Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from scanned images of public domain material from the Google Print project.) HENRY JAMES [Illustration: Photo portrait of Henry James] HENRY JAMES By REBECCA WEST KENNIKAT PRESS, INC. / PORT WASHINGTON, N. Y. HENRY JAMES First Published in 1916 Reissued in 1968 by Kennikat Press Library of Congress Catalog Card No: 67-27663 Manufactured in the United States of America AUTHOR'S NOTE _I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness for help in compiling the bibliography to Mr James B. Pinker, Miss Wilma Meikle, and Messrs Constable; and to Messrs Macmillan for the loan of the New York Edition of the Novels and Tales of Henry James._ R. W. CONTENTS PAGE I. THE SOURCES 9 II. THE INTERNATIONAL SITUATION 24 III. TRANSITION 55 IV. THE CRYSTAL BOWL 86 V. THE GOLDEN BOWL 105 BIBLIOGRAPHY 119 AMERICAN BIBLIOGRAPHY 124 INDEX 127 I THE SOURCES At various times during the latter half of the eighteenth century there crossed the Atlantic two Protestant Irishmen, a Lowland Scotsman, and an Englishman, and thereby they fixed the character of Mr Henry James' genius. For the essential thing about Mr James was that he was an American; and that meant, for his type and generation, that he could never feel at home until he was in exile. He came of a stock that was the product of culture and needed it as part of its environment. But at the time of his childhood and youth--he was born in 1843--culture was a thing that was but budding here and there in America, in such corners as were not being used in the business of establishing the material civilisation of the new country. The social life of old New York and Boston had its delicacy, its homespun honesty of texture, its austerer sort of beauty; but plainly the American people were too preoccupied by their businesses and professions to devote their money to the embellishment of _salons_ or their intelligence to the development of manners. Hawthorne and Emerson and Margaret Fuller and their friends were trying to make a culture against time; but any record of their lives which gives a candid account of how desperately these people had to struggle to make the meanest living shows that the poor American ants were then utterly unable to form the leisured community which is the necessary environment for grasshoppers. "The impression of Emerson's personal history is condensed into the single word Concord," wrote Mr James later, "and all the condensation in the world will not make it rich." There was no blinking the fact that in attempting to set up in this unfinished country Art was like a delicate lady who moves into a