The autumn of 1875 marked the period of his final decision to make his home in Europe. He settled in Paris at first, and was admitted to terms of intimacy with Turgenev, Flaubert, Maupassant, Daudet, Zola, Edmond de Goncourt, and others. The very great influence of Turgenev upon his work is hardly second to that of Balzac and Hawthorne, and Flaubert and Maupassant gave him something more than a passion for technique. If we add an early but rather strong influence from the novels of George Eliot, we shall have practically completed the list of his literary derivations, which are less significant in his case than in that of any other American writer of fiction.

Paris gave place to London the following year, and it was in England that he found his spiritual home, although he did not become a British citizen until a few months before his death. England ministered to his sense of the past, while preserving his consciousness of continuity in race and language. As a novelist, he was to write in English, and not in French. America was young and, as he said not altogether truly in 1880, “it takes an old civilization to set a novelist in motion.'

1 Letters, 1920, i. 72. To W. D. Howells.

99 1

Save for two years (1881-3) which were chiefly spent in America because of the death of his parents, and a final visit for a few months twenty years later, he was never to leave Europe again. The chronicle of this last forty years is simply a record of books and friendships till death claimed him in Chelsea on February 28, 1916. We may note, however, the fact, which has been scarcely emphasized, that in later years he more than once expressed a wish that young American writers might remain at home; and we may add to this fact two little recorded moments in the life of Henry James when he was off guard. These two pictures tell us more about him than all his letters and all his prefaces.

Let Desmond MacCarthy offer us the first picture. "It was after a luncheon party of which he had been, as they say, 'the life.' We happened to be drinking our coffee together while the rest of the party had moved on to the verandah. 'What a charming picture they make,' he said, with his great head aslant, 'the women there with their embroidery, the . . . There was nothing in his words-anybody might have spoken them-but in his attitude, in his voice, in his whole being, there was a suggestion of such complete detachment,

that I was startled into speaking out of myself: 'I can't bear to look at life like that, I want too much to be in it—it makes me feel absolutely alone—perhaps that is why I cannot write. . . The effect of this confession upon him was surprising. He leant forward and grasped my arm excitedly: "Yes, it is absolute solitude. Absolute solitude. If it runs after you and catches you, well and good. But for heaven's sake don't run after it!" And he got up hurriedly and joined the others." 1

Edmund Gosse supplies the other incident. "I was staying alone with Henry James at Rye one summer, and as twilight deepened we walked together in the garden. . . . I suddenly found that in profuse and enigmatic language he was recounting to me an experience, something that had happened, not something repeated or imagined. He spoke of standing on the pavement of a city, in the dusk, and of gazing upwards across the misty street, watching, watching for the lighting of a lamp in a window on the third story. And the lamp blazed out, and through bursting tears he strained to see what was behind it, the unapproachable face. And for hours he stood there, wet with the rain, brushed 1 New Statesman, May 15, 1920, p. 164.

by the phantom hurrying figures of the scene, and never from behind the lamp was for one moment visible the face. . . . And for a long time Henry James shuffled beside me in the darkness, shaking the dew off the laurels, and still there was no sound at all in the garden but what our heels made crunching the gravel, nor was the silence broken when suddenly we entered the house and he disappeared for an hour." 1 When we add to these two pictures a sentence from a letter to Mr. Arthur Christopher Bensen written in 1896, we have learned all that we need to know. "Let your soul live," James says, "it's the only life that isn't, on the whole, a sell." 2

ary

We may add, however, a few notes on his litermethod drawn from those invaluable prefaces to the New York edition of his novels and tales which form the most complete exposition of the art of fiction ever given to the world by a great story-teller, and we may add to these a phrase or two from his published letters.

3

In his preface to The Spoils of Poynton,3 he makes an important distinction. "A short story,"

1 Aspects and Impressions, 1922, pp. 42-43.

2 Letters, 1920, i. 259.

3 London edition, 1922, p. xxvii.

he writes, "to my sense and as the term is used in magazines, has to choose between being either an anecdote or a picture and can but play its part strictly according to its kind. I rejoice in the anecdote, but I revel in the picture."

Elsewhere he speaks of "the author's incorrigible taste for gradations and superpositions of effect, his love, when it is a question of a picture, of anything that makes for proportion and perspective, that contributes to a view of all the dimensions addicted to seeing 'through'-one thing through another, accordingly, and still other things through that he takes, too greedily perhaps, on any errand, as many things as possible by the way. It is after this fashion that he incurs the stigma of laboring uncannily for a certain fullness of truth-truth diffused, distributed and, as it were, atmospheric." Again, he refers to "that odd law which somehow always makes the minimum of valid suggestion serve the man of imagination better than the maximum," 2 and remarks presently that "we are divided . . . between liking to feel the past strange and liking to feel it familiar; the difficulty is, for intensity, to catch it at the moment

1

1 Preface to What Maisie Knew, London edition, 1922, p. xx. 2 The Aspern Papers, London, 1922, p. viii.