The American by Henry James

Christopher Newman, lately possessed of a sizeable fortune amassed through years of conscious endeavor in trade in America, decides to throw it all off and go abroad. He has only a vague idea of what he seeks, but what he finds is an enchanting woman who answers his feminine ideal. Madame de Cintre returns his affections, but their engagement is broken by her aristocratic family, who scorn the idea of a common businessman attaining her hand. Newman strives valiantly to win her, but is eventually forced to abandon the matter forever.

Newman is just that - arisen out of obscurity to a self-generated place of prosperity. Easy-going, forthright, warm, congenial, and open, he is a credit to his country. "You take things too coolly," says a European acquaintance. "It exasperates me. And then you are too happy. You have what must be the most agreeable thing in the world, the consciousness of having bought your pleasure beforehand and paid for it." Indeed, he feels, as Americans are wont to do, that most anything can be bought, and in America this is at least true of position. One's origins have little bearing on one's place in society; hard work is virtuous, something to be commended.

But Newman's would-be in-laws take quite the opposite view, living on little else but the glory of their ancient lineage. They shun Newman for his industry while inhabiting a moldering house emblematic of their waning finances. They find Newman's proposal audaciously incomprehensible; Newman is just as incapable of understanding their indignation. "[H]is sense of human equality was not an aggressive taste or an aesthetic theory, but something as natural and organic as a physical appetite which had never been put on a scanty allowance." That his antecedents have any importance to them baffles him.

As Newman later finds, high birth is certainly no indication of high morals. He behaves honorably throughout the degrading ordeal to which his fiancée’s relatives subject him, and he emerges blameless and unscathed. Unfortunately, he also comes out without a wife. Madame de Cintre commits herself to a nunnery to escape the contrivances of her family.

It is too bad that Newman is treated so terribly, for he is a decent protagonist, pleasantly sociable, confident and uninhibited. "He himself was almost never bored, and there was no man with whom it would have been a greater mistake to suppose that silence meant displeasure." He views the Continent with "a placid, fathomless sense of diversion." That world, however, does not look as kindly on him.