James

He never married. He did not even succumb to
the beguilements of verse, but was content with
prose no less during his experimental years than
afterward, when he had added new prose intrica-
cies and harmonies to the language.

The years 1865-69 saw him writing criticism
for the Nation and stories for the Atlantic, with
the encouragement of Howells, and other stories
for the Galaxy, which was at the time the chief
American rival of the Atlantic in literary pres-
tige. The criticism showed a special admiration
for George Eliot. The stories were more or less
imitative, generally of Hawthorne or Balzac, and
inclined to be romantic and melodramatic. The
earliest story to reveal James's essential traits
was "A Passionate Pilgrim/' published in the
Atlantic in 1871. It is true that the story carries
a sensitive American to England to claim a for-
tune, as Hawthorne's Ancestral Footstep had
done, but there is more of James than of Haw-
thorne in the record of the sensations which the
ardent traveler feels in the presence of the Eu-
ropean charm which maddens, as so often in the
later Henry James, the "famished race" of Amer-
icans. The story-teller, trying various themes,
had found one which he could study from his
own experience. He himself was divided between
the continents. Europe drew him in 1869 to a
devout, excited pilgrimage. Once more in Cam-
bridge during 1870-72, he returned for two fur-
ther European years, then tried America again,
and in 1875 finally decided that his future be-
longed to Europe. At first he thought of Paris
as his place of residence, but though he there met
Turgenev and the Flaubert group, he felt him-
self too much a foreigner for comfort, and in
1876 settled for good in London, the natural
home of his imagination.

Patriotic critics in America have often cen-
sured Henry James for his expatriate impulses
and for what they regard as his regrettable yield-
ing to them. But the love of an artist for his
chosen themes is seldom guided by what he calls
his will or by what others call his duty. James,
the circumstances of whose upbringing had of-
fered him an unusual range of choice, did not so
much direct his imagination as discover that it
was directed to Europe. For a time, indeed, he
resisted the impulse, and throughout his life was
moved now and then by longings for his native
country. It would probably have been fatal for
him to frustrate his instinct and live in America,
just as it would have been fatal for Mark Twain
[q*v.], whose Innocents Abroad belonged to the
year of James's passionate pilgrimage, to frus-
trate his different instinct and live in Europe.
For James though not a native was a natural

James
European. The accident which had assigned him
a birthplace in the New World had not made
impossible in him an instinctive nostalgia which
would doubtless have driven him, sooner or later,
to the Old even if his early training had not
encouraged his "relish for the element of ac-
cumulation in the human picture and the infinite
superpositions of history."
There are no outer obligations upon the artist
to choose one theme rather than another, but
there are inner penalties. With James the pen-
alty was an over-consciousness of national qual-
ities, a trembling concern with matters which
are hardly of the first moment for the novelist.
Something of this appears in his further auto-
biographical fragment The Middle Years (1917),
but it appears still more strikingly in the stories
and novels which mark the first period of his
European residence: Roderick Hudson (1876),
The American (1877), Daisy Miller (1879),^
International Episode (1879), The Madonna of
the Future and Other Tales (1879), The Por-
trait of a Lady (1881)—to name only a few of
the many books which he rapidly wrote and pub-
lished. The Europeans (1878) and Washington
Square (1881) had their scenes laid in America,
and The Bostonians (1886) was, after the close
of this period, to return somewhat unsatisfacto-
rily to the use of American material; but what
really interested James was the plight of his
fellow-countrymen in a world of greater intri-
cacy than they were accustomed to. Roderick
Hudson, a young sculptor from Massachusetts,
loses his original integrity, which turns out to
have been based upon a provincial narrowness
rather than upon a definite talent, when he ex-
changes his Puritan discipline for the richer cul-
ture of Rome. Isiewman in The American, hav-
ing gone to take his ease in Paris, falls in love
with a French woman, is defeated by the opposi-
tion of her family, and gives her up with a ges-
ture of renunciation which shows that he can
neither accept the European nor rid himself of
the American code. Daisy Miller comes to grief,
and indirectly to her death, through the false
conception of her character which her purely
American manners put in the mind of a Euro-
peanized American who loves her and whom she
loves. Only in The Portrait of a Lady, the mas-
terpiece of these years, does James rise more or
less clearly above the international and superfi-
cial elements in his favorite theme. Isabel Archer
is but incidentally an American finding her way
in the European world. She is primarily a wo-
man outgrowing her simple girlhood amid such
enlightening shocks as any girl might have to
endure in any world. The action, instead of be-