To his Parents.

Professor Norton and his family were still at this time in Europe. Arthur Sedgwick was Mrs. Norton's brother.

Cambridge, (Mass.)Jan. 16, '71.

My dear Charles,

If I had needed any reminder and quickener of a very old-time intention to take some morning and put into most indifferent words my frequent thoughts of you, I should have found one very much to the purpose in a letter from Grace, received some ten days ago. But really I needed no deeper consciousness of my great desire to punch a hole in the massive silence which has grown up between us....

Cambridge and Boston society still rejoices in that imposing fixedness of outline which is ever so inspiring to contemplate. In Cambridge I see Arthur Sedgwick and Howells; but little of any one else. Arthur seems not perhaps an enthusiastic, but a well-occupied man, and talks much in a wholesome way of meaning to go abroad. Howells edits, and observes and produces—the latter in his own particular line with more and more perfection. His recent sketches in theAtlantic, collected into a volume, belong, I think, by the wondrous cunning of their manner, to very good literature. He seems to have resolved himself, however, [into] one who can write solely of what his fleshly eyes have seen; and for this reason I wish he were "located" where they would rest upon richer and fairer things than this immediate landscape. Looking about for myself, I conclude that the face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a reallygraspingimagination. This I think Howellslacks. (Of courseIdon't!) To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be amaster. But unfortunately one is less!... I myself have been scribbling some little tales which in the course of time you will have a chance to read. To write a series of good little tales I deem ample work for a life-time. I dream that my life-time shall have done it. It's at least a relief to have arranged one's life-time....

There is an immensity of stupid feeling and brutal writing prevalent here about recent English conduct and attitude—innocuous to some extent, I think, from its very stupidity; but I confess there are now, to my mind, few things of more appealing interest than the various problems with which England finds herself confronted: and this owing to the fact that, on the whole, the country is so deeply—so tragically—charged with a consciousness of her responsibilities, dangers and duties. She presents in this respect a wondrous contrast to ourselves. We, retarding our healthy progress by all the gross weight of our maniac contempt of the refined idea: England striving vainly to compel her lumbersome carcase by the straining wings of conscience and desire. Of course I speak of the better spirits there and the worst here.... We have over here the high natural light of chance and space and prosperity; but at moments dark things seem to be almost more blessed by the dimmer radiance shed by impassioned thought.... But I must stay my gossiping hand....

This next visit to Europe had begun in the spring of 1872. He had reached Germany, in the company of his sister and aunt, by way of England, Switzerland and Italy.

Heidelberg,Sept. 15th, '72.

Dear Father and Mother,

I think I should manifest an energy more becoming a child of yours if I were to sustain my nodding head at least enough longer to scrawl the initial words of my usual letter: we are travellers in the midst of travel. You heard from me last at Innsbrück—or rather, I think, at Botzen, just before, a place beautiful by nature but most ugly by man; and [we] came by an admirable five hours' run through the remnant of the Tyrol to Munich, where we spent two rather busy days. It's a singular place and one difficult to write of with a serious countenance. It has a fine lot of old pictures, but otherwise it is a nightmare of pretentious vacuity: a city of chalky stucco—a Florence and Athens in canvas and planks. To have come [thither] from Venice is a sensation! We found reality at last at Nüremburg, by which place, combined with this, it seemed a vast pity not to proceed rather than by stupid Stuttgart. Nüremburg is excellent—and comparisons are odious; but I would give a thousand N.'s for one ray of Verona! We came on hither by a morning and noon of railway, which has not in the least prevented a goodly afternoon and evening at the Castle here. The castle (which I think you have all seen in your own travels) is an incomparable ruin and holds its own against any Italian memories. The light, the weather, the time, were all, this evening, most propitious to our visit. This rapid week in Germany has filled uswith reflections and observations, tossed from the railway windows on our course, and irrecoverable at this late hour. To me this hasty and most partial glimpse of Germany has been most satisfactory; it has cleared from my mind the last mists of uncertainty and assured me that I can never hope to become an unworthiest adoptive grandchild of the fatherland. It is well to listen to the voice of the spirit, to cease hair-splitting and treat one's self to a good square antipathy—when it is so very sympathetic! I may 'cultivate' mine away, but it has given me a week's wholesome nourishment.

Strasbourg.We have seen Strasbourg—a palpably conquered city—and the Cathedral, which beats everything we have ever seen. Externally, it amazed me, which somehow I hadn't expected it to do. Strasbourg is gloomy, battered and painful; but apparently already much Germanized. We take tomorrow the formidable journey to Paris....

Yours in hope and love,H. JAMESjr.

Mr. Howells's novel, just published, wasA Chance Acquaintance. An allusion at the end of this letter recalls the great fire that had recently devastated the business quarter of Boston.

Berne, June 22d [1873].

My veritably dear Howells,

Your letter of May 12th came to me a week ago (after a journey to Florence and back) and gave me exquisite pleasure. I found it in the Montreux post-office and wandered further till I found the edge of an open vineyard by the lake, and there I sat down with my legs hanging overthe azure flood and broke the seal. Thank you for everything; for liking my writing and for being glad I like yours. Your letter made me homesick, and when you told of the orchards by Fresh Pond I hung my head for melancholy. What is the meaning of this destiny of desolate exile—this dreary necessity of having month after month to do without our friends for the sake of this arrogant old Europe which so little befriends us? This is a hot Sunday afternoon: from my window I look out across the rushing Aar at some beautiful undivided meadows backed by black pine woods and blue mountains: but I would rather be taking up my hat and stick and going to invite myself to tea with you. I left Italy a couple of weeks since, and since then have been taking gloomy views of things. I feel as if I had left my "genius" behind in Rome. But I suppose I am well away from Rome just now; the Roman (and even the Florentine) lotus had become, with the warm weather, an indigestible diet. I heard from my mother a day or two since that your book is having a sale—bless it! I haven't yet seen the last part and should like to get the volume as a whole. Would it trouble you to have it sent by post to Brown, Shipley & Co., London? Your fifth part I extremely relished; it was admirably touched. I wished the talk in which the offer was made had been given (instead of the mere résumé), but I suppose you had good and sufficient reasons for doing as you did. But your work is a success and Kitty a creation. I have envied you greatly, as I read, the delight of feeling her grow so real and complete, so true and charming. I think, in bringing her through with such unerring felicity, your imagination hasfait ses preuves.... I should like to tell you a vast deal about myself, and I believe you would like to hear it. But as far as vastness goes I should have to invent it, and it's too hot for such work. I send you another(and for the present last) travelling piece—about Perugia etc. It goes with this, in another cover: a safe journey to it. I hope you may squeeze it in this year. It has numbers (in pages) more than you desire; but I think it is within bounds, as you will see there is an elision of several. I have done in all these months since I've been abroad less writing than I hoped. Rome, for direct working, was not good—too many distractions and a languefying atmosphere. But for "impressions" it was priceless, and I've got a lot duskily garnered away somewhere under my waning (that's ann, not av)chevelurewhich some day may make some figure. I shall make the coming year more productive or retire from business altogether. Believe in me yet awhile longer and I shall reward your faith by dribblings somewhat less meagre.... I say nothing about the Fire. I can't trouble you with ejaculations and inquiries which my letters from home will probably already have answered. At this rate, apparently, the Lord loveth Boston immeasurably. But what a grim old Jehovah it is!...

My blessing, dear Howells, on all your affections, labours and desires. Write me a word when you can (B. & S., London) and believe me always faithfully yours,

H. JAMESjr.

Florence, Jan. 14th, '74.

Dear Grace,

...I have been jerked away from Rome, where I had been expecting to spend this winter, just as I was warming to the feast, and Florence, tho' very well in itself, doesn't go so far as it might as a substitute for Rome. It's like having a great plum-pudding set down on the table before you, and then seeing it whisked away and finding yourselfserved with wholesome tapioca. My brother, after a month of great enjoyment and prosperity at Rome, had a stroke of malaria (happily quite light) which made it necessary for him to depart, and I am here charitably to keep him company. I oughtn't to speak light words of Florence to you, who know it so well, and with reason love it so well: and they are really words from my pen's end simply and not from my heart. I have an inextinguishable relish for Florence, and now that I have been back here a fortnight this early love is beginning to shake off timidly the ponderous shadow of Rome.... Just as I was leaving Rome came to me Charles's letter of Dec. 5th, for which pray thank him warmly. I gather from it that he is, in vulgar parlance, taking America rather hard, and I suppose your feelings and Jane's on the matter resemble his own. But it's not for me to blame him, for I take it hard enough even here in Florence, and though I have a vague theory that there is a way of being contented there, I am afraid that when I go back I shall need all my ingenuity to put it into practice. What Charles says about our civilization seems to me perfectly true, but practically I don't feel as if the facts were so melancholy. The great fact for us all there is that, relish Europe as we may, we belong much more to that than to this, and stand in a much less factitious and artificial relation to it. I feel forever how Europe keeps holding one at arm's length, and condemning one to a meagre scraping of the surface. I have been nearly a year in Italy and have hardly spoken to an Italian creature save washerwomen and waiters. This, you'll say, is my own stupidity; but granting this gladly, it proves that even a creature addicted as much to sentimentalizing as I am over the wholemise en scèneof Italian life, doesn't find an easy initiation into what lies behind it. Sometimes I am overwhelmed with the pitifulness of this absurdwant of reciprocity between Italy itself and all my rhapsodies about it. There is certainly, however, terribly little doubt that, practically, for those who have been happy in Europe even Cambridge the Brilliant is not an easy place to live in. When I saw you in London, plunged up to your necks in that full, rich, abundant, various London life, I knew that a day of reckoning was coming and I heaved a secret prophetic sigh. I can well understand Charles's saying that the memory of these and kindred things is a perpetual private [? pang]. But pity our poor bare country and don't revile. England and Italy, with their countless helps to life and pleasure, are the lands for happiness and self-oblivion. It would seem that in our great unendowed, unfurnished, unentertained and unentertaining continent, where we all sit sniffing, as it were, the very earth of our foundations, we ought to have leisure to turn out something handsome from the very heart of simple human nature. But after I have been at home a couple of months I will tell you what I think. Meanwhile I aspire to linger on here in Italy and make the most of it—even in poor little overshadowed Florence and in a society limited to waiters and washerwomen. In your letter of last summer you amiably reproach me with not giving you personal tidings, and warn me in my letters against mistaking you for theNation. Heaven forbid! But I have nonouvelles intimesand in this solitary way of life I don't ever feel especially like a person. I write more or less in the mornings, walk about in the afternoons, and doze over a book in the evenings. You can do as well as that in Cambridge....

Florence,May 17th, 1874.

Dearest Mother,

...The days pass evenly and rapidly here in my comfortable little dwelling on this lively (and also dusty) old Piazza Sta. Maria Novella. (The centre of the square is not paved and the dust hovers over it in clouds which compel one to live with closed windows. But I remove to my bedroom, which is on a side-street and very cool and clean.) Nothing particular happens to me and my time is passed between sleeping and scribbling (both of which I do very well,) lunching and dining, walking, and conversing with my small circle of acquaintance.... Tell Willy I thank him greatly for setting before me so vividly the question of my going home or staying. I feel equally with him the importance of the decision. I have been meaning, as you know, for some time past to return in the autumn, and I see as yet no sufficient reason for changing my plan. I shall go with the full prevision that I shall not find life at homesimpatico, but rather painfully, and, as regards literary work, obstructively the reverse, and not even with the expectation that time will make it easier; but simply on sternly practical grounds; i.e. because I can find more abundant literary occupation by being on the premises and relieve you and father of your burdensome financial interposition. But I shrink from Willy's apparent assumption that going now is to pledge myself to stay forever. I feel as if my three years in Europe (with much of them so maladif) were a very moderate allowance for one who gets so much out of it as I do; and I don't think I could really hold up my head if I didn't hope to eat a bigger slice of the pudding (with a few more social plums in it, especially) at somefuture time. If at the end of a period at home I don't feel an overwhelming desire to come back, it will be so much gained; but I should prepare myself for great deceptions if I didn't take the possibility of such desire into account. One oughtn't, I suppose, to bother too much about the future, but arrange as best one can with the present; and the present bids me go home and try and get more things published. What makes the question particularly difficult to decide is that though I should make more money at home, American prices would devour it twice as fast; but even allowing for this, I should keep ahead of my expenses better than here. I know that when the time comes it will be unutterably hard to leave and I shall be wondering whether, if I were to stay another year, I shouldn't propitiate the Minotaur and return more resignedly. But to this I shall answer that a year wouldn't be a tenth part enough and that besides, as things stand, I should be perplexed where to spend it. Florence, fond as I have grown of it, is worth far too little to me, socially, for me to think complacently of another winter here. Here have I been living (in these rooms) for five weeks—and not a creature, save Gryzanowski, has crossed my threshold—counting out my little Italian, who comes twice a week, and whom I have topayfor his conversation! If I knew any one in England I should be tempted to go there for a year, for there I could work to advantage—i.e. get hold of new books to review. But I can't face, as it is, a year of British solitude. What I desire now more than anything else, and what would do me more good, is arégalof intelligent and suggestive society, especially male. But I don't know how or where to find it. It exists, I suppose, in Paris and London, but I can't get at it. I chiefly desire it because it would, I am sure, increase my powers of work. These are going very well, however, asit is, and I have for the present an absorbing task in my novel. Consider then that if nothing extremely unexpected turns up, I shall depart in the autumn. I have no present plans for the summer beyond ending my month in my rooms—on the 11th of June. I hope, dearest mammy, that you will be able to devise some agreeable plan for your own summer, and will spend it in repose and comfort.... Has the trunk reached Quincy St.? Pray guard jealously my few clothes—a summer suit and a coat, and two white waistcoats that I would give much for here, now. But don't let Father and Willy wear them out, as they will serve me still. Farewell, sweet mother. I must close. I wrote last asking you to have my credit renewed. I suppose it has been done. Love abounding to all. I will write soon to Willy. I wrote lately to A.

Yours ever,H.

AFTERanother uneventful American year at Cambridge (1874-5,) during which Roderick Hudson was running its course in theAtlantic Monthly, Henry James came to Europe again with the clear intention of staying for good. His first idea was to settle in Paris. There he would find the literary world with which he had the strongest affinity, and it does not seem to have occurred to him at the time to seek a European home anywhere else. His knowledge of England was still very slight, and he needed something more substantial to live and work upon than the romance of Italy. In Paris he settled therefore, in the autumn of 1875, taking rooms at 29 Rue du Luxembourg. He began to write The American, to contribute Parisian Letters to theNew York Tribune, and to frequent the society of a few of his compatriots. He made the valued acquaintance of Ivan Turgenev, and through him of the group which surrounded Gustave Flaubert—Edmond de Goncourt, Alphonse Daudet, Guy de Maupassant, Zola and others. But the letters which follow will shew the kind of doubts that began to arise after a winter in Paris—doubts of the possibility of Paris as a place where an American imagination could reallytake root and flourish. He found the circle of literature tightly closed to outside influences; it seemed to exclude all culture but its own after a fashion that aroused his opposition; he speaks sarcastically on one occasion of having watched Turgenev and Flaubert seriously discussing Daudet'sJack, while he reflected that none of the three had read, or knew English enough to read,Daniel Deronda. During a summer stay at Etretat these doubts increased, and when he went back to Paris in the autumn of 1876 he had already begun to feel the tug of an inclination towards London. His brother William seems to have given the final impulse which sent him over, and before the end of the year he was in London at last.

He took rooms at 3 Bolton Street, just off Piccadilly, and at first found the change from 'glittering, charming, civilised Paris' rather rude. But within a few weeks he was deep in London, with doors unnumbered opening to him and a general welcome for the rising young novelist from America. Letter after letter was sent home with accounts of the visits and dinner-parties which were soon his habitual round. He quickly discovered that this was his appointed home and set himself deliberately to cultivate it. But his relief at finding a place of which he could really take possession was entirely compatible with candid criticism. Letter after letter, too, is filled with caustic reflections on the minds and manners of the English; and as the following pages contain not a few of these, so it should here be pointed out that his correspondence was the only outlet open to these irrepressible sentiments, and that they must be seen in due proportion with the perfect courtesy of appreciation that he always shewed to his well-meaning hosts. He was very much alone in his observing detachment during these years. 'I wish greatly,' he writes to Miss Norton about this time,'you and Charles were here, so that I might have some one to say the things that are in me too; I mean the things about England and the English—the feelings, impressions, judgments, emotions of every kind that are being perpetually generated, and that I can't utter to a single Briton of them all with the smallest chance of being understood.... The absence of a sympathetic, compatriotic, intelligent spirit, like yours, is my greatest deprivation here, and everything is corked up.'

But whatever the shortcomings of the English might be, London life closed round him and held him fast. He would break away for an occasional excursion abroad, or he would carry his work into seaside lodgings for the end of the summer. Otherwise he clung to London, with such country visits as sprang naturally from his numerous relations with the town and were simply an extension of these. During the years covered by the present section he spent some weeks in Rome towards the end of 1877, three months in Paris in the autumn of 1879, and two in Italy again, at Florence and Naples, in the following spring. By 1881 he was sufficiently acclimatised in London to feel the need of escaping from the 'season,' then so much more organised and exacting an institution than it has since become; he went to Venice in March and did not return till July. But these were the only variations from the life of a 'cockneyconvaincu,' as he admitted himself to be. The wonder is that he found time under such conditions to accomplish the large amount of work he still put forth year by year. In spite of health that continued somewhat uncertain, he was able to concentrate upon his writing in the midst of all distractions. Daisy Miller, The Europeans, Confidence, Washington Square, and the Portrait of a Lady, all belong to the first five years of his London life, besides an unbroken stream of shorter pieces—fiction,picturesque sketches, reviews of books—contributed to several English and American periodicals. Time slipped by, and he began to wait upon the right opportunity for a long visit to his own country. It was not indeed that he felt himself to be losing touch with it; his appetite for American news was unassuageable, and by means of a correspondence as copious as ever he jealously preserved and cherished every possible tie with his old home. But he turned to his own family, then as always afterwards, with an affection stimulated by his unfathered state in England. His parents were growing old, his elder brother (who had married in 1878) was beginning to enjoy and exhibit the maturity of his genius, and it was more than time for a renewal of associations on the spot. By the autumn of 1881 he had finished The Portrait of a Lady, the longest and in every way the most important of his works hitherto, and he could also feel that his grounding in London, so to call it, was solid and secure. After six years of absence he then saw America again.

29 Rue du Luxembourg.April 11th [1876].

Dear Father,

...The slender thread of my few personal relations hangs on, without snapping, but it doesn't grow very stout. You crave chiefly news, I suppose, about Ivan Sergeitch [Turgenev], whom I have lately seen several times. I spent a couple of hours with him at his room, some time since, and I have seen him otherwise at Mme. Viardot's. The latter has invited me to her musical parties (Thursdays) and to her Sundaysen famille. I have been to a couple of the former and (as yet only) one of the latter. She herself is a most fascinating and interesting woman, ugly, yet also very handsome or, in the French sense,très-belle. Her musical parties are rigidly musical and to me, therefore, rigidly boresome, especially as she herself sings very little. I stood the other night on my legs for three hours (from 11 till 2) in a suffocating room, listening to an interminable fiddling, with the only consolation that Gustave Doré, standing beside me, seemed as bored as myself. But when Mme. Viardot does sing, it is superb. She sang last time a scene from Gluck'sAlcestis, which was the finest piece of musical declamation, of a grandly tragic sort, that I can conceive. Her Sundays seem rather dingy and calculated to remindone of Concord 'historical games' etc. But it was both strange and sweet to see poor Turgenev acting charades of the most extravagant description, dressed out in old shawls and masks, going on all fours etc. The charades are their usual Sunday evening occupation and the good faith with which Turgenev, at his age and with his glories, can go into them is a striking example of that spontaneity which Europeans have and we have not. Fancy Longfellow, Lowell, or Charles Norton doing the like, and every Sunday evening! I am likewise gorged with music at Mme. de Blocqueville's, where I continue to meet Emile Montégut, whom I don't like so well as his writing, and don't forgive for having, à l'avenir, spoiled his writing a little for me. Calling the other day on Mme. de B. I found with her M. Caro, the philosopher, a man in the expression of whose mouth you would discover depths of dishonesty, but a most witty and agreeable personage. I had also the other day a very pleasant call upon Flaubert, whom I like personally more and more each time I see him. But I think I easily—more than easily—see all round him intellectually. There is something wonderfully simple, honest, kindly, and touchingly inarticulate about him. He talked of many things, of Théo. Gautier among others, who was his intimate friend. He said nothing new or rare about him, except that he thought him after the Père Hugo the greatest of French poets, much above Alfred de Musset; but Gautier in his extreme perfection was unique. And he recited some of his sonnets in a way to make them seem the most beautiful things in the world. Find in especial (in the volume I left at home) one calledLes Portraits Ovales.... I went down to Chartres the other day and had a charming time—but I won't speak of it as I have done it in the Tribune. The American papers over here areaccablants, andthe vulgarity and repulsiveness of the Tribune, whenever I see it, strikes me so violently that I feel tempted to stop my letter. But I shall not, though of late there has been a painful dearth of topics to write about. But soon comes theSalon.... I am very glad indeed that Howells is pleased with my new tale; I am now actively at work upon it. I am well pleased that theAtlantichas obtained it. His own novel I have not read, but he is to send it to me.

Your home news has all been duly digested. Tell Willy that I will answer his most interesting letter specifically; and say to my dearest sister that if she will tell me which—black or white—she prefers I will send her gratis a fichu of écru lace, which I am told is the proper thing for her to have.

Ever, dearest daddy, your loving son,

H. JAMESjr.

The 'story' wasThe American, which began to appear inThe Atlantic Monthlyin June, 1876.

29 Rue du Luxembourg, Paris.May 28th [1876].

Dear Howells,

I have just received (an hour ago) your letter of May 14th. I shall be very glad to do my best to divide my story so that it will make twelve numbers, and I think I shall probably succeed. Of course 26 pp. is an impossible instalment for the magazine. I had no idea the second number would make so much, though I half expected your remonstrance. I shall endeavour to give you about 14 pp., and to keep doing it for seven or eight months more. I sent you the other day a fourthpart, a portion of which, I suppose, you will allot to the fifth.

My heart was touched by your regret that I hadn't given you "a great deal of my news"—though my reason suggested that I could not have given you what there was not to give. "La plus belle fille du monde ne peut donner que ce qu'elle a." I turn out news in very small quantities—it is impossible to imagine an existence less pervaded with any sort ofchiaroscuro. I am turning into an old, and very contented, Parisian: I feel as if I had struck roots into the Parisian soil, and were likely to let them grow tangled and tenacious there. It is a very comfortable and profitable place, on the whole—I mean, especially, on its general and cosmopolitan side. Of pure Parisianism I see absolutely nothing. The great merit of the place is that one can arrange one's life here exactly as one pleases—that there are facilities for every kind of habit and taste, and that everything is accepted and understood. Paris itself meanwhile is a sort of painted background which keeps shifting and changing, and which is always there, to be looked at when you please, and to be most easily and comfortably ignored when you don't. All this, if you were only here, you would feel much better than I can tell you—and you would write some happy piece of your prose about it which would make me feel it better, afresh.Ergo, come—when you can! I shall probably be here still. Of course every good thing is still better in spring, and in spite of much mean weather I have been liking Paris these last weeks more than ever. In fact I have accepted destiny here, under the vernal influence. If you sometimes read my poor letters in theTribune, you get a notion of some of the things I see and do. I suppose also you get some gossip about me from Quincy St. Besides this there is not a great deal to tell. I haveseen a certain number of people all winter who have helped to pass the time, but I have formed but one or two relations of permanent value, and which I desire to perpetuate. I have seen almost nothing of the literary fraternity, and there are fifty reasons why I should not become intimate with them. I don't like their wares, and they don't like any others; and besides, they are notaccueillants. Turgenev is worth the whole heap of them, and yet he himself swallows them down in a manner that excites my extreme wonder. But he is the most loveable of men and takes all things easily. He is so pure and strong a genius that he doesn't need to be on the defensive as regards his opinions and enjoyments. The mistakes he may make don't hurt him. His modesty and naïveté are simply infantine. I gave him some time since the message you sent him, and he bade me to thank you very kindly and to say that he had the most agreeable memory of your two books. He has just gone to Russia to bury himself for two or three months on his estate, and try and finish a long novel he has for three or four years been working upon. I hope to heaven he may. I suspect he works little here.

I interrupted this a couple of hours since to go out and pay a visit to Gustave Flaubert, it being his time of receiving, and his last Sunday in Paris, and I owing him a farewell.Heis a very fine old fellow, and the most interesting man and strongest artist of his circle. I had him for an hour alone, and then came in his "following," talking much of Emile Zola's catastrophe—Zola having just had a serial novel for which he was handsomely paid interrupted on account of protests from provincial subscribers against its indecency. The opinion apparently was that it was a bore, but that it could only do the book good on its appearance in a volume. Among your tribulations as editor, I take itthat this particular one is not in store for you. On my way down from Flaubert's I met poor Zola climbing the staircase, looking very pale and sombre, and I saluted him with the flourish natural to a contributor who has just been invited to make his novel last longer yet....

Your inquiry "Why I don't go to Spain?" is sublime—is what Philip van Artevelde says of the Lake of Como, "softly sublime, profusely fair!" I shall spend my summer in the most tranquil and frugal hole I can unearth in France, and I have no prospect of travelling for some time to come. The Waverley Oaks seem strangely far away—yet I remember them well, and the day we went there. I am sorry I am not to see your novel sooner, but I applaud your energy in proposing to change it. The printed thing always seems to me dead and done with. I suppose you will write something about Philadelphia—I hope so, as otherwise I am afraid I shall know nothing about it. I salute your wife and children a thousand times and wish you an easy and happy summer and abundant inspiration.

Yours very faithfully,H. JAMES, jr.

Etretat,July 29th [1876].

Dear Wm.

...I have little to tell you of myself. I shall be here till August 15-20, and shall then go and spend the rest of the month with the Childes, near Orléans (an ugly country, I believe,) and after that try to devise some frugal scheme for keeping out of Paris till as late as possible in theautumn. The winter there always begins soon enough. I am much obliged to you for your literary encouragement and advice—glad especially you like my novel. I can't judge it. Your remarks on my French tricks in my letters are doubtless most just, and shall be heeded. But it's an odd thing that such tricks should grow at a time when my last layers of resistance to a long-encroaching weariness and satiety with the French mind and its utterance has fallen from me like a garment. I have done with 'em, forever, and am turning English all over. I desire only to feed on English life and the contact of English minds—I wish greatly I knew some. Easy and smooth-flowing as life is in Paris, I would throw it over tomorrow for an even very small chance to plant myself for a while in England. If I had but a single good friend in London I would go thither. I have got nothing important out of Paris nor am likely to. My life there makes a much more succulent figure in your letters, my mention of its thin ingredients as it comes back to me, than in my own consciousness. A good deal of Boulevard and third-rate Americanism: few retributive relations otherwise. I know the Théâtre Français by heart!

Daniel Deronda (Dan'l himself) is indeed a dead, though amiable, failure. But the book is a large affair; I shall write an article of some sort about it. All desire is dead within me to produce something on George Sand; though perhaps I shall, all the same, mercenarily and mechanically—though only if I am forced.Please make a point of mentioning, by the way, whether a letter of mine, upon her, exclusively,didappear lately in the Tribune. I don't see the T. regularly and have missed it. They misprint sadly. I never said, e.g., in announcing her death, that she was 'fearfullyshy': I used no such vile adverb, but another—I forget which.

I am hoping from day to day for another letter from home, as the period has come round.... I hope your own plans for the summer will prosper, and health and happiness be your portion. Give much love to Father, and to the ladies.

Yours always,H. JAMESjr.

H. J. had by this time been settled in London for some three months.

Athenaeum Club, Pall Mall.March 29th, '77.

Dear Wm.

...London life jogs along with me, pausing every now and then at some more or less succulent patch of herbage. I was almost ashamed to tell you through mother that I, unworthy, was seeing a bit of Huxley. I went to his house again last Sunday evening—a pleasant, easy, no-dress-coat sort of house (in our old Marlboro' Place, by the way). Huxley is a very genial, comfortable being—yet with none of the noisy and windy geniality of some folks here, whom you find with their backs turned when you are responding to the remarks that they have made you. But of course my talk with him is mere amiable generalities. These, however, he likes to cultivate, for recreation's sake, of a Sunday evening. (The thundering Spencer I have not lately seen here.) Some mornings since, I breakfasted with Lord Houghton again—he invites me most dotingly. Present: John Morley, Goldwin Smith (pleasanter than my prejudice against him,) Henry Cowper, Frederick Wedmore, and a monstrous cleverly, agreeablytalking M.P., Mr. Otway. John Morley has a most agreeable face, but he hardly opened his mouth. (He is, like so many of the men who have done much here, very young-looking.) Yesterday I dined with Lord Houghton—with Gladstone, Tennyson, Dr. Schliemann (the excavator of old Mycenae, etc.) and half a dozen other men of 'high culture.' I sat next but one to the Bard and heard most of his talk, which was all about port wine and tobacco: he seems to know much about them, and can drink a whole bottle of port at a sitting with no incommodity. He is very swarthy and scraggy, and strikes one at first as much less handsome than his photos: but gradually you see that it's a face of genius. He had I know not what simplicity, speaks with a strange rustic accent and seemed altogether like a creature of some primordial English stock, a thousand miles away from American manufacture. Behold me after dinner conversing affably with Mr. Gladstone—not by my own seeking, but by the almost importunate affection of Lord H. But I was glad of a chance to feel the 'personality' of a great political leader—or as G. is now thought here even, I think, by his partisans, ex-leader. That of Gladstone is very fascinating—his urbanity extreme—his eye that of a man of genius—and his apparent self-surrender to what he is talking of, without a flaw. He made a great impression on me—greater than any one I have seen here: though 'tis perhaps owing to my naïveté, and unfamiliarity with statesmen....

Did I tell you that I had been to the Oxford and Cambridge boat-race? But I have paragraphed it in theNation, to which I refer you. It was for about two minutes a supremely beautiful sight; but for those two minutes I had to wait a horribly bleak hour and a half, shivering, in mid-Thames, under the sour March-wind. I can't think of any other adventures: save that I dined two or three dayssince at Mrs. Godfrey Lushington's (they are very niceblushingpeople) with a parcel of quiet folk: but next to a divine little Miss Lushington (so pretty English girls can be!) who told me that she lived in the depths of the City, at Guy's Hospital, whereof her father is administrator. Guy's Hospital—of which I have read in all old English novels. So does one move all the while here on identified ground. This is the eve of Good Friday, a most lugubrious day here—and all the world (save 4,000,000 or so) are out of London for the ten days' Easter holiday. I think of making two or three excursions of a few hours apiece, to places near London whence I can come back to sleep: Canterbury, Chichester etc. (but as I shall commemorate them for lucre I won't talk of them thus).

Farewell, dear brother, I won't prattle further.... Encourage Alice to write to me. My blessings on yourself from your fraternal

H. J. jr.

3 Bolton St., Piccadilly.August 7th, 1877.

Dear Grace,

...I feel now more at home in London than anywhere else in the world—so much so that I am afraid my sense of peculiarities, my appreciation of people and things, asLondonpeople and things, is losing its edge. I have taken a great fancy to the place; I won't say to the people and things; and yet these must have a part in it. It makes a very interesting residence at any rate; not the ideal and absolutely interesting—but the relative and comparative one. I have, however,formed no intimacies—not even any close acquaintances. I incline to believe that I have passed the age when one forms friendships; or that every one else has. I have seen and talked a little with a considerable number of people, but I have become familiar with almost none. To tell the truth, I find myself a good deal more of a cosmopolitan (thanks to that combination of the continent and the U.S.A. which has formed my lot) than the average Briton of culture; and to be—to have become by force of circumstances—a cosmopolitan is of necessity to be a good deal alone. I don't think thatLondon, by itself, does a very great deal for people—for its residents; and those of them who are not out of the general social herd are potentially deadly provincial. I have become in all these years as little provincial as possible. I don't say it from fatuity and I may say it to you; and yet to be so is, I think, necessary for forming here many close relations. So my interest in London is chiefly that of an observer in a place where there is most in the world to observe. I see no essential reason however why I should not some day see much more of certain Britons, and think that I very possibly may. But I doubt if I should ever marry—or want to marry—an English wife! This is an extremely interesting time here; and indeed that is one reason why I have not been able to bring myself to go abroad, as I have been planning all this month to do. I can't give up the morning papers! I am not one of the outsiders who thinks that the "greatness" of England is now exploded; but there mingles with my interest in her prospects and doings in all this horrible Eastern Question a sensible mortification and sadness. She has not resolutely played a part—even a wrong one. She has been weak and helpless and (above all) unskilful; she has drifted and stumbled and not walked like a great nation. One has a feelingthat the affairs of Europe are really going to be settled without her. At any rate the cynical, brutal, barbarous pro-Turkish attitude of an immense mass of people here (I am no fanatic for Russia, but I think the Emperor of R. might have been treated like a gentleman!) has thrown into vivid relief the most discreditable side of the English character. I don't think it is the largest side, by any means; but when one comes into contact with it one is ready to give up the race!

I saw the Lowells and can testify to their apparent good-humour and prosperity. It was a great pleasure to talk with Lowell; but he is morbidly Anglophobic; though when an Englishman asked me if he was not I denied it. I envied him his residence in a land of colour and warmth, of social freedom and personal picturesqueness; so many absent things here, where the dusky misery and the famous "hypocrisy" which foreign writers descant so much upon, seem sometimes to usurp the whole field of vision. But I shall in all probability go abroad myself by Sept. 1st: go straight to our blessed Italy. I hope to be a while at Siena, where you may be sure that I shall think of you....

Yours always, dear Grace, in all tender affection,

H. JAMESjr.

Paris, Dec. 15th [1877].

Dear Grace,

I hoped, after getting your letter of October 15th, to write you from Siena, but I never got there. I only got to Rome (where your letter came to me,) and in Rome I spent the whole of the sevenweeks that I was able to give to Italy. I have just come back, and am on my way to London, whither I find I gravitate as toward the place in the world in which, on the whole, I feel most at home. I went directly to Rome some seven weeks since, and came directly back; but I spent a few days in Florence on my way down. Italy was still more her irresistible ineffable old self than ever, and getting away from Rome was really no joke. In spite of the "changes"—and they are very perceptible—the old enchantment of Rome, taking its own good time, steals over you and possesses you, till it becomes really almost a nuisance and an importunity. That is, it keeps you from working, from staying indoors, etc. To do those things in sufficient measure one must live in an ugly country; and that is why, instead of lingering in that golden climate, I am going back to poor, smutty, dusky, Philistine London. Florence had never seemed to me more lovely. Empty, melancholy, bankrupt (as I believe she is), she is turning into an old sleeping, soundless city, like Pisa. This sensible sadness, with the glorious weather, gave the place a great charm. The Bootts were there, staying in a villa at Bellosguardo, and I spent many hours in their garden, sitting in the autumn sunshine and staring stupidly at that never-to-be-enough-appreciated view of the little city and the mountains....

I have had an autumn of things rather than of people, and have not much to relate in regard to human nature. Here in Paris, for a few days, I find I know really too many people—especially as they are for the most part acquaintances retained for the sake of social decency rather than of strong sentiment. They consume all my time, so that I can't even go to the Théâtre Français! In Rome I found the relics and fragments of the ancient American group, which has been much broken up—or rather broken down. But neither in its meridiannor in its decline has it had any very irresistible charms. The chief quality acquired by Americans who have lived thirty years in Europe seems to me a fierce susceptibility on the subject of omitted calls.

Public matters here, just now, are more interesting than private—and in France indeed are as interesting as can be. Parliamentary government is really being put to the test, and bearing it. The poor foolish old Marshal has at last succumbed to the liberal majority, and has apparently no stomach to renew his resistance. Plevna is taken by the Russians and England is supposed to be dreadfully snubbed. But one is only snubbed if one feels it, and it remains to be seen how England will take the Russian success. But one has a feeling now—to me it is a very painful one—that England will take anything; that over-cautious and somewhat sordid counsels will always prevail. On the continent, certainly, her ancient "prestige" is gone; and I almost wish she would fight in a bad cause, if only to shew that she still can, and that she is not one vast, money-getting Birmingham. I really think we are assisting at the political decadence of our mighty mother-land. When so mealy-mouthed an organ as theTimesis correctly held to represent the sentiment of the majority, thismustbe. But I must say that even the "decline" of England seems to me a tremendous and even, almost, an inspiring spectacle, and if the British Empire is once more to shrink up into that plethoric little island, the process will be the greatest drama in history!

This will reach you about Xmas-time, and I imagine you reading it at a window that looks out upon the snow-laden pines and hemlocks of Shady Hill. That white winter light that is sent up into a room from the deep snow is something that one quite loses the memory of here; and yet, as I thinkof it now, it is associated in my mind with all kinds of pleasant and comfortable indoor scenes. I am afraid that, for you, the season will have no great animation; but you will, I suppose, see a good deal of infantine exhilaration about you....

8 Bolton St., W.May 1st, '78.

Dear William,

...There were many interesting allusions in your letter which I should like to take up one by one. I should like to see the fair Hellenists of Baltimore; and I greatly regret that, living over here, my person cannot profit by my American reputation. It is a great loss to have one's person in one country and one's glory in another, especially when there are lovely young women in the case. Neither can one's glory, then, profit by one's person—as I flatter myself, even in your jealous teeth, that mine might in Baltimore!! Also about my going to Washington and its being my 'duty,' etc. I think there is much in that; but I can't whisk about the world quite so actively as you seem to recommend. It would be great folly for me, à peine established in London and getting a footing here, to break it all off for the sake of going to spend four or five months in Washington. I expect to spend many a year in London—I have submitted myself without reserve to that Londonizing process of which the effect is to convince you that, having lived here, you may, if need be, abjure civilization and bury yourself in the country, but may not, in pursuit of civilization, live in any smaller town. I am still completely an outsiderhere, and my only chance for becoming a little of an insider (in that limited sense in which an American can ever do so) is to remain here for the present. After that—a couple of years hence—I shall go home for a year, embrace you all, and see everything of the country I can, including Washington. Meanwhile, if one will take what comes, one is by no means cut off from getting impressions here.... I know what I am about, and I have always my eyes on my native land.

I am very glad that Howells's play seemed so pretty, on the stage. Much of the dialogue, as it read, was certainly charming; but I should have been afraid of the slimness and un-scenic quality of the plot. For myself (in answer to your adjuration) it has long been my most earnest and definite intention to commence at play-writing as soon as I can. This will be soon, and then I shall astound the world! My inspection of the French theatre will fructify. I have thoroughly mastered Dumas, Augier, and Sardou (whom it is greatly lacking to Howells—by the way—to have studied:) and I know all they know and a great deal more besides. Seriously speaking, I have a great many ideas on this subject, and I sometimes feel tempted to retire to some frugal village, for twelve months, where, my current expenses being inconsiderable, I might have leisure to work them off. Even if I could only find some manager or publisher sufficiently devoted to believe in this and make me an allowance for such a period, I would afterwards make a compact and sign it with my blood, to reimburse him in thousands. But I shall not have to come to this, or to depend upon it.

I received a few days since your article on H. Spencer, but I have not yet had time to read it. I shall very presently attack—I won't say understand it. Mother speaks to me of your articles in Renouvier's magazine—and why have you not sentme those? I wish you would do so, punctually. I met Herbert Spencer the other Sunday at George Eliot's, whither I had at last bent my steps. G.H. Lewes introduced me to him as an American; and it seemed to me that at this fact, coupled with my name, his attention was aroused and he was on the point of asking me if I were related to you. But something instantly happened to separate me from him, and soon afterwards he went away. The Leweses were very urbane and friendly, and I think that I shall have the rightdorénavantto consider myself a Sundayhabitué. The great G.E. herself is both sweet and superior, and has a delightful expression in her large, long, pale equine face. I had my turn at sitting beside her and being conversed with in a low, but most harmonious tone; and bating a tendency toaborderonly the highest themes I have no fault to find with her....

We expect to hear at any hour that war has broken out; and yet it may not be. It will be a good deal of a scandal if it does—especially if the English find themselves fighting side by side with the bloody, filthy Turks and their own Indian Sepoys. And to think that a clever Jew should have juggled old England into it! The papers are full of the Paris exhibition, which opens today; but it leaves me perfectly incurious. Blessings on all from yours fraternally,

H. JAMESjr.

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