The plan did not mature until 1855 when the boy was twelve. In the _interim_ tutors were employed for his education who instructed him with desultory, changing methods, allowing him always to take apparently the paths of his preference. In these same paths he seems to have continued during the four years of his residence abroad with his parents in London, Geneva, Boulogne-sur-Mer, and Paris. All harshness he avoided, all sharpness of discipline--mathematics, examinations. He would sit, boy as he was, only in the places of beauty and refinement. "The whole perfect Parisianism I seemed to myself always to have possessed mentally--even if I had but just turned twelve."[96] One does not understand Henry James who neglects this formative period of his life. He returned to America an esthete, a dreamer, with his heart in the lands of culture, dissatisfied with the rush and rudeness that were preparing a new world for its future. He was too frail in health to enter the armies which soon were recruiting about him for the great war; he had no inclination, because of his father's prejudice, to undertake a college course; he shrank from the usual professions open to young men of his class. He did for a year attend lectures at the Harvard Law School, but it was with no thought of preparing for a legal career. He dreamed of literature as a profession. He would woo the muse, but the muse he would woo "was of course the muse of prose fiction--never for the briefest hour in my case the presumable, not to say the presuming, the much-taking-for-granted muse of rime, with whom I had never had, even in thought, the faintest flirtation." For this profession he trained himself as deliberately and as laboriously as if it were the violin that he was to master, or the great organ. He read industriously, especially in the French; he resided now in Boston, where his father at last had settled, now in France, now in Italy. Like Story, the sculptor, whom in so many ways he resembled, he would live at the richest centers of his art. Finally, in the late seventies, he took up his residence permanently abroad to return only as a rare visitant. III Henry James more than any other American author stands for specialization, for a limited field cultivated intensively and exclusively. Poetry, as he has explained, was no part of his endowment; he never attempted it even at the age when all men are poets; romance never attracted him. He approached his chosen field of prose fiction deliberately as a scientist, and prepared himself for it as a man studies medicine. He began as he ended--more crude in his art to be sure, more conventional, more youthful in thought and diction, yet not fundamentally different from his final manner.