Considering what he calls ‘The Scale of the Infusion’, one of the running-heads to the British edition of The American Scene (1907), Henry James professes himself at something of a loss. Faced by the overwhelming ‘impression’ of New York, James finds the spectacle resistant to attempts to make it ‘legible’, to find meaning from the vision of excess which lay profligate all around him. The travelogue recalls James’ journey to America in 1904–05, his first trip back to his homeland in over twenty years. Having made his name and career in Europe, James was fresh from the recent completion of the novels of his so-called ‘major phase’, The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903) and The Golden Bowl (1904). But if the trip was a return of the native (James was disappointed that Thomas Hardy had already taken this title (3 n.2)), the person who returned was not the one who had left to seek his literary fortune. As such, The American Scene is a document of James’ sense of ‘dispossession’ (100), of a subject unable to fix his sense of the past or comprehend the new America he encountered.