Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Third Supplement.djvu/313

 JAMES, HENRY (1843–1916), novelist, was born at 2 Washington Place, New York, 15 April 1843. He came of a stock both Irish and Scotch, established in America from the eighteenth century. His father, Henry James, senior, was an original and remarkable writer on questions of theology. His mother’s name was Mary Walsh. Henry James the younger was the second son, the elder being the distinguished philosopher William James. They received a very desultory education, at first in New York, afterwards (during two lengthy visits of the family to Europe) in London, Paris, and Geneva. Henry James entered the law school at Harvard in 1862, and lived with his parents at Cambridge, near Boston, until he finally settled in Europe in 1875. From 1865 onwards he was a regular contributor of reviews, sketches, and short stories, to several American periodicals; his life as a writer began from that year, and owed much to his acquaintance, soon a close friendship, with the novelist W. D. Howells. James’s first piece of fiction long enough to be called a novel, Watch and Ward, appeared serially in 1871; his first volume of short stories was published in 1875, and Roderick Hudson, the novel which definitely marked the end of his literary apprenticeship, in 1876.

It was during the years spent in Europe as a boy that James had absorbed once for all what he afterwards called the ‘European virus’, the nostalgia for the old world which made it impossible for him to live permanently elsewhere. In 1869, and again in 1872, he came to Europe as a tourist, lingering chiefly in Rome, Florence, and Paris. These visits intensified his desire to find a fixed home on this side of the Atlantic; and when he came again, in 1875, it was with the decided intention of remaining for good. He proposed at first to settle in Paris; but after a year there he began to see that London (which he then knew very slightly) was the place where he could best feel at home, and he removed thither in 1876. He lived constantly in London, in lodgings off Piccadilly or in a flat in Kensington, for more than twenty years. In 1898 he moved to Lamb House, Rye, Sussex, where he mainly lived for the rest of his life, and where all his later novels were written. He was never married.

Henry James was thus thirty-three years old when he established himself in the country he was to make his own, and the fact is important for an understanding both of his character and his work. His youth, so far as it was European, had been almost entirely continental; his culture was French; he was a highly civilized, very critical and observant young citizen of the world. He came to England almost as a stranger, in spite of the fact that English life seemed to him in many ways barbarously insular; and he came because he was convinced that here only could an American really strike root in European soil. He accordingly proceeded with intense application to study and assimilate his chosen world—a narrow world, it may be said, for it was practically bounded by the social round of well-to-do London, but quite large enough, as he felt, to task his powers of absorption and to give him what he sought, a solid home in his expatriation. This was one side of the matter. The other concerned the exercise of his keen and unresting imagination, which found in London, and even in a small section of London, the inexhaustible material that it needed.

It is commonly said that James’s work as a novelist falls into three distinct ‘periods’ or ‘manners’; and the classification is convenient, though it may tend to obscure the unbroken steadiness with which his art was developed from book to book. In the first of these periods he was chiefly occupied with the ‘international’ subject, the impact of American life upon the older, richer, denser civilization of Europe; and it was not until he had been living for a good many years in England that he felt ready to drop the many possibilities of this fruitful theme and to treat a purely English subject. By that time he had written all those of his novels which were ever likely to be popular with the public at large; and though their simplicity may seem rather thin and their art ingenuous compared with his later work, books like Roderick Hudson (1875), The American (1877), Daisy Miller (1879), and more especially The Portrait of a Lady (1881), have a charm of freshness and neatness, which their author himself recognized when many years later he re-read and to some extent revised them. He had come to Europe at the right moment for the effect of the contrast which he found so pictorial, the clash of new and old, while the American in Europe (particularly the American girl) was still inexperienced and unfamiliar enough to create a ‘situation’, seen against the background of London or Paris or Rome. In half a dozen novels and a long series of shorter pieces James recurred to this situation, 287