James

ing determined by the scenes through which it
moves, advances under the momentum of a hu-
man experience which is universal, however
varied and enriched in this case by the interna-
tional complications.

The five prolific years 1876-81 James spent
largely in London, with occasional visits to his
London friends when they were in the country,
and with relieving excursions to the English sea-
side and to France or Italy. While his letters
to his family were often caustic enough about the
islanders among whom he had settled, he in-
creasingly developed a profound affection for
them. As a people of action, as explorers, col-
onizers, traders, soldiers, the British hardly ex-
isted for him, any more than his compatriots
had done. These were matters which interested
him very little. He confined himself to the life
of fashion and of leisure, to domestic adventure
and routine, to the affairs of hearts and minds
for the most part withdrawn from hampering
contact with the rougher phases of existence.
This is what James would presumably have done
had he stayed in America. London, with its
larger world of fashion and leisure, with its
fixed and ordered habits of private life, furnished
him with an easier and more abundant, and there-
fore more congenial, universe to study and rec-
ord than he had been able to discover in New
York or Boston.

For some time he now and then thought of his
status as resembling that of Turgenev, in that
each of the two novelists, writing in a cosmopoli-
tan capital, had elsewhere a vast native province
to draw upon. James, however, less American
than Turgenev was Russian, gradually lost this
sense of America as a kind of spiritual reservoir.
His recollections of New York and New Eng-
land, never profound, grew dim with his absence
from them. Perhaps it w'as less his country than
his family that he remembered. Though he made
two visits to America during 1881-83, the death
of his mother and of his father during these
years so reduced his interest in the scenes and
persons of his youth that he did not come back
again till 1904. He had even lost his interest in
the international contrasts which had so long en-
gaged him. The Princess Casamassima (1886),
purely European as to setting and characters,
was evidence how far James had gone in his
saturation with English life. The theme was
suggested to him, he later wrote, by his habit of
walking the streets of London and reflecting upon
the possible lot of some young man who should
have been produced by this civilization and yet
should be condemned, as James had decidedly not
teen, tp witness it from without—that is, from

James
without the world of grace and intelligence.
James's representation of the world to which
Hyacinth Robinson is introduced and by which
he is seduced from his enthusiasm for the rights
of men in general is James's tribute to the soci-
ety which, less melodramatically, had won the
American from his own native allegiances. And
whereas The Bostonians, published the same
year, w'as a little angular and schematic, The
Princess Casamassima was ripe and full, if not
precisely full-blooded.
This novel may be said to mark the high point
of James's idealization of English life, in which
for ten years he had been involving himself with
an affectionate admiration not without its ro-
mantic elements. In The Tragic Muse (1890),
his next long work, he showed a more critical
attitude. Nicholas Dormer resigns his seat in
Parliament to become a mere portrait painter, to
the horror of his family and friends who have
expected him to be as political as they. In the
same book Miriam Rooth prefers becoming a
great actress to becoming the wife of a brilliant
diplomat. In both characters the conflict is be-
tween art and the world, even the fascinating
London world. The sympathy in the narrative
is on the side of the artists, who to James now
seemed to belong to an aristocracy more impor-
tant and more desirable than anything in those
"dense categories of dark arcana" which he had
come to Europe to penetrate. From thinking
about the consequences of where one lives he had
moved on to thinking about how one might live
best. "It's the simplest thing in the world," he
makes one of his characters say; "just take for
granted our right to be happy and brave. What's
essentially kinder and more helpful than that,
more beneficent ? But the tradition of dreariness,
of stodginess, of dull dense literal prose, has . . .
sealed people's eyes" (The Tragic Muse, 1908,
p. 170). Like Walter Pater, James was urging
the claims of intensity and joy as against regu-
larity and complacency. But whereas Pater had
felt obliged to look for his examples in the past,
James was content, and able, to find them in the
immediate present.
His shift of emphasis was the outcome of an
experience of which he had become increasingly
aware. Except in the case of Daisy Miller he
had won almost no popular success, though he
had confidently expected something of the sort
from The Bostonians and The Princess Casa-
massima. Nor had England greeted his books
more eagerly than the United States had done.
The London world of fashion and leisure either
neglected his tribute or else took it casually for
granted. There was personal resentment in his