This last conception of Europe is the subject of _Roderick Hudson_ (1875). _Roderick Hudson_ is not a good book. It throws a light upon the lack of attention given at that period to the art of writing that within a few years of each other two men of great genius--Thomas Hardy and Henry James--wrote in their thirties first novels spoilt by technical blemishes of a sort that the most giftless modern miss with a subscription to Mudie's would never commit in her first literary experiment. _Roderick Hudson_ is wooden, it is crammed with local colour like a schoolmistress's bedroom full of photographs of Rome, it has a plain boiled suet heroine called Mary. But its idea is magnificent. An American of fortune takes Hudson, who has already shown talent as a sculptor, from his stool in a lawyer's office in Northampton, Massachusetts, and sets him up in a studio in Rome. It is the fear of old Mrs Hudson and of Mary, his fiancee, that European life will be too soft for him. But the very opposite occurs; it is he who is too soft for European life. The business of art means not only lounging under the pines of the Villa Ludovisi and chiselling the noble substance of Carrara marble; it means also the painful toil of creation, which demands from the artist an austerer renunciation of every grossness than was ever expected of any law-abiding citizen of Northampton, which sends a man naked and alone to awful moments which, if he be strong, give him spiritual strength, but if he be weak heap on him the black weakness of neurasthenia. And when that has turned him into a raw, hurt, raging creature he is further snared by the loveliness of Christina Light, who is characteristically European in that her circumstances have not the same clear beauty as her face. She is being hawked over the Continent to find a rich husband by her mother and a Cavaliere who is really her father, and this ugly girlhood has so corrupted her vigorous spirit that the young American's courtship provokes from her nothing but eccentric favours or perverse insults. After the collapse of his art and his love Roderick falls over a precipice in a too minutely described Switzerland, hurled by a _denouement_ which has inspired Mr James to one of his broadest jokes. In the first edition Roderick, on hearing that, while he has been vexing his benefactor with his moods, that gentleman has been manfully repressing a passion for Mary, exclaims, "It's like something in a novel!" which Mr James in the definitive edition has altered to, "It's like something in a bad novel!"