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Show and every Sunday evening!" Whether or not all celebrated Americans behave with invariable decorum, the astonished spectator of Turgenev's performance had no temptation to "do the like. " His appearance among a company of artists and writers gathered together in a country village during the late summer of I886 1has been characteristically recorded by Mr. Edmund Gosse. "Henry James was the only sedate one of us all-benign, indulgent, but grave, and not often unbending beyond a genial chuckle ... It is remembered with what affability he wore a garland of flowers at a birthday feast, and even, nobly descending, took part one night in a cake-walk. But mostly, though not much our senior, he was serious, mildly avuncular, but very happy and unupbraiding." By that time Henry James was at his ease in England. The inhabitants were no longer either gods or in:beciles. Through the general British fog he had perceived gleams of intelligence shining on his bewilderment. He was no longer wholly dependent on Boston for refreshment. He could fall back upon the company of Mr. Edmund Gosse and he had found a friend in R. L. Stevenson. The little handful of Islanders posses.sc;~ of a ge.nuine interest in the art of letters and the crttiCism of hfe emerged from the obscurity, and he made out that, on the whole, there were perhaps about as many civilised people in England as in his native land. Yet he was a little troubled about his position. He wondered, while he reviewed the past, whether the path he had so carefully chosen for himself was the righ~ one, whether he might not have missed more by leavmg the Umted States than he had gained by coming to England. He lamented, in a letter written to his brother William in 1 899, that he had not had the kind of early experience that might have attached him to his JO own country. He earnestly aclvised a different treatment for his nephews. "What I most of all feel and !n the. lig~t o~ it ~onjure you to keep doing for them, 1s their be111g a meme to contract local saturations and attachments in respect to their own great and glorious country, to learn, and ~trike roots into, its infinite beauty, as I suppose, and vanety. . . Its being their 'own' will double their use of it." It was only after a visit to America in 1904 that he found, on his return to Rye, that he had a home and a country. He was able after this discovery to write to Mrs. Wharton that "your only drawback is not having the homeliness and the inevitability and the happy limitation and the affluent poverty, of a Country cif your Own (com me moi, par exemple!)"; and he could declare after taking the Oath of Allegiance to the King of England in 1915 that "I was really too associated before for any nominal change to matter. The process has only shown me what I virtually was-so that it's rather disappointillg in respect to acute sensation. I haven't any." Associated he certainly was, allied by innumerable sympathies and affections to the adopted country. But he was never really English or American or even Cosmopolitan. And it is to difficult to suppose that even if he had passed all his youth in New England and contracted all the local saturations and attachments he urged fer his nephews he could ever have melted comfortably into American uniformity. He who took nothing in the world for granted, could su;ely never have taken New England for granted. To-day, with the complete record before us-the novels, criticisms, biographies, plays and letters-we can understand how little those international relations that engaged Henry James's attention mattered to his genius. Wherever he might have lived and whatever human interactions he might have observed, he would in all prob- 31 |