The American National Quality?

Like every work by James, the story is calculated to describe with exquisite precision how life works. Our protagonist, Raymond, is in love with Mrs. Temperly’s daughter, Dora, and wants to marry her. Without ever saying to either Raymond or Dora that the marriage should not happen, Mrs. Temperly ensures it will not. That is the story.

Mrs. Temperly does indeed have faculty in a supreme degree.

What does that mean? “Faculty” is not a word used much these days to describe a person. Do I know anyone with faculty in a supreme degree? I don’t think so. I have certainly never described anyone that way. I have never even herd someone described that was before. I suspect neither have you. 

More than that, I was not even sure what exactly it would mean to say someone had faculty in a supreme degree.

The Oxford English Dictionary comes to the rescue, which begins by pointing to Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, which defines the term most succinctly as “The power of doing any thing.”

Ah. Mrs. Temperly certainly has faculty in a supreme degree. It is, without a doubt her defining characteristic. She sets forth what she wants to do, and then arranges for it to happen, seemingly without effort, not just inhibiting a marriage, but every other thing she wants to do.

Chance for her is a lighthearted joke: “Oh, a chance! what do you call by that fine name?”

Is Mrs. Temperly realistic? Since she is in a Henry James short story, she certainly meant to be realistic. But is it possible to have such a high degree of faculty? Is it possible to arrange one’s world so perfectly, so neatly, that nothing is left to chance, and things will work out exactly as you would have them work?

Even more interestingly, if you were to meet someone with a supreme degree of faculty, would you like that person? Would you want to be friends with someone like that? Would you hire someone like that?

Probably not. You, being a person with a lower degree of faculty, will become merely another set piece in that other person‘s perfectly arranged life.

Raymond does not make out too well in his interactions with the woman of supreme faculty. He has ideas of his own, he is unhappy with the status quo, but he ends up living out his life in exactly the way Mrs. Temperly would choose without her ever needing to cajole or force him to do anything at all.

Having faculty seems like a good thing. I would like to have faculty.

But, others having faculty may not be such a good thing for you. What if your plans are not the same as the plans of the person with faculty? “I am sorry you have ideas that make you unhappy,” Mrs. Temperly tells Raymond. “I guess you are the only person here who hasn’t enjoyed himself to-night.”

Part of me wants to just dismiss the whole idea of a supreme degree of faculty as an oddity in a Henry James story. Surely not every character in Henry James is someone I can actually imagine meeting. But, James won’t let us dismiss the term so easily. It is, he said, “the American national quality.” That is intriguing. 

James is setting up Mrs. Temperly as the personification of America in the drawing rooms of France in the late 1800s.

She “was an optimist for others as well as for herself, which doubtless had a great deal to do…with the headway she made in a society tired of its own pessimism.” 

Not a bad description of America in the late 1800s compared to European continent in the midst of centuries of perpetual struggle.

Over a century later, is it still true?  Curiously, James’ story may provide insight into the divisions currently deepening in American society.  One the one side, we have those who see America as the land of Faculty, that optimism that the good old USA can do any thing.  On the other side, there is a society tired of its own pessimism.  When the former enters into the land of the latter, what happens?

Henry James is a prophet.