James

as such. What interested him was the delicacy,
the fineness of these virtues, in contrast to the
vulgar vices which assail them. In two of the
three cases virtue is reasonably triumphant. The
Golden Bowl comes to an end as soon as the
truth about the evil-doers in the action has been
found out. The Wings of the Dove shows the
pure whiteness of its heroine putting to shame
and confusion the blackness of those who plot
against her. And if in The Ambassadors the
hero from Massachusetts yields to the loveliness
of Paris, that is because provincialism, no mat-
ter how virtuous, could not, for James, be quite
a virtue. Strether is not merely an American
who goes to Europe. He is a man, sufficiently
universal in his experience, who has been brought
up in a limited community and then discovers,
not altogether too late, what joy and content-
ment might have awaited him in a fuller exist-
ence. "Live all you can; it's a mistake not to,"
Strether says in an essential passage (The Am-
bassadors, 1903, p. 149). "It doesn't so much
matter what you do in particular so long as you
have your life. If you haven't had that what
have you had ?" James seldom reduced the im-
plications of his dramas to such simple terms, but
they were always actually simple, however elab-
orately they might be involved in the multitude
of subtleties which gave his work its substance
and proportions.

In 1903 James wrote a letter to a French
friend: "Europe has ceased to be romantic to
me, and my own country, in the evening of my
days, has become so; but this senile passion too
is perhaps condemned to remain platonic" (Let-
ter^I, 411). It did not remain platonic. During
1904-05 James, again in America, traveled from
New Hampshire to Florida, and by Chicago, In-
dianapolis, St. Louis, to California. The conti-
nent, of which heretofore he had known only a
corner, now overwhelmed him, and he fled back
to Europe with his hands to his ears. The next
two years he spent in writing The American
Scene (1907) and in thoroughly revising, re-
arranging, and (in many cases) discarding what
he had already written for his collected novels
and tales (1907-09). His prefaces to this edi-
tion not only explain his own work as well as it
will ever be explained, but also throw a pro-
found and valuable light upon the whole art of
fiction. Thereafter James's life was less unified
than it had been. He resumed his theatrical am-
bitions, though without high hopes, and wrote
three plays, of which only one, The High Bid,
Was produced (1908). He completed two vol-
umes of short stories, The Altar of the Dead
(1909) and The Finer Grain (1910). He mo

James

tored in France and visited Italy and published
Italian Hours (1909). In 1910, following a seri-
ous illness, he returned once more to America,
with his brother William, who died soon there-
after. Deeply disturbed by these domestic losses
he proceeded to write A Small Boy and Others
(1913) and Notes of a Son and Brother (1914).
He received an honorary degree from Harvard
in 1911 and from Oxford in 1912, and on his
seventieth birthday was asked by three hundred
English friends to allow his portrait to be painted
for the National Portrait Gallery by John S.
Sargent.

Early in 1914 James again took up his plan,
dropped in 1909, for a long novel to have its
scene laid in America and to be called The Ivory
Tower. The World War put an end to his ca-
reer, much as the Civil War had done to Haw-
thorne's. The Ivory Tower was never completed,
nor were The Sense of the Past and the auto-
biographical The Middle Years; all three were
still fragments when they appeared (1917) after
his death. In the vast turmoil and danger of the
time James's imagination could not fix itself
upon things imagined. He had rarely troubled
himself over public affairs, but this war was an
affair which, he felt, menaced everything he most
prized. As he saw the conflict, the barbarians
were pounding at the gates and might at any
moment break in to violate the shrines of his
sacred city. His own country seemed to him to
-be refusing to lift a hand in the indispensable
cause. There was, he concluded, no other way
for him to signify his allegiance and his protest
than by becoming a British citizen, as he did in
1915, No doubt this was only a romantic ges-
ture, but it was at the same time an outward act
which expressed the whole tendency of his inner
life. The native American who was a natural
European had taken the one further step which
he could take to offset the accident of his birth-
place.

Though James was born in America, lived in
England, and wrote in the language common to
the two countries, he must be thought of as
something more than a merely Anglo-Saxon phe-
nomenon. The French Balzac and the Russian
Turgenev furnished the examples in which he
found what his own art needed to employ or
avoid. His originality lay, first, in his choice of
his terrain, that international triangle which has
New York, London, Paris at its points and
which embraces a tolerably homogeneous civili-
zation which before James had never had a great
novelist concerned with the territory as a whole.
The first novelist of this world, James is still the
best. There was originality, too, in his attitude

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