making no money –or so little that it passes there for none – and being thereby distinctly reduced to minding, amounts to your being reduced to the knowledge that America is no place for you . . .

The immense majority of people pull, luckily for the existing order, the string that consecrates their connection with it; the minority (small, however, only in comparison) pull the string that loosens that connection. The existing order  is meanwhile safe, inasmuch as the faculty of making money is in America the commonest of all and fairly runs the streets: so simple a matter does it appear there, among vast populations, to make betimes enough not to mind. Yet the withdrawal of the considerable group of the pecuniarily disqualified seems no less, for the present, an assured movement; there will always be scattered individuals condemned to mind on a scale beyond any scale of making. The relation of this modest body to the country of their birth , which asks so much, on the whole – so many surrenders and compromises, and the possession above all of such  prodigious head for figures –before it begins, in its wonderful way, to give or to ‘pay’ would appear to us extremely touching. I think, as in the case of communion baffled and blighted, if we had time to work it out. It would bathe in something of a tragic light the vivid truth that the ‘great countries are all, more and more, happy lands (so far as any can be called such) for any, for every sort of person rather than the middle sort.

The upper sort - in the scale of wealthy, the only scale now –can to their hearts content build their own castles and move by their own motors; the lower sort, masters of gain in their degree, can  also profit,  to their hearts’ content, by the enormous extension of those material facilities which may be be gregariously enjoyed;  they are able to rush about, as never before under the sun. in promiscuous packs  and hustled herds, while to the act of so rushing about all felicity and prosperity appear for them to have been comfortably reduced.


The frustrated American, as I have hinted at him, scraping for his poor practical solution who ‘makes’ to little for the castle and yet ‘minds’ too much for the hustled herd, who can neither achieve such detachment nor surrender to such society, and who most of all accordingly, in the native order, fails of a working basis.