Page:The Dial (Volume 75).djvu/48

30 but for the grace of Europe, his life too would have ended in some monstrous fiasco? His return to America at seventeen, after his first long visit to the Old World, had signified, to his aching fancy, as he tells us, "premature abdication, sacrifice and, in one dreadful word, failure." How did he feel in his old age? "When I think," he wrote to Mrs William James in 1913, "when I think of how little Boston and Cambridge were of old ever my affair, or anything but an accident, for me, of the parental life there to which I occasionally and painfully and losingly sacrificed, I have a superstitious terror of seeing them at the end of time again stretch out strange inevitable tentacles to draw me back and destroy me." A superstitious terror! Strange inevitable tentacles! James was a man of seventy when he wrote that.

To the end of his life, then, and however disenchanting his experience of Europe may have been, America, to James, signified failure and destruction. It was the dark country, the sinister country, where the earth was a quicksand, where amiable uncles ended in disaster, where men were turned into machines, where genius was subject to all sorts of inscrutable catastrophes. He had taken to heart numberless examples that seemed to have been placed, as if to warn him, directly in his path. There was his father, whose mind he had never understood, but whose brilliant capacity was no more obvious than the fact that somehow he had mysteriously failed to effectuate himself. There was William Page, the painter, the friend of the family, whose extraordinary pictures were already turning black and vanishing from their canvases owing to "some fallacy as to pigments, some perversity as to basis, too fondly, too blindly entertained," as James was to remark later, a tragic story of waste, of "unlighted freedom of experiment possible only (for it comes back to that) in provincial conditions." There was Washington Allston, whose talent had grown thinner and vaguer every day in the bleak atmosphere of Cambridgeport: long and long James had looked at that last unfinished, laboured canvas of his in the Boston Athenaeum, drinking in the lesson that he was constrained to draw from it. The American artist in the American air was a doomed man: pitfalls surrounded him on every side. Was not even Hawthorne a case in point, Hawthorne who had himself attributed the paucity of his productions to a "total lack of sympathy at the age when his mind would naturally have been most