Seven

“THE SENTIMENTAL TRAVELLER”

1878–1881

( 1 )

Walking out to his carriage in front of the Surrey cottage of George Eliot at the end of October 1878, he was startled when George Henry Lewes, after all the good-byes had already been said, hastened after him. Stopping him at the door, Lewes held two blue-bound volumes in his raised hand. “Ah those books,” he said, “take them away, please, away, away!” As James walked to the carriage to rejoin his friend, Mrs. Richard Greville, whose guest he was at nearby Milford Cottage, he looked at the title and saw, to his shock, that it was his own novel The American. He felt stunned, dislocated, the victim of an unintended cosmic joke. Apparently, the book his hostess had proudly loaned to her famous neighbors was being returned unread, as an unwanted intrusion. “Our hosts hadn’t so much as connected book with author, or author with visitor, or visitor with anything but his ridding them of an unconsidered trifle.… The vivid demonstration of one’s failure to penetrate there had been in the sweep of Lewes’s gesture, which could scarce have been bettered by his actually wielding a broom.”1

He did not feel quite entirely swept away, even if Eliot and Lewes had declined to read him, though unaware of whom they were declining. Still, the fear of being held disdainfully between two fastidious fingers and pronounced irrelevant, unsuitable, unwanted, was much on his mind. His situation as an American intending to make London his permanent headquarters had a dark side that even his social successes could not obviate. In November 1877 Scribner’s Monthly published “Four Meetings,” a story that expressed one of his nightmares, the fear of being cut off forever from the European experience. A New England spinster, whose lifelong ambition has been to visit Europe, finally gets as far as Le Havre, only to be forced to return to America when a putative cousin, an artist, exploits her passive innocence and borrows all her money. At home, she soon receives an indefinite, demanding guest, a “countess” who claims to be the widow of the now dead cousin. The coarse “countess,” perhaps an ex-prostitute, despises America and Miss Spencer. To preserve or gain some advantage for herself, even the advantage of having her morning coffee served to her, the countess would certainly condemn Miss Spencer to death. “Poor Miss Spencer,” the narrator concludes, “had been right in her presentiment that she should still see something of Europe”—the condescending cruelty of those who know how to exploit innocence and weakness.

Just as Lewes held up for removal his unwanted copy of The American, James holds up for analysis his American narrators in “Four Meetings” and in “Daisy Miller: A Study.” When the narrator of the former, a perceptive American whom long residence in Europe has so refined that excessive politeness and respect for privacy have rendered him morally passive, does nothing at all to help “poor Miss Spencer,” he reveals himself to be an accomplice in his countrywoman’s exploitation. His noninterference principle substitutes the aesthetic responsibility of an observer for the moral responsibility of a participant. As an American too long in Europe, the narrator of “Daisy Miller,” Frederick Winterbourne, finds himself unable to act to help an innocent, vivacious young lady to survive behaving in Europe as she is used to behaving in America. Ostensibly abroad to study, Winterbourne spends his time on superficial flirtations and travels. At its best, the story sets up an effective interplay between the limitations of the shallow narrator and those of the young lady. But the dramatic question of the story is whether or not Daisy deliberately flaunts the moral conventions of the Roman society in which she lives. When Winterbourne, having resisted the common opinion that Daisy and her Italian friend, Giovanelli, are having an affair, sees them at midnight in the Colosseum, he concludes that they are indeed having a sexual relationship. The narrator and the author never let us know, other than by indirection, what Daisy is thinking. Without an effective father or mother, she seems an American innocent on her own in a small-minded European culture. Daisy’s recklessness can be understood as youthful American assertiveness. She is the new American woman, a variant of Minny Temple, a combination of the young girl who believes that everyone will love her no matter what she says or does and the rebellious woman determined to tell off the world. Winterbourne’s imagination is too shallow, too enervated, for him to evaluate her in terms other than the conventional polarity between innocence and experience, purity and sexuality. Like Christopher Newman, Daisy cannot survive in Europe. Through the literary and cultural tradition that disposes of unfit women by mysterious illnesses, James provides a minor coda to the life of Minny Temple, while positioning himself outside the narrator and the main character. At the end, Daisy is dead, and the ineffective Winterbourne, granting that he was destined to make a mistake because he had “lived too long in foreign parts,” resumes his superficial life. James’s own survival instinct almost visibly emanates through the energies of the story.

To his surprise, “Daisy Miller,” in which he had placed no more commercial hope than in his previous stories, proved an extraordinary popular success. The Cornhill’s middle-class British audience and “Daisy’s” middle-class American readers found it sufficiently sexual to be titillating, sufficiently indirect to be morally acceptable, and sufficiently indeterminative in regard to “did she or didn’t she” to provoke lively discussion. “It is having an immense run both here [in Boston] & NY,” Mary James happily remarked. Howells was delighted. “Harry James waked up all the women with his Daisy Miller, the intention of which they misconceived, and there has been a vast discussion in which nobody felt very deeply, and everybody talked very loudly. The thing went so far that society almost divided itself into Daisy Millerites and anti-Daisy Millerites.” Daisy’s only sin, James insisted, is innocence, her naive misunderstanding of European conventions and her assertion of her integrity in her refusal to change her behavior. What everyone else takes as a scandalous flouting of proprieties is, for Daisy, perfectly innocent conduct. For her, there is neither smoke nor fire. Most readers saw both, though Aunt Kate had no doubt that Henry’s “very clever” story expressed the desire, which “seems to burn in his bones, to vindicate Americans to the European mind.”2 Most important for James, everyone, so to speak, read the story. Howells hoped that, “in making James so thoroughly known, it would call attention in as wide degree to the beautiful work he had been doing for so long for very few readers and still fewer lovers.”

For a moment, “Daisy Miller” seemed a breakthrough. A month before its publication, Macmillan had agreed to publish The Europeans in London—James “very glad you undertake the book.” For its serial publication in 1878 in the Atlantic, he received a thousand dollars. “As regards the profits I am afraid there is not much danger of their being ‘enormous’ … but … it will be a beginning of my appearance before the British public as a novelist—as the novelist of the future, destined to extract from B.P. [British public] eventually (both for himself & his publisher) a colossal fortune!” The comic hyperbole expressed actual hope. Perhaps his reputation would rise to a level of popularity that would produce substantial profits. In 1875, his income had jumped from the under two thousand dollars that it had never previously exceeded to more than twenty-five hundred dollars, the level at which it remained for the next two years. In 1878, it rose to almost thirty-five hundred dollars, most of that from serial publication of novels and from the publication of short stories and essays in magazines.3 As for “Daisy Miller” itself, the $220 he had received from The Cornhill represented most of his immediate profit. Though he had hoped to sell the advance sheets to an American magazine for simultaneous publication, he unexpectedly found that he was too late. Since English publication had preceded American, American publishers were free, in the absence of a copyright treaty, to publish “Daisy” without any payment to the author, which they promptly did. When Harper & Bros, in New York asked to publish “Daisy” in “Harper’s Half Hour Series,” they agreed to a 10 percent royalty. But since the pamphlet sold for twenty cents, James earned only two cents a copy. The two hundred dollars he received from Harper’s the next year disappointed him.

Since “Daisy” had been a “great hit,” he worked on a companion story, “An International Episode,” also for The Cornhill, and sold the American rights “outright, copyright and all,” for a small sum to the Harper pamphlet series. Macmillan now agreed to bring out English editions of The American and Roderick Hudson. In the fall, he happily told Lizzie Boott he was “in a very good way of work and of growing fame & profit.”⁴ His mind dwelt optimistically on his anticipated “Americana—a female counterpart to Newman,” for which he had received invitations from both The Cornhill and Macmillan’s Magazine.

By the next year, he admitted that in regard to “Daisy” and “An International Episode,” “having in advance no prevision of their success I made a very poor bargain.” Still, he explained to William, “a man’s 1st successes are those, always, by which he makes least. I am not a grasping business-man—on the contrary, and I sometimes—or rather, often—strike myself as gaining woefully less money than fame. My reputation in England seems (considering what it is based on) ludicrously larger than any cash payment that I have yet received for it. The Macmillans are everything that’s friendly—caressing—old Macmillan physically hugs me; but the delicious ring of the sovereign is conspicuous in our intercourse by its absence.” Yet, he assured his family, whose financial situation was much on his mind, “I am sure of the future—that is the grand thing.” Also, he rationalized, “It is something to behave like a gentleman even when other people don’t,” as if he could justify his lost financial opportunities by proclaiming his moral superiority to his publishers. At some level of partial evasion, he seems to have been aware that what was at issue were not standards of gentlemanly conduct but his own practical judgment in an aspect of his professional life to which, dependent on his earnings, he always had given importance. Still, he consoled himself and his family, “I shall have made by the end of this year very much more money than I have ever made before; & next year I shall make as much as that again.”5

With publishers unwilling to pay advances for book publication and with the sales of his books limited because the work had already been widely available in magazines, he needed to increase as much as possible his earnings from serial publication. At the beginning of 1879, he signed an agreement with Macmillan for publisher and author to split equally all profits, after the deduction of Macmillan’s expenses, for a volume of stories, the essays on French literature, The American, and The Europeans. But he faced two problems in regard to the contract. He had no way of checking the publisher’s actual expenses, and the profits reported were likely to be small enough to make no significant difference to him. His plan, though, was to double his main source of income, he told William, by publishing simultaneously in English and American magazines. “I shall be able at once to live very comfortably, to ‘put by,’ and to make an allowance to each member of the family. This is my dream.” Money pressures were pinching, if not bruising, his parents. William earned very little. Both Wilky and Bob, who needed regular assistance to stay afloat, seemed to be drowning. Alice was a total dependent. In October 1878, the depression in America had put his parents’ money affairs “in a bad way.” Aunt Kate also found herself with a “largely reduced income.” When he learned of the new losses at home, he immediately apologized for his sluggishness in settling the last of his debts to them. Within the next year, he became aware that his family’s losses were even greater than he had imagined. “My father appears to have lost 1/2 of his property.” By the spring of 1879, he was finally square with his financially pressed parents. “In the future I expect to give you money,” he assured them, “not to take it from you!” If he could add the profit that he was certain writing for the stage would provide, he and they would never have to be concerned about money again. “I am morally certain I should succeed, and it would be an open gate to money-making.”⁶

Though the gate to England and to fortune was only partly open in 1878, fame was another matter. Wherever in the English-speaking world there were serious middle- and upper-class readers, he was being read, with general acknowledgment that he was among the most talented of the young writers, with few or no rivals in regard to psychological subtlety, social observation, and technical effectiveness. “Harry’s recent things,” his mother boasted, “seem to be making him famous on both sides of the water. The English papers are full of favourable criticism and flattering predictions.” He reassured her about the inextricable link between his genius and his character. “Never was a genius—if genius there is—more healthy, objective, and (I honestly believe) less susceptible of superficial irritations and reactionary impulses. I know what I want.” Where there was critical carping, it usually focused on the opposite side of the coin of his virtues, a sometimes perplexing “super-subtlety” in presentation and an unsatisfying emotional aloofness. The success of “Daisy” did, though, encourage him “as regards the faculty of appreciation of the English public; for the thing is sufficiently subtle, yet people appear to have comprehended it.”7 He wanted to expand his audience without diminishing his subtlety.

When, at the end of 1878, he published the first of two installments of “An International Episode” in The Cornhill, he was confronted by another kind of threat to his anticipated popularity. In the story, two young upper-class Englishmen, to escape the August heat, sail from New York to Newport to stay with Mrs. Kitty Westgate and her sister Bessie Alden. When Lord Lambeth falls in love with Bessie, his friend Percy Beaumont writes to Lambeth’s mother, who immediately recalls her son on the specious claim that his father is seriously ill. Bessie likes but is not in love with Lambeth. Having never visited Europe, when she and her older sister arrive in England in the spring, she is overwhelmed by the beauty of the English countryside. Both sisters, though, dislike British class distinctions and British snobbery. When Lambeth, genuinely in love with her, discovers that Bessie is in England, he pays her extensive attention. The question arises whether or not she would accept him if he offers marriage. No one can imagine that she would not. When Lambeth compels his mother and sister to visit the American sisters, the duchess and her daughter are glacially impolite. Lambeth soon proposes. Bessie then tells her sister that they must leave England now, since she has declined Lambeth’s proposal. She has turned him down because it does not suit her to marry him. She likes him very much, but she is not in love with him and recognizes that they are very different. She is serious about the things of this world, about ideas and places and expanding the self. He is complacent, the product of a privilege that does not question itself. She loves and admires English history and literature, but not the English, who take it for granted, and not those English attitudes that she finds morally distasteful. Sensitive, intelligent, and independent, Bessie is another representation of James’s idealization of the American woman, again with echoes of Minny Temple. In the evocations of New York and Newport the descriptions resonate with the glow of James’s memories. In Lord Lambeth’s essential goodness and his physical handsomeness, James continues his idealization of the English male, partly expressing his attraction to male beauty, partly his erotically tinged Anglophilia.

William had sharply criticized The Europeans for being overcondensed and underdeveloped, and Henry correctly feared he would have much the same to say about “An International Episode.” Whatever the story’s limitations, he was astonished, though, when some of his English acquaintances expressed unhappiness with its unflattering portrayal of aspects of English culture. He had naively assumed that since he had satirized Americans in England, the English would not mind, in all fairness, his satirizing the English in America. He had balanced, he felt, American virtues with British virtues; the dragons of the story were unwarranted personal and national pride, snobbishness, and cruelty. At first, he was baffled, then angered. “So long as one serves up Americans for their entertainment it is all right—but hands off the sacred natives! They are really I think, thinner-skinned than we!” Finally, he retreated into accommodation. He liked and needed his British friends too much to wound them. More subtlety, not less, was called for—avoidance and evasion, subtlety’s necessary allies. “I shall keep off dangerous ground in the future,” he told his mother. He needed his British audience, though a sizable portion of it was represented by the “fly-fishing” Tories and the “very vulgar-minded and superficial” people he met at dinner parties. When, a year after the publication of “An International Episode,” the editor of the North American Review asked him to contribute an article comparing “English & American manners,” he declined. “It would be too invidious & ticklish a theme—especially while I continue to reside in England.” For an economically and socially dependent guest-resident already concerned, with good reason, that he wrote beyond the interest and understanding of a broad audience, it could be dangerous to be understood too well.8

( 2 )

On New Year’s Eve, 1879, he found himself in the company of one of the least thin-skinned of his English friends, the elderly Monckton Milnes, Lord Houghton, his host at Fryston Hall in Yorkshire. “Full of sociable and friendly instincts, and with a strong streak of humanity and democratic feeling,” Houghton came into James’s room to ask why he had not come down to afternoon tea. Seating himself, with his usual fidgety eccentricity, in a comfortable armchair for a few minutes of conversation, Houghton fell “into a social slumber.” In a few moments, he began “to snore violently.” James went back to writing a letter.

His excursions into English social life and his meetings with Victorian literary giants were simultaneously dull and fascinating. Many of his preconceptions needed redefinition. At the end of October 1878, he visited Tennyson at his country home at Aldworth with the ever-reliable, celebrity-conscious Mrs. Greville, a “large, elegant, extremely near-sighted and extremely demonstrative lady,” who was “an intimate friend” of the poet’s. “With her exquisite good nature and her innocent fatuity,” Mrs. Greville expressed her warmth for Tennyson by “kissing him somewhere—quite en famille—every quarter of an hour.” Tennyson did not seem to mind. When Mrs. Greville referred to one of her French relatives, Mademoiselle Laure de Sade, James’s attention was immediately provoked. He had certainly heard of the infamous Marquis. Though his knowledge probably exceeded his reading experience, he would read sexually explicit works without the slightest sense of personal impropriety if the work interested him. When a young writer, W. E. Henley, whom he befriended, asked him if he had read Sacher-Masoch, he responded that he had “never read a word by Sacher-Masoch. But if you recommend S.-M. I will try him.”9 In response to Mrs. Greville’s, “‘De Sade?’ [Tennyson] at once exclaimed with interest—and with the consequence … of my wondering almost to ecstasy … to what length he would proceed. He proceeded admirably … to the very greatest length imaginable, as was signally promoted by the fact that clearly no one present, with a single exception, recognised the name or the nature of the scandalous, the long ignored, the at last all but unnameable author; least of all the gentle relative of Mademoiselle Laure, who listened with the blankest grace to her friend’s enumeration of his titles to infamy, among which that of his most notorious work was pronounced. It was the homeliest, frankest, most domestic passage … and most remarkable for leaving none of us save myself, by my impression, in the least embarrassed or bewildered; largely, I think, because of the failure … of all measure on the part of auditors and speaker alike of what might be intended or understood, of what, in fine, the latter was talking about.”

Later in the afternoon, Tennyson, having proposed that he read one of his poems of their choice, took them upstairs to his study. James, who had heard him read before, requested “Locksley Hall.” “I sat at one of the windows that hung over space, noting how the windy, watery autumn day, sometimes sheeting it all with rain, called up the dreary, dreary moorland.… I asked myself in fine why … I failed to swoon away under the heaviest pressure I had doubtless ever known the romantic situation bring to bear.” He felt nothing. The reading bored him. “The author lowered the whole pitch, that of expression, that of interpretation above all; I heard him, in cool surprise, take even more out of his verse than he had put in, and so bring me back to the point I had immediately and privately made, the point that he wasn’t Tennysonian.”10

When he met the novelist George Meredith at a dinner late in 1878, James was in partial agreement with Meredith’s definition of what it meant to be English. “He hates the English, whom he speaks of as ‘they.’ ‘Their conversation is dreary, their food is heavy, their women are dull.’” Just as Meredith earned his criticism on the margin of his own Englishness, James felt that because he was “so fond of London” he could “afford to abuse it.” His own criticism varied with his moods, often balancing derogation with appreciation. “London is on the whole such a fine thing,” he told Grace Norton in 1879, “that it can afford to be abused! It has all sorts of superior qualities, but it has also, and English life, generally, and the English character have, a certain number of great plump flourishing uglinesses and drearinesses.”¹¹ Meredith himself he found a delightful dinner companion, a “decidedly brilliant fellow, full of talk, paradoxes, affectations etc.; but interesting and witty.” Though he had reservations about the depth and quality of Meredith’s mind, he thought him, over the years, the wittiest Englishman he had ever known, a quality that enlivened his company but also infected his prose. As a novelist, Meredith seemed too linguistically ornamental, too verbally decorative, sacrificing realism on the altar of wit and attenuated indirection. He would much rather have Meredith’s company than his books. But since Meredith lived in the country, he had his books, which he read, comparing them unfavorably to Turgenev’s.

Occasionally, he felt “woefully tired of [London] people and their talk.” Frequently bored, sometimes repelled, “I confess I find people in general very vulgar-minded and superficial—and it is only by a pious fiction, to keep myself going, and keep on the social harness, that I succeed in postulating them as anything else or better.” At moments, he thought of liberating himself from “the social harness,” never again to challenge the approximately 107 times that he calculated he had already dined out during the London social season of 1879. “If you dine out a good deal in London,” he wrote to William, “you forget your dinner the next morning—or rather, if you walk home, as I always do, you forget it by the time you have turned the corner of the street.… My impressions evaporate with the fumes of the champagne.”¹² He may have been exaggerating to deflate the criticism he suspected his Cambridge family had of the waste of time involved in his social life. He was honest, though, with Grace Norton. “You will simply wonder what can have induced me to perpetrate such a folly, and how I have survived to tell the tale!” He might have added, in his effort to impress his family, the amount of money he saved on food. He had, of course, no easy, single answer to his own questions about his folly. The reasons were many, including his calculation that in order to be less of a stranger in a strange land he needed to “stand ready,” as he was soon to write in regard to Hawthorne’s years in Europe, “to pay with his person.” Standing ready often meant sitting to satiety in dull company at long dinners. Beyond that, he was a shy, socially curious man who felt pleasure at becoming a part of the great London literary and social world. He wanted to be wanted, and he needed company, not particularly of single individuals with demands of intimacy, but of varied numbers, even at the risk of superficiality. And now, once having got onto the social Ferris wheel, he feared that if he got off it might not stop for him again. As a bachelor in a foreign world, without family or long-standing friends, the certainty of dinner company at innumerable dinners seemed more attractive than the possibility of frequent solitary evenings.

Still, even while having regular dinner company, he often felt “lonely & speechless. Everything around me is worldly, stuffy, literal, unspeakably Philistine.” The winter of 1879 was particularly cold, gloomy, and unsympathetic, with heavy snowstorms and severe economic depression. An oppressively thick fog enveloped London, forcing chimney smoke “into one’s eyes and down one’s throat, so that one is half blinded and quite sickened.” He told his American readers in The Nation that the misery of “hard times” visibly pressed as painfully in England as it did across the Atlantic. Politics dominated dinner-table discussions and newspaper columns, especially questions of the extension of the franchise and the interminable Eastern Question. The Liberal party, which he supported, seemed to him to cut as poor a figure as the Conservative in everything except its principles. He felt that England could not, in the long run, afford to abdicate its international presence as an imperial power, though it was to be praised for its moral judgment in assessing many of the calls to arms as not worth the shedding of blood. Still, he forecast that England would do anything to avoid war “until contemptuous Europe, growing audacious with impunity, shall put upon her some supreme and unendurable affront. Then—too late—she will rise ferociously and plunge clumsily and unpreparedly into war. She will be worsted and laid on her back—and when she is laid on her back will exhibit—in her colossal wealth and pluck—an unprecedented power of resistance. But she will never really recover as a European power.” Despite these concerns over the long-term fortunes of his world, he found the day-to-day dominance of political discourse insufferable. London “is hideously political,” he complained bitterly, “& there don’t seem to me to be three people in it who care for questions of art, or form.”13 Though he felt that he had more opportunities for literary and social richness in London and England than in New York and America, at moments he felt hostile to the culture in which he had chosen to live. Worse, he felt isolated.

Often, during the cold winter and spring of 1879, his thoughts went “fluttering their wings toward the Roman housetops.” He fantasied that the ideal existence for him would be “5 months of London, 5 of Italy (mainly Rome), a month for Paris” and a month for spontaneous excursions.¹⁴ Beneath and behind his Italian daydreaming, though, were two realities, England and America, the England in which he felt he needed to live in order to practice his art, and the America that was a constant part of his consciousness. By March, weary of the sharp east wind and his perpetual sore throat, he told Lizzie that, if practical matters would permit, he would leave immediately for Rome. Despite the dark weather and the stupefyingly innumerable dinings-out, he kept an intense writing schedule. Beginning in late 1878, his imaginative life had directed itself mostly toward America, perhaps as an expression of his renewed need, after having been abroad for more than four years, to rethink and reexpress why he was living in England, perhaps because he felt American yearnings more strongly than he had for some time, particularly for his family.

In October 1878, he had received an unanticipated request from Macmillan to write a short biographical study of either Washington Irving or Nathaniel Hawthorne for the publisher’s “English Men of Letters” series. Having decided that if he were to write such a book, he preferred to write on Hawthorne, he hesitated briefly, and then refused. When pressed, he hesitated again. Then, finally, he accepted, partly because of his “desire to make next year as much money as possible.” At the beginning of 1879, he happily signed a contract for an outright sale of the British copyright. Macmillan’s usual arrangement for world rights for books in the series was a fee of seventy-five pounds, but, as an American citizen, James owned the American rights, which Harper & Bros, in New York queried Macmillan about. When Macmillan gave him the choice of an additional twenty-five pounds or a royalty arrangement of 10 percent on the American sales, he chose to add the twenty-five pounds to the seventy-five already agreed on.¹⁵ Later, when the book sold well in America, he regretted his decision. Both publishers profited considerably beyond the hundred pounds the author earned on a sale in his lifetime of about twenty thousand copies. He was never again, with a minor exception, to sell outright any of his copyrights. By the time he began the writing in summer 1879, his lack of enthusiasm for the project had declined into regret. At the end of the year, he readily confessed to Grace Norton that he had written it “sadly against my will. I wanted to let him alone.”

His reluctance in writing Hawthorne derived partly from his sense that it would force on him too direct a confrontation with his feelings about America. There was also the money issue. Hawthorne had struggled to become a writer in an antithetical climate in which it was impossible to earn a living as a writer. Writing a biography of America’s first great novelist, who suffered because he could not earn enough from his writing to support himself, he constantly had in mind his own financial disappointments, including the absurdly small sum he was being paid for the current project. Unlike Hawthorne, he had made himself an indefinite, if not a permanent, exile from his native land for the sake of his art, which included sustaining himself so that he could practice his art. As well as it was going, it was not going quite well enough. By the end of 1879, when he confessed his feelings about the Hawthorne book to Grace Norton, he had already decided that there were good, even necessary reasons for a visit “home for several months.” He had baldly told Norton a full year before that he was “coming home for a year in 1880. Then we can talk.”16 The decision had resulted from numbers of preoccupations, especially the fantasy of triumphant return that he had begun exploring in The Europeans.

In The Europeans, Eugenia (Baroness Münster) and her brother, Felix Young, come from Europe to Boston, both of them to gain or repair their fortunes. Sophisticated, worldly, calculating, Eugenia is married to a baron from whom she has separated and who wants her, for reasons of state, to agree to a divorce. Eager for new adventures and capable of growth and change, Felix earns his living (and his sister’s) as a society portrait painter. In a raw, wintry Boston, brilliantly invoked in the opening paragraphs through the condescending eyes of the Europeanized Eugenia, they introduce themselves to their cousins, the wealthy, puritanical Wentworths. A buoyant, happy artist, Felix is more American than European in values but more European than American in substance. A partial Jamesian self-portrait, he has puritan morality without a puritan sensibility. Partly American by blood, he returns to the continent of his family’s origin to discover that his native charm, energy, optimism, talent, and moral sensibility have found their proper climate. Eugenia who is given the chance to marry Robert Acton, a handsome, wealthy, and distinguished friend of the Wentworths, but alienates him with her European sophistication, which takes the form of deviousness and manipulation. To Acton, the beautiful New England countryside, described with tactile, evocative vividness, is home. To Eugenia, it is exotic and alien. In the end, she returns to Europe, not having allowed herself to feel the pull of America, or even to understand, because she does not want to, what America is about.

In Hawthorne, James brought into sharper, more realistic focus what he had played with in totally fictional terms in The Europeans: his awareness of the losses to be suffered because of his determination to reside in England and the tragic insufficiency of both his options. His choice had been made. It had been, he felt, the only realistic choice for him. In The Europeans, Felix Young carries the emotional lightness, almost exhilaration, of James’s fantasy of a triumphant return to America. In Hawthorne, with the disguising devices of biography rather than fiction, he soberly, sympathetically, indirectly, makes the case for the untenability or, at least, undesirability, of American residence for a writer like himself. The argument was not a new one. He had rehearsed it informally in his letters to Ho wells. He had heard extensions of it in Henry senior’s advocacy of the importance of social responsibility and his disapproval of Emersonian individualism. But now he expressed it with deliberate, almost magisterial cogency, evoking sympathetically the difficult situation of Hawthorne as writer in pre–Civil War America, a situation still applicable to the writer in post–Civil War America. For James, “the best things come, as a general thing, from the talents that are members of a group; every man works better when he has companions working in the same line … yielding the stimulus of suggestion, comparison, emulation. Great things of course have been done by solitary workers; but they have usually been done with double the pains they would have cost if they had been produced in more genial circumstances.” In America, “the individual counts for more, as it were, and, thanks to the absence of a variety of social types and settled heads under which he may be easily and conveniently pigeon-holed, he is to a certain extent a wonder and a mystery.” The result for the writer is glorious isolation, but isolation nevertheless.

In thinking about the unpropitious soil of Hawthorne’s youth, he had in mind the limitations of post-Civil War Cambridge and Boston for someone with a desire for world culture and a sustaining literary community. “When we think of what the conditions of intellectual life, of taste, must have been in a small New England town fifty years ago; and when we think of a young man of beautiful genius, with a love of literature and romance, of the picturesque, of style and form and colour, trying to make a career for himself in the midst of them, compassion for the young man becomes our dominant sentiment, and we see the long dry village picture in perhaps almost too hard a light.” He would soften but never fully relent or regret his decision to seek a sympathetic community in England. He had done what he believed necessary, though he was later to admit he paid an even greater price than he ever anticipated.

For the writer that James desired to be, both the subject matter and fraternal community would be more readily available in London than in Cambridge or Boston or New York. For “the flower of art blooms only where the soil is deep.… It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.… It needs a complex social machinery to set a writer in motion. American civilization has hitherto had other things to do than to produce flowers, and before giving birth to writers it has wisely occupied itself with providing something for them to write about.” Fortunes were being earned. A social and an artistic culture was slowly gathering. But it had not yet reached the critical mass that would satisfy his needs. “History, as yet, has left in the United States but so thin and impalpable a deposit that we very soon touch the hard substratum of nature; and nature herself, in the western world, has the peculiarity of seeming rather crude and immature. The very air looks new and young; the light of the sun seems fresh and innocent.”

American energy and innocence were to be cherished. But, for him, they were by themselves insufficient to the challenge of creating literature. “One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left. No State, in the European sense of the word, and indeed barely a specific national name. No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor public schools—no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political life, no sporting class.… Some such list as that might be drawn up of the absent things in American life.… The natural remark, in the almost lurid light of such an indictment, would be that if these things are left out, everything is left out. The American knows that a good deal remains; what it is that remains—that is his secret, his joke, as one may say.” But the special twist of this unusual joke, with its cosmic romanticism, the secret revealed in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, in Melville’s Moby Dick, and in Emily Dickinson’s poems, spoke to a different order of reality and literature than he desired to identify himself with, partly because of who he was, partly because of what he wanted America to be.

( 3 )

His decision, in late 1878, that he would go home for a visit in 1880 expressed his sense that the emotional vividness of his American world was being diminished by time and distance. Each day the pile of unanswered letters on his desk, many of them from across the Atlantic, seemed to remain constant, no matter how many letters he wrote. Home news arrived with the regularity of transatlantic steamers, always attenuated by the time between the occurrence and his receipt of the letter, sometimes sharply punctuated by news so dramatic that the emotional distancing of the delay made little difference. He had learned to live without his family, a triumph of self-assertion for which he had no doubt that he paid a price, both in expenditure of emotional energy and in the inadequacy of some of his substitutions. A crucial center of his emotional life was at a distance, his most intense relationships conducted by mail. He missed his parents, and William especially. His mother and William wrote regularly, Alice, occasionally. He cherished their letters. Mary James confidently believed that “it will give your heart a happier bound every time you open a letter from home.” At Quincy Street, they were always “longing dreadfully” to hear from him.17 He felt both the burden and the inadequacy of a life by correspondence. Crucial events were occurring without his presence—deaths, marriages, births, and especially the closely, tightly woven fabric of everyday activities and feelings that provide the experiences that give each life its particular texture.

Occasionally, home came to him. Sara Sedgwick, Charles Norton’s sister-in-law and Alice’s envied friend, came to England in the summer of 1877 for a visit. She soon startled everyone who knew her by the announcement that she was engaged to marry William Darwin, Charles Darwin’s eldest son. “If they bite in numbers, bear in mind,” Alice urged her, “the lone lorn spinster you have left behind.” Her fiancé seemed to James the epitome of a well-meaning, innocuous, English liberal, with as little vitality as his wife, who, the next year, when she visited home, struck everyone at Quincy Street “with her sadness and invalidism.” Still, James liked them both enough to visit them regularly at their country home and to maintain a long, companionable relationship. He had a sharp, kind whiff of Boston in the form of Elizabeth Peabody, a James family friend, whom he visited on the Isle of Wight in spring 1878. An elderly, shy, self-abnegating woman of great intelligence, she had been a distinguished educational reformer and feminist of the previous generation, the sister-in-law of Hawthorne and a friend of Emerson, Fuller, and Thoreau. He welcomed a long walk with her, the pleasure of her fresh news from home, and “the native finesse and animation of the American female mind.”18 In another instance, he had an American home away from home through the hospitality of Russell Sturgis, an American-born senior partner with Baring Brothers who had made a fortune in banking and permanently resided in England, in a handsome London house and a luxurious country estate. Two of Sturgis’ sons were to become his friends, particularly the youngest, British-born son by his third marriage, Howard. It was a hospitality that had every attraction for him except the crucial one of intellectual and aesthetic interest. But he was a great favorite among the Sturgises. Being so warmly welcomed outweighed the occasional dullness. It was like visiting family.

Clover and Henry Adams came to Europe early in summer 1879, making London their headquarters for a European year, planning to spend part of the autumn in Paris and the winter in Spain with Lowell. Delighted to see them, James sat up with them one night till one in the morning, “abusing the Britons,” one of the Adamses’ favorite pastimes, both a privilege of their Anglophilia and an assertion of their Americanness. The Adamses are “very pleasant, friendly, conversational, critical, ironical.” Clover, chattering less than usual, seemed calmer. They both appeared a little deflated and depressed, which James imagined might come from their being Milnes Gaskell’s house guests in a large London mansion that he had taken for the season for the purpose of hosting his friends. “Henry A. can never be in the nature of things a very gracious or sympathetic companion … but they are both very pleasant & doubtless when they get into lodgings will be more animated.”¹⁹ He was right. As the summer progressed, they became “excellent company.” But not so excellent that he felt he could forsake his work and accept their strongly urged invitation that he go with them to Spain in the fall.

In spring 1878, he had joyful news from home. William had become engaged to marry Alice Howe Gibbens, a serious, intelligent, attractive young lady from Cambridge about whom, after meeting her the previous year, Henry senior had announced to the family that he had found the woman William would marry. Whether it was “will” or “should,” it was one of the few instances of Henry senior being both pragmatically wise and helpfully directive. William quickly agreed. He had, though, to spend much of a year attempting to persuade Miss Gibbens to agree, which, with much reluctance and after considerable delay, she finally did. William, at almost thirty-six years of age, still had sufficient emotional, physical, and financial problems to make any practical woman hesitate. Finally, after one false start, an engagement occurred in May 1878. “She has been brought up so simply and economically she will if I mistake not,” Mary James remarked, “make an excellent poor man’s wife.” Henry had no doubt that “my father & mother consider her perfection, & they tell me she is very beautiful.” Aunt Kate spoke for the family, with the exception of Alice, when she exclaimed that “we are all prepared to find the new Alice a great acquisition to the family circle.… I doubt not we will all love her very much.”20 His parents thought the marriage would be the necessary final push toward their eldest son’s emotional and physical salvation.

In early spring, as the engagement became likely, Alice James became “wretchedly ill again, in her old way.” She had a nervous breakdown so extreme in May 1878 that she never fully recovered. Attempting to comfort her, even to the extent of momentarily allying himself against William, Henry complained that it is “inconsiderate of William to have selected such a moment for making merry.” Alice, her mother wrote to Bob, “has had a nervous breakdown of a very serious character—an aggravated recurrence of her old troubles.” Suicide was much on Alice’s mind. In one bout of misery, she requested and received Henry senior’s permission to take her own life if living became unbearable. Henry senior, “completely absorbed” in caring for her, had his “secret thoughts” as he sat by her bedside “constantly with the truths of immortal life.” On William’s wedding day, she stayed in her sickbed, “half the time, indeed more than half,” Henry senior told Bob, “on the verge of insanity and suicide.” Over the next months, she slowly recovered some stability. But she later marked “that hideous summer of’78” as the time “when I went down to the deep sea, its dark waters closed over me, and I knew neither hope nor peace.” As William’s marriage day approached, he became increasingly anxious. But, he wrote on his wedding night, “every Dr. I have ever spoken to has said that matrimony ought to be the best possible mode of life, for me. Alice Gibbens is an angel if there ever was one—I take her for her moral more than her intellectual qualities.”²¹ Like Henry senior, both in practice and in doctrine he believed that one of the purposes of marriage was to provide a good angel to counterbalance his inner demon. Alice Gibbens was to endure until her husband’s death the burden as well as the blessing of this idealization. His brother in England immediately responded with his blessing, particularly to Miss Gibbens who, he joked, “will need it most.”

The news of the engagement did not surprise Henry. William’s need to marry had been hovering between the lines of his letters and of his life, especially in his regular recommendations that Henry marry. “I had long wished to see you married,” Henry wrote. “I believe almost as much in matrimony for most other people as I believe in it little for myself—which is saying a good deal.” Clear in his own mind that marriage was not for him, he occasionally heard rumors that he was engaged or about to be engaged, either to some attractive spinster or young widow.” His own feelings on the subject were clear. In a short story that James published in May 1878, the narrator believes that his friend Sanguinetti is in love with a hairdresser’s wife when actually, as a fetishistic collector of “pretty things,” it is the effigy in the hairdresser’s window, an inanimate object, with which he is in love. A comically trivial admirer and collector, he is a grotesque fictional variation of James’s own sexual displacement, a man fixated with “pretty things” that are essentially dead. In another story, “Longstaff’s Marriage,” marriage tensions and resolutions are dramatized as concomitants to blackmail and death. Reginald Longstaff, a perfect English gentleman, who is ill and thought to be dying, falls in love with a beautiful, chaste American, Diana Belfield. When he proposes marriage to her on his deathbed, she, taking it as blackmail, which it is, declines and returns to America. Reginald recovers, apparently because he is angry that she has refused to marry him. During the next two years, Diana appears to be wasting away. Returning to Europe, she confesses to Reginald that she had fallen totally in love with him after she had declined to marry him, actually in the moments of her refusal. Now that she is dying, on her request he agrees to marry her, though he no longer loves her. Since she is angel enough to spare him the burden of marriage to someone he does not love, she soon dies. It is a story with bitter, harsh edges.22

As if these two earlier stories were trial runs, he published, in Macmillan’s in July 1879, “The Diary of a Man of Fifty,” a fully realized, brilliant story about anxiety, sexuality, commitment, and marriage. A retired British army officer, who has returned to Florence, meets a young Englishman, Stanmer, who is in love with the daughter of Countess Salvi by her first marriage. Though the general had been in love with the countess twenty-seven years before, he had abruptly left her when he had decided that she was a flirt. The general and Stanmer soon become intimate friends. Fearing that Stanmer will make the mistake of believing the countess’ daughter and will not do what he himself did, that is, leave and reject the relationship, the general, who has had doubts about whether he had read his own situation of twenty-seven years ago accurately, warns him not to allow himself to be deceived. Stanmer unhesitantly rejects the general’s reading of the situation and the people. Later, in England, Stanmer assures the general that the marriage has turned out to be a stunning success. He also informs the general that he had been wrong about Bianca’s mother. The narrator ends with the thought that perhaps he had been too cautious, that perhaps he had misunderstood the countess, that perhaps he had destroyed the possibility of happiness for both of them through his caution, his jealousy, his self-protectiveness, and his lack of romantic spontaneity. “That’s a charming discovery,” he remarks ironically, “for a man of my age!”

Whatever the emotional sources of James’s own disinclination to marry, these stories both reveal and disguise a pervasive anxiety about marriage. Though bachelorhood was self-assertion, it was also rebellion, more readily enacted from the distance of Europe than in Cambridge. As his parents grew older, he and they had to come to terms with the increasing certainty that he would not have two of the experiences, marriage and parenthood, that for Henry senior and Mary James defined human life. Henry senior had tirelessly advocated that “a man’s relations to his wife afford the only field for the sentiment of spiritual unity with his kind, that this disorderly world allows.”23 The Jameses extolled parenthood as a sacred mission, the family engagement that bound them all to a shared life. For a while, Mary James felt strongly obligated to encourage Henry to marry. Probably Henry senior at some point gave thought to the likelihood that Henry’s refusal expressed a purposeful rejection of what he had preached as a sacred necessity. A candid advocate of the naturalness of sexuality and of redeeming natural lust through marriage to an “angel,” Henry senior might have pondered the mystery of his son’s de facto commitment to celibacy. Probably the Jameses in Quincy Street assumed that there would be, for Henry, no sexual experience outside marriage. Apparently, Henry junior maintained the same assumption. He committed himself to marital and sexual self-sufficiency, to being the “angel” of his own house. From the beginning, he knew that there would be a price to pay, and that the cost would include his parents’ disappointment.

William’s marriage and the subject in general worked itself into a short novel, with the oddly ironic title Confidence, that he conceived of in early spring 1879. The external impetus was a request from the disparaged Scribner’s, “that painful periodical,” which made “a sudden and advantageous proposal” for a serial novel in six numbers, to begin in August 1879 and to be a third longer than The Europeans, for which they would pay the handsome sum of fifteen hundred dollars. With “a good idea” in mind, he made the commitment, eager to earn as much as possible in order to set aside time to devote exclusively to the “big novel” he had given thought to and for which he had done some preliminary outlining. With the usual explanations, he apologized to Howells for not offering it to the Atlantic. Though he felt slightly contaminated that it would “appear (alas!) in the dreadful Scribner’s,” he thought it would “be very good indeed—much better than the Europeans which I never thought good.” Writing rapidly, he finished at the beginning of June, convinced that it was superior to anything he had done before. By the end of the year, he made a partial tactical retreat under fire from William’s criticism that, like The Europeans, the tale suffered from the thinness that he had come to Europe to avoid. “I have got (heaven knows!) plenty of gravity within me, & I don’t know why I can’t put it more into the things I write. It comes from modesty & delicacy … or at least from the high state of development of my artistic conscience, which is so greatly attached to form that it shrinks from believing that it can supply it properly for big subjects, & yet is constantly studying the way to do it; so that at last, I am sure, it will arrive.”24

The story of two close friends, both financially independent, one an artist, the other a scientist, Confidence hinges on the former, Bernard, not being able to see that a woman he has briefly met in Italy, and with whom Gordon has fallen in love at Baden-Baden, actually had fallen in love, at first sight, with him. The perceptive artist does not even envision it as a possibility. It then takes him three years to realize that he is in love with her. Perhaps, as critics have suggested, the two friends embody Henry’s view of himself and William, the artist and scientist, the man of imagination and the man of dry and controlled reason. But the ironic power of the novel is that it fails precisely because its major weakness is the one that James is usually so alert to avoid. Bernard is someone who should quickly see the reality, or at least give it imaginative consideration as a possibility. If Bernard is a partial self-portrait, the story is a dramatization of the novelist’s ambivalence about himself. Henry’s conflict and competition with William reveal themselves as subordinate elements to his expression of anxiety about sexuality and marriage. Bernard’s unrealistically sustained stupidity dramatizes not only the author’s commitment to abjure marriage and the marriage bed but also to leave unspoken, certainly unexplored, the sexual reasons for the renunciation. The tension between Bernard and Gordon has a homoerotic resonance. The object of their confusion and rivalry is named Angela, not so much a Swedenborgian angel but a representation of the angels of the James household, including “our angelic Harry” himself.

Three thousand miles distant from his family, James took pleasure in the loose-knit, comparatively nondemanding “family” of his social world. In spring 1877, he had met friends of Grace Norton—Sir John Clark, a wealthy retired diplomat twenty years older than himself, and his wife, Lady Clark, “a handsome, charming woman of a certain age … a rather satirical invalid” who subscribed to and enjoyed reading the Atlantic. He liked them both. On a Sunday in mid-September 1879, from a wind-tossed mountain in Aberdeenshire he looked down at Tillypronie, the Clarks’ Scottish estate, “the supremely comfortable house lying deep among the brown and purple moors.” It was his first visit to Scotland, whose beauty took his breath away. “The great thing is the color … & the wonderful velvety bloom of the hills, which are powdered over with all kinds of broken & filtered lights.” On the way up, he had stopped in Edinburgh, whose “grand air” impressed him. He took such a “great fancy” to Scotland, he told Macmillan, that he thought, jokingly, that he might settle in Edinburgh. At Tillypronie, the Clarks “could not be a more tenderly hospitable couple. Sir John caresses me like a brother, and her ladyship supervises me like a mother.” They were “very good kind people.” “Don’t envy me too much,” he told Alice. For “a cosmopolitanized American,” the British country house sometimes has “an insuperable flatness.” But at Tillypronie “you get the conveniences of Mayfair dove-tailed into the last romanticism of nature.”25

London had become sufficiently oppressive for him to enjoy the change that country visits provided. Country houses, though, tended to be less congenial for working. Laboring at an intense writing schedule, he tried to limit country visits to holiday periods. London dinners, with their mixed blessings, provided helpful sociability and diversion at the end of workdays. He exercised with long London walks. The Reform Club provided rest, reading, inexpensive meals, companionable or solitary leisure, and even the opportunity to be a host at tea or, on rare occasions, dinner. He preferred to be a guest, for practical reasons. Late evenings, he often stopped for drinks and talk at Mrs. Kemble’s, a woman “with a deep, rich human nature.” At the beginning of 1879, he attended a dinner hosted by the Thackeray and Ritchie families at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where he met Mrs. Brookfield, Mrs. Ritchie’s mother, with whom Thackeray had been in love and who was his model for Amelia Sedley in Vanity Fair. Her youth seemed reflected in the sweet beauty of her daughter. “I don’t wonder that Thackeray put her in a book.” When he dined with Leslie Stephen and his “remarkably beautiful” bride just after their honeymoon, he saw the usually morose Stephen happy for the first time. She “has cheered him up amazingly; but I don’t see what he has done to merit so grandly fair a creature.”26

At another dinner he met Walter Pater, already well-known for work on the Renaissance, and found him pale, gray, unattractive, “far from being as beautiful as his own prose. “James responded unfavorably to Pater’s physical appearance and to a preciousness that hinted at his homosexuality. Another time James had the interesting experience of sitting next to Ruskin’s former wife, “a very big, handsome, coarse, vulgar, jolly, easy friendly Scotchwoman, and as unRuskinish a being as one could conceive,” now married to the painter John Millais; her marriage to Ruskin had been annulled on the grounds of nonconsummation. When Lowell came to London at the beginning of 1880, this time as ambassador to Great Britain, he and James went to lunch with Tennyson at the poet’s Eaton Place townhouse, where Mrs. Tennyson kept an open table for spontaneous visits. Impatient, bewildered, James observed that Lowell did not speak to Tennyson and Tennyson did not speak to Lowell. Late in the lunch, he heard “‘Do you know anything about Lowell?’ launched on the chance [by Tennyson] across the table and crowned at once by Mrs. Tennyson’s anxious quaver, ‘Why, my dear, this 15 Mr. Lowell!’”²⁷

Though he missed London when away, he was determined, for the sake of his work, to get away when it was necessary, especially during “the dreary British summer.” The summer of 1879 seemed particularly rainy and oppressive, “the whole country a perfect bog.” He was happy to meet two young writers, both of whom were to become friends, Edmund Gosse and Robert Louis Stevenson. Stevenson seemed “a pleasant fellow, but a shirt-collarless Bohemian and a great deal (in an inoffensive way) of a poseur.” Less talented, indefatigably careerist, Gosse always kept his shirt collar tightly buttoned. Summer solitude and occasional attractive company did not always outweigh the wearisome dirt and heat. As usual, Italy beckoned. The Bootts were regularly sending him invitations. But he worried that Italy would be too expensive. Also, on his previous visit he had found himself too distracted to work well there. Still, he wanted to go and resisted only by an exercise of willpower and common sense.

In the fall of 1879, he went to Paris instead, for a visit of about three months, just as he was to put the finishing touches on Hawthorne. He had in mind a new short novel, and thought perhaps that he might begin the major work that he told Macmillan he would probably call The Portrait of a Lady. “But upon this I observe the Silence of Death!” He did not rule out going to Italy if the weather became unpleasant. It did not. Paris was “transcendently civilized, after the grimy Babylon by the Thames, but one million times less interesting.” He had a comfortable apartment. The “warm, hazy, golden September weather” was lovely. Spending many pleasant hours with the Adamses, who were in Paris for three weeks on their way to Spain, they dined at restaurants together almost every day. James found Adams “very sensible, though a trifle dry,” Clover, a woman with “a touch of genius.” He spent time with Isabella Gardner, whom he had met in London, probably through the Adamses. She was an assertive, narcissistic, flamboyant American married to a wealthy Bostonian, Jack Gardner. “I have a happy faith that we shall Europeanize together again, in the future,” he told her. In October he visited the Childes at the Château de Varennes. He felt sorry for Childe’s “false position in the world—his absence of a country, a career &c, & his being nothing in France except through his wife.” He enjoyed Theodore Child’s company. With Hamilton Aïdé, he went to the country to visit Turgenev, and the next month Turgenev came in from the country to have breakfast with him. As for his former French literary friends, Flaubert no longer held his Sunday salon. He was to die the next year. Zola’s “naturalism is ugly & dirty, but he seems to me to be doing something—which surely (in the imaginative line) no one in England or the U.S. is, & no one else here.”28

When, near the end of September 1879, he received his annual royalty statement from Macmillan, he was appalled. Macmillan had hinted that sales had been minimal. He had immediately wanted to know “whether you meant they had been nil.” Even if they were small, that “would not prevent me from accepting them.” Macmillan responded with an advance of fifty pounds, half of the sum he was to receive on the completion of Hawthorne. “As a general thing,” James told Macmillan, he had “a lively aversion to receiving money in anticipation for work not delivered & I think that if you had proposed this yesterday I should have said No, for the present. But I should feel ungracious in returning the cheque—so I keep it.” He felt relieved when he was able to send the completed Hawthorne from Paris in the middle of September. But he still needed money. “Excuse my appearance of dunning you,” he wrote to Macmillan, but “I shld. take it very kindly if you would include” with the fifty pounds due for Hawthorne “whatever money is owing me” on the sales of the six books Macmillan had published. “This sum is apparently very small … but such as it is it will be a convenience to me to have it—& not an inconvenience to you, I hope, to send it, though I believe your regular way is not to settle these matters till somewhat later.” Macmillan sent the small sum the next month.29

Inwardly, James was fuming—angry, humiliated, deeply disappointed. In September and October, he negotiated an agreement with Macmillan’s Magazine and with the Atlantic Monthly for the serial publication of The Portrait of a Lady, to run from approximately the middle of 1880 to the middle of 1881. He grieved, he told Macmillan, that his other books “should not do better. It seems to me an anomaly that they don’t, as they have been on the whole largely and favorably noticed, & apparently a good deal talked about. I hope better things for the serial.” At the same time, he wrote to Chatto & Windus asking them what they would pay him for the book publication of Confidence. When they offered better terms than precedent indicated Macmillan would, he gave it to them, hoping that this would “operate as a salubrious irritant to Macmillan, who wants my books very much, but doesn’t want to pay for them!” He began the same process with Osgood and Scribner’s, but left Confidence with Osgood, “a weak proceeding, natural to the son of my father,” when the Boston publisher plaintively appealed to his loyalty.³⁰ Five years later, the unfortunate publisher contributed heavily to the commercial failure of The Bostonians by declaring bankruptcy immediately prior to its publication.

( 4 )

Before returning from Paris to London in mid-December 1879, he had taken a few mental half steps in the direction of the Alps. Each time, he had stepped back, with increasingly self-deprecating apologies to Lizzie Boott. He missed London more than he desired Italy. Unexpectedly, there was an immense early December snowstorm that blocked egress from Paris for a few days. Since he felt obliged to be back in London by the middle of January, it now seemed impractical to go south. “The moment seems ill-chosen for a hasty scamper over the Alps.… You can’t despise me more than you already do,” he told Lizzie. But he assured her that it was only a postponement, that he would come in the spring. Fortunately, London was “not a shade darker & several inches less under water” than Paris. Christmas and the New Year he spent at Fryston Hall and Thorne House, where he felt well enough to go to a ball and dance energetically. In London, he dined out regularly, though he claimed he intended “to cultivate a quiet winter, being, after three years of it, very tired of a promiscuous London life.” London itself “is a wonderful, brutal great Babylon of a place, & if one doesn’t like it very much, one must hate it: but fortunately I like it.”31

When the Adamses returned to London in January 1880, he saw them often in the pretty house that they had taken overlooking St. James’s Park, his visits including evening conversations starting at dusk and lasting till the early morning. They talked by a blazing fire, James often “with his hands under his coat-tails,” affectionately but pointedly arguing with the Adamses about his decision to live in England. Homesick for Washington, the Adamses felt appalled and betrayed by their friend’s rejection of American residence. “Don’t be afraid,” he had told his old Cambridge friend Grace Norton, “I shall never stray so far from our common nationality as to lose my way back.” But the Adamses expressed their doubts. They tried to argue him out of going to Italy. “It is both unnatural and impossible” that he should leave, they told him, “just after they have arrived.” They had been counting on his society. “But you should hear,” he told Lizzie Boott, “how bravely I defend myself.” Beyond Italy, he had on his mind America, where he was determined to return for a visit in late 1880, to see his family and to refresh his American sensibility. “I hold fast to my design of going home,” he told Isabella Gardner. He also held tenaciously to his claim that only “an old civilization” could “set a novelist in motion,” that “it is on manners, customs, usages, habits, forms, upon all these things matured and established, that a novelist lives.”³²

His defensiveness was exercised by his failure to protect his copyright in a short story, “A Bundle of Letters.” He had unwittingly lost the American rights when he published it, as a favor, in a Parisian magazine edited by his friend Theodore Child. When he learned, in January 1880, that an enterprising Boston publisher had brought out a pamphlet edition that was “selling like Wildfire,” he was furious that he had no grounds for legal redress. “They have been selling in thousands,” his mother remarked, “but unfortunately Harry reaps only fame.” The commercial success of Hawthorne also galled him. It sold well in England, even better in America. Ignoring the fact that he himself had made the choice to accept a flat fee, he blamed Macmillan. George Smalley advised him that the answer to such situations was to have professional representation by a lawyer both in England and America rather than deal directly himself with publishers. “If I had dealt with the Macmillans through ‘my solicitor’ they would not … have befooled me to the point of allowing them to appropriate all the profits” of the American sales. When Macmillan gave him as a present a handsomely bound edition of Hawthorne’s complete works, he did not feel assuaged. “I would much rather have my ‘rights,’ and no presents. But a truce,” he told his father, “to this sordid minuteness in which you will not recognize your would-be-gentlemanly son.”33 When Macmillan urged him to write a short biography of Dickens for the “English Men of Letters” series, for which he would pay ten times what he had paid for Hawthorne, James briefly mulled it over. If he were to do it, he decided, he would not do it for Macmillan’s series but as an independent book to be hawked to the highest bidder. Since to take that one, he would have to postpone writing Portrait, he declined.

What angered him even more than the poor deal he had made for Hawthorne was the widespread American critical hostility to the book. To many it seemed as if he had attacked Hawthorne and America rather than provided a sympathetic and balanced evaluation. Some reviewers praised it, including the ever-loyal Howells. Edwin Godkin told the James family that it is “the best thing of the kind that has appeared in this generation; and … no [other] American living or dead could have written it.” Tom Perry praised it highly. The English reviews were especially good. Hawthorne “appears to be a good deal liked here,” he told Grace Norton. “But whatever success it has ought to come from the U. S. A.” In America, though, there was such “a mass of the narrowest, most personal, inane criticism poured out upon him personally” that he almost reeled under the onslaught. The American press is “furious over my poor little Hawthorne. It is a melancholy revelation of angry vanity, vulgarity & ignorance. I thought they would protest a good deal at my calling New England life unfurnished but I didn’t expect they would lose their heads at such a rate. We are surely the most-thin-skinned idiots in the world, & I blush for my compatriots.” But “let us hope,” he told Perry, his venomous critics were “not the real American public. If I thought they were, I would give up the country.” With neither financial nor critical rewards, he now thought of the book as “ill-fated.”³⁴

On “a perfect spring morning” at the end of March 1880, James gazed from his open window overlooking the yellow-green Arno and the Ponte Vecchio. At last he was back in Italy, this time for a well-earned holiday and to begin writing The Portrait of a Lady. By the time he arrived in Italy, some of the sting of the reception of Hawthorne had drained away. He had with him the completed manuscript of a short novel, which he had told Howells was “a poorish story in three numbers—a tale purely American.” It was written during the late fall and winter months for publication in The Cornhill from June to November 1880 and in Harper’s Monthly Magazine.³⁵ He thought it a minor effort, an expression both of the absence of rich detail in American life and of the pressure to write quickly a brief serial fiction that would yield the largest amount of money at the earliest possible time. In February 1879, Fanny Kemble had told him the story of her selfish brother, who, more than anything, had wanted a rich wife and whose manipulations had resulted in failure. It is in essence the plot of Washington Square. In his novel, James makes Catherine Sloper, the daughter of a wealthy doctor who defies her father, the central consciousness. Fascinated, as in Watch and Ward and the novel he was now about to write, with the female attempting to make her way from adolescence to maturity in a male-dominated world, James readily finds the center of his novel in the complexities of father-daughter relationships and in psychologically and socially complicated courtship rituals. In Watch and Ward, Nora Lambert marries a substitute father. In The Portrait of a Lady, Isabel Archer marries a frigidly corpselike expatriate American living in Italy. In Washington Square, Catherine Sloper does not marry at all. Having determined to be a spinster himself, James had various ways of dramatizing the complexities of his decision. Set in the pre-Civil War New York of his childhood, Washington Square is a vividly psychological autobiographical drama.

Catherine Sloper is a victim of her small talents, of her father’s strengths, of her aunt’s self-serving recklessness, and of Morris Townsend’s merciless, egomaniacal greed. The only man who wants to and can protect her is the father she has to rebel against in order to have the man she wants to marry. A sincere, intelligent, and experienced protector of his daughter, Dr. Sloper cannot protect her when she falls in love with a scoundrel whom she has neither the intelligence, experience, nor instincts to see clearly. In the end, Townsend does Sloper’s work for him. When the dowry proves to be less than he had anticipated, he declines to marry her. Catherine brutally learns that her father had been right. Though she still loves Townsend, she accepts that he does not love her. Later, she has two additional opportunities to marry, in one instance to a worthy, appropriate man who genuinely loves her. She declines. Her love for Townsend determines that she will remain a spinster, a role for which she shows talent and in which she has many successes. When, twenty years later, Townsend returns, proposing that they resume their relationship with the likelihood of marriage, she bluntly, absolutely refuses him, returning to her knitting, “for life—as it were.”

In spring 1880, from his window overlooking the Arno, in one direction James had a view across the river toward Bellosguardo, which he frequently climbed to visit Lizzie Boott, whose relationship with her father had some of the intensity of Catherine Sloper’s with hers. Quiet, passive, and stubbornly persistent, Lizzie seemed always to be a student of painting but never a painter. She had brought back with her from Munich her American-born painting instructor, Frank Duveneck, a talented but unsophisticated thirty-two-year-old midwesterner with whom she had gradually developed a quiet intimacy. James immediately thought highly of his paintings, which seemed “remarkably strong and brilliant.” What feelings and directions were at issue between Lizzie and Duveneck were a puzzle and a problem to her father and her friends. The previous November, Henry had ironically remarked to William that “the natural & logical thing now seems … for Lizzie to marry Duveneck.” His words were unintentionally prophetic, though when he met Duveneck in Florence in April he thought that probably there was no danger that that would happen. Lizzie looked “elderly & plain.” She works indefatigably at her painting “under the inspiration of her friend & master the uncouth but vigorous Duveneck, to whom she appears to stand in a sort of double relation of pupil & adoptive mother—or at least adoptive sister. I hope she won’t ever become his adoptive anything-else, as, though an excellent fellow, he is terribly earthy & unlicked.” Lizzie’s spinsterhood seemed to him her natural state, partly because he perceived hers in terms of his own, and also because Duveneck seemed to him inappropriate. Duveneck, he thought, would be an incongruous if not impossible son-in-law for the aging but still elegant, fastidious, and demanding Francis Boott.36

In the other direction from his hotel was the Uffizi, to which a number of times he escorted another American spinster, a moderately successful, full-figured, and attractive American writer, forty-year-old Constance Fenimore Woolson. Born in New Hampshire to a businessman father, her mother was a niece of James Fenimore Cooper. She had been raised in Cleveland, had gone to school in New York City, had lived in the South, and had begun publishing stories and sketches in 1875. In 1880, she had her first literary success with the publication of Rodman the Keeper: Southern Sketches. A friend of John Hay’s and of Howells’, who published her stories and encouraged her career, she had moved to Europe in 1879 for what developed into almost fifteen years of expatriation. When she had arrived in London in 1879, she had unsuccessfully attempted to be introduced to James. Apparently she had come to Florence with the hope that she would find him there, this time with a letter of introduction from James’s cousin, Minny Temple’s sister. She had also come for her health. Chronically depressed, a tendency she believed she had inherited from her father, she thought a southern climate would counteract her annual winter darkness. “Every year proves to me more and more decidedly … that it is entirely a matter of warmth.… The minute it is warm, all the wretchedness, no matter what serious and dignified name it may have borne, vanishes into nothing, and never comes back until it is cold again.” In the long run, James and warm weather each proved insufficient. For a few weeks in late April and in May 1880, they took pleasure in one another’s company. Hard-of-hearing, she frequently asked him questions, the answers to which she could not hear. “Constance,” he wrote to William, “is old-maidish, deaf, & ‘intense’; but a good little woman & a perfect lady.”37

As soon as he had arrived in Italy, he felt that “all the ancient charm of the place” took possession of him again. Before settling down for a steady period of writing in Florence, he determined to treat himself to some unadulterated vacation, a trip southward of about two weeks, to Rome and to Naples, without the demands of a manuscript in his portmanteau. He had old friends and many memories in Rome. Though he had visited Naples briefly years before, its major attraction now was “the peculiar Joukowsky,” living temporarily in Naples with Richard Wagner and his complicated family and fraternal entourage. James’s love for Joukowsky had waned without disappearing entirely. He still felt, and was to feel for many years, an ache for the loss of his beautiful young Russian friend. From Florence, he went directly to Rome, where he spent a half dozen pleasant days. He dined with friends, including the Storys, and revisited the scenes of his earlier emotional effusions with the feeling that despite changes within himself and changes in Rome—“the enormous crowds, the new streets, the horse-cars … the ruination of the Coliseum, the hideous iron bridge over the Tiber, the wholesale desecration of the Pincio”—he could still happily spend many months there again.³⁸

From Rome he went to Naples, then immediately left for Posillippo, to see Joukowksy. Though he could not avoid feeling the oppression of Neapolitan poverty, he was able at moments to concentrate on the magnificent scenery. He felt it warmly, sensually, almost erotically, like a relaxing bath. “Vesuvius sits there on my right, looking wonderfully serene as he smokes his morning pipe, and just beneath my window a boatful of fishermen in red caps sends up a murmur of lazy sounds which mingles with the clash of little waves.” But he did not like what he saw at Posillippo. He was appalled by the openly homosexual and adulterous activities in the Wagner entourage. Joukowsky had become a Wagner worshiper, perhaps a lover of Wagner as well as of his music. James embraced Joukowsky, briefly. He declined to meet, let alone embrace, Wagner, “the musician of the future,” on the flimsy grounds that “I speak no intelligible German and he speaks nothing else.” Instead, he went to see “the mutilated Psyche” at the Naples Museum.39

Returning to Florence, he spent mornings and occasional afternoons during much of May 1880 trying to progress with the early sections of The Portrait of a Lady. Heavy rains drenched the city for a week. When the sun came out, he felt comically drowned in his heavy perspiration whenever he climbed the winding road to Bellosguardo. Though he amused himself with museums and carriage drives, he missed the conveniences of his London life. Nevertheless, he felt glad to be away during an intense election season, when politics would be the dominating subject anyway. Keeping his fingers on the pulse of his responsiveness, he concluded that he had lost the ability to have fresh, spontaneous impressions and keen, sharp enjoyments. It was simply “the common curse of advancing life. So true it is that we are young but once.” Italy could not be to him what it had been when he had first visited eleven years before. But it was still seductive enough, fertile enough “in pretexts for one’s haunting its lovely sights and scenes rather than one’s writing table” so that by mid-April he felt that he had lost a whole month in his progress on Portrait. Writing to Howells for a postponement from June to November, he blamed his slowness partly on the extension of Washington Square in The Cornhill from four to six monthly installments, but more particularly on Italy. Do not come to Italy “with a masterpiece suspended in the air by the tenderest portion of its texture; or else forbid yourself the pleasure of paying your proper respects to this land of loveliness.”⁴⁰

At the Hôtel de l’Arno, “in a room in that deep recess, in the front,” he began The Portrait of a Lady. By early May 1880, he was “pegging away.” In a notebook in which he jotted down ideas for stories, he had a substantial sketch of the plot and the characters, probably written soon after he had come back from Paris at the end of 1879 or the beginning of 1880. His heroine was again an American, a woman who brings to a long residence in Europe ideals and energies that European culture both enriches and erodes. The issues that had dominated his fiction and consciousness heretofore were to be carried, he hoped, a major step farther in Portrait. The novel’s conception and, ambitious construction he believed would for the first time not only place him in the company of the great realist novelists of the nineteenth century but in the company of the great artists of the past. Years before, after reeling through the streets of Rome, he had told Grace Norton that his mind was swarming “with effects of all kinds—to be introduced into realistic novels yet unwritten.”⁴¹ The effects he had stored up in the intervening years were not only those of sensation and sensibility but of psychology and artistic structure, of character and life. He felt ready now to capitalize on a long apprenticeship, on a slow, steady, stubborn accumulation and accretion of art and life.

( 5 )

America and his anticipated departure for home in October 1880 were much on his mind as he wrote. Within weeks of his return from Florence to London, William provided an ambivalent American embrace. William’s first words were “My!—how cramped and inferior England seems! After all, it’s poor old Europe, just as it used to be in our dreary boyhood!” The English seemed to him superbly “homogeneous … solid, so resolute, so spirited,” but “with all the terrible uniformity of their arranged lives.” William had vacillated through much of the spring about whether to take his summer months in Europe without his wife and child. Home and health weighed heavily upon him. The eager husband had become a devoted but burdened father and a heavily overworked teacher. His chronic depression led to eyestrain, backaches, irritability, and intense, highly expressive philosophical angst in regard to free will and the nature of human life. When William arrived in mid-June, he looked to Henry hardly changed, “no older … with all his vivacity and brilliancy of mind undimmed.” As egomaniacally loquacious as ever, William seemed characteristically thin, quiveringly nervous, with a touch of disability. “I can’t get rid of the feeling that he takes himself, and his nerves and his physical condition, too hard and too consciously,” Henry wrote to his mother. They spent hours talking about change and life. Henry “learned more from him about home affairs in a half hour’s conversation, than in a year of letter-writing.”42

When William embraced his thirty-seven-year-old brother, he noticed that he had to extend his arms wider than ever before. He had been warned the previous year. “I have certainly become a hopeless, helpless, shameless (and you will add, a bloated,) cockney.… I am as broad as I was long, as fat as a butter-tub & as red as a British mater familias. On the other hand, as a compensation, I am excellently well!” When he had congratulated William on his marriage, William had congratulated him on his gaining weight. “I rejoice in your rejoicings in my fat,” he responded, “and would gladly cut off fifty pounds or so and send them to you as a wedding-gift.”⁴³ Despite his striking success as a conversationalist and guest when he allowed Henry to take him to parties, England seemed socially “oppressive” to William. Henry hosted in William’s honor a dinner at the Reform Club. “Harry seems to bestride the British lion,” William told his parents, “but it takes a good deal of time to get into that position.” The position, though, suited Harry well. “As he grows older … he is better suited by a superficial contact with things at a great many points than by a deeper one at a few points. The way he worked at paying visits and going to dinners and parties was surprising to me, especially as he was all the time cursing them for so frustrating his work. It shows the perfect fascination of the whirlpool of a capital when once you are in it. You detest it and yet you can’t bear to let go your hold. However it will all suddenly stop on a certain day.” Whenever that day would be, it would not mean repatriation. “I think [Harry] is so thoroughly at home in England that he will always prefer to make it his head quarters.” They had chosen different countries, different paths. Harry’s seemed right for him.

They shared the Bolton Street address for four weeks. “William has been with me for a month,” Henry told Tom Perry, “enjoying London quietly & entertaining me much with his conversation.” But they had different daily agendas. Henry kept at his writing and his usual social entertainments. William saw a few personal friends and professional colleagues, among them Lowell and Adams. “You never saw,” he reported home, “such a pair of patriots … and [Adams’] little cockatrice of a wife. I use this term most affectionately for she was delightful.” But his mind was much on his elderly parents and his own childhood, particularly on the lives they had led when they had all lived in London and on the different paths he and Henry had chosen. “All the while I was there, in the vicinity of Clarges Street, 1/2 Moon Str. and Green Park Piccadilly, I found myself thinking in a manner unexampled in my previous life of Father and Mother in their youth coming to live there as a blushing bridal pair, with most of us children still unborn, and all the works unwritten; and my heart flowed over with a new kind of sympathy, especially for the beautiful, sylph like and inexperienced mother. Then when I went into St. John’s Wood and its monotony, and contrasted the life you led there with that which Harry is now leading in Bolton St., it made me feel how few things you laid claim to, and how entirely at that time your lives were given up to us.” As a parent, he felt that he now had eyes to see his own parents for the first time. “I have been almost shedding tears every day in London to think of you, my beloved old Father and Mother, standing in your youth before the great roaring foreign tide, often perplexed in the extreme, and wondering how you might best provide for us. Better late than never. But I wish that this new feeling might enable me to be more of a comfort to you in your old age than I have been of late years, with my afflictions.” His afflictions followed him to Amsterdam in the middle of July, then to solitary mountain hiking in Switzerland, where, berating himself for having become enraged at the condition of his eyes and at some English tourists nearby, he felt “a sort of moral revolution” pour through him. “Nature, God and Man all seemed fused together into one Life as they used to 15 or twenty years ago … a break up of the old worn out condition and pouring in of new strength.”44 He returned almost immediately to America.

By early July, Henry had decided, instead of departing for America late in the summer, to postpone the voyage for a full year. Though he had already booked passage for the twenty-first of August, 1880, he could cancel without any loss of money. Suddenly, he had felt a strong need to remain in Europe for another year, ostensibly to finish Portrait, before making so substantial and emotionally demanding a visit. No, he told Grace Norton, “I am not afraid to go home; though it seems to me that I well might be.” In Cambridge, Mary James happily fantasied that the month that William had “spent with Harry must have been a period of rare enjoyment to both of them.” It was also a trial. After William’s departure, Henry immediately went to bed with “one of those wretched sieges of pain in my head,” he told his mother, that “I have had so often.” Actually, he had had them infrequently in recent years, but illness remained the safest stance from which to bring his parents bad news. Perhaps William’s visit had been a reminder of the difficulties and strains of life with his family, of the inevitable diminishment of independence and autonomy that the family required. With his long novel only half completed, he explained to his disappointed mother, he needed to stay abroad to finish it in the best possible circumstances. “If by waiting a while I become able to return with more leisure, fame and money in my hands, and the prospect and desire of remaining at home longer, it will be better for me to do so; and this is very possible.” Expressing her aches and pains, part of the “feeling of growing old,” and having just celebrated her seventieth birthday with all her sons at a distance, Mrs. James quickly, self-protectively accepted her son’s reasoning. “Some imperative work … obliged him to this decision. He seems to regret it as much as we do, and says that when he comes, he wishes to come with entire leisure to see us all and stay as long as he desires.”⁴⁵

With an almost audible sigh of relief, Henry returned to his work and his recreation, particularly London people and gossip. In Florence, he had gotten the announcement directly from the bridegroom that John Cross, an American whom he had met many times at London literary meals, had become engaged to marry George Eliot, twenty-one years his senior. Lewes had died in 1878, shortly after James’s unhappy departure from the Lewes’s country cottage with the unread volumes of The American thrust into his hands. From Florence, in May 1880, he had sent Cross his congratulatory wishes. In August, he declined an invitation to visit with “Mrs. Cross neé George Eliot & her junior spouse. Aren’t you sorry?” he teased Grace Norton, “so that I might tell you they were grotesque? I don’t think they are, but they are deemed to be.” During the Venetian honeymoon, Cross had plummeted from their bedroom window into a dark canal in what was either a nervous breakdown or a suicide attempt, or both. The next year, after Eliot’s sudden death, Cross told James, who sat “in his poor wife’s empty chair in the beautiful little study they had just made perfect,” that he had felt like “a cart horse yoked to a racer.” James’s “private impression” was “that if she had not died, she would have killed him.”46

He himself, he told his mother in the fall, was “not just now making any matrimonial arrangements,” though he constantly heard rumors that he had been “‘very attentive’” to numerous spinsters and widows and the opinion that he would be “‘so much happier’” if only he would marry. As if from one spinster to another, he explained to Grace Norton, “I am unlikely ever to marry.… One’s attitude toward marriage is a part … of one’s general attitude toward life.… If I were to marry I should be guilty in my own eyes of an inconsistency—I should pretend to think just a little better of life than I really do.… I am not moved to that way, because I think my opinion of life on the whole good enough. I am attached to it, I am used to it—it doesn’t in any way paralyse or incapacitate me (on the contrary), and it doesn’t involve any particular injustice to any one, least of all to myself.… I am happy enough as it is, and am convinced that if I should go further, I should fare worse.”⁴⁷

In London for most of the summer, fall, and winter of 1880, he kept hard at work on Portrait. He made a few weekend visits—in July to the Sturgis’ lovely country home in Surrey; during the summer some brief solitary stays at hotels in Dover, Folkestone, and Brighton to escape the heat; and in November to Mentmore to stay briefly with new friends, Lord Rosebery, the witty, talented aristocrat and liberal politician, soon to be foreign secretary and then prime minister, and his wife, Hannah de Rothschild. Their “huge modern palace” was “filled with wonderful objects accumulated by the late Sir Nathan Meyer de Rothschild, Lady R.’s father.… Lady R. is large, fat, ugly, good-natured, sensible and kind; and Lord R. remarkably charming.” He liked them both, and, for the moment, was a little dazzled. One of his fellow guests, John Bright, the radical politician, seemed lively and honest, a good deal like “a superior New Englander—with a fatter, damper nature, however.” For Christmas week he went to Falmouth to stay with the Clarks, “kindly, funny, and harmlessly talkative” as usual, where he felt “woefully homesick for Piccadilly—& appalled by the prospect of being dragged” through a howling storm to visit Land’s End. “I prefer the Land’s Center—i.e Bolton St.”48 In January 1881, he spent a weekend at another of the Rosebery’s houses, this one at Epsom near the Downs. He enjoyed the small, sporting house, the paintings, and Smalley’s company, his friend as gossipy and talkative as ever.

But he kept to his own “land’s center”—his desk—most of the time, his working energy at high pitch partly because he now regularly turned down dinner and other invitations. Soon he felt he had mostly escaped the turning wheel of London social activity, with occasional exceptions. He held particularly long conversations with Fanny Kemble, who, at one visit after another, warned him that she would probably have died and not be there when he next returned. Her mordant predictions had so far remained unfulfilled. Beginning in midsummer 1880, he had begun to send to Howells portions of the novel in progress. It seemed to him to increase “in merit and interest” as he wrote. He told William that its merits were greater than those in his previous work due to the larger canvas on which he worked, making it “inevitably more human, more sociable. It was the constant effort at condensation (which you used always to drum into my head … when I was young and you bullied me) that has deprived my former things of these qualities.” By the new year, the publication of Portrait in the Atlantic and in Macmillan’s was well under way. In February 1881, he noted the death of Carlyle, a significant moment in the passing of the old order. Politics was very much in the air, particularly the Irish Question. He favored Home Rule, which he thought inevitable, but for the sake of the English rather than the Irish. The English, he felt, suffered more from the albatross of Ireland than the Irish from England. If he had nothing else to do, he told Tom Perry, he would “run over to Ireland: which may seem strange to you on the part of one satiated in youth with the Celtic genius. The reason is I should like to see a country in a state of revolution.”⁴⁹ But he had already made up his mind to go to Italy for the spring. London was having record cold and snow. He wanted a warmer, happier place in which to write.

In mid-February 1881, from the balcony of his hotel room overlooking the Tuileries, the Paris sun seemed as bright as April. Happy to be in Paris again, “which as usual seems splendid and charming,” he felt unusually expansive. Portrait so far had been an immense critical success. The monthly checks from serial publication made him feel flush. He could afford to travel. Italy was ahead of him, even warmer and more beautiful than Paris. He could count on visiting home next autumn on a note of triumph. Though he could hear the low notes, they did not drown out his own high aria of personal and artistic success. “It is the age of Panama Canals, of Sarah Bernhardt,” whose acting he detested, “of Western wheat-raising, of merely material expansion. Art, form, may return, but I doubt that I shall live to see them—I don’t believe they are eternal, as the poets say. All the same, I shall try to make them live a little longer!”

In Paris, he had three long visits with Turgenev, who looked noticeably older, and was the guest of honor at a dinner hosted by the Childes. Paris struck him “as having the drawbacks of London without the compensations.” After twelve days he went south via Avignon, Marseilles, and an unpleasantly overcrowded Nice, to “warm, quiet, lovely” San Remo where he spent almost two weeks. Then it was on to Genoa for a week, where he visited some friends whose winter houseguest was Jane Morris, “strange, pale, livid, gaunt, silent, and yet in a manner graceful and picturesque,” with “wonderful aesthetic hair.” He loved being in Italy again. In San Remo, he wrote every day, each morning walking “among the olives, over the hills behind the queer little black, steep town,” each night reading into the late hours. From Genoa, in mid-March, he went to Milan, where he spent eight days nursing a sore throat, going to galleries and attending the opera. In late March, he went directly to Venice, the destination that had been in his mind from the start, a city that he had visited briefly twice before but for which he had never felt a special attraction. Unexpectedly, this time, he was enthralled. He had “fallen deeply and desperately in love.”50