HENRY JAMES: AN INTERNATIONAL
EPISODE
"IT'S a wretched business," said Roderick Hudson, "this virtual quarrel of ours with our own country, this everlasting impatience that so many of us feel to get out of it. Can there be no struggle then, and is one's only safety in flight?" This was the great question which, for a dozen years, had filled the horizon of Henry James. Later, in his life of Story, he was to speak of it as an inward drama that has enacted itself in thousands of breasts and thousands of lives. "There is often," he adds, in the same connexion, "a conflict of forces as sharp as any of those in which the muse of history, the muse of poetry, is usually supposed to be interested."
For several years he had been travelling uneasily back and forth between Europe and America. "The great fact for us all there [at home]," he writes in a letter from Florence, in 1874, "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." Beyond everything else there was one consideration that must have weighed heavily with him: the writers he most admired were saturated with the atmosphere of their own countries. Of Turgenev he observes: "His works savour strongly of his native soil, like those of all great novelists." Like the works of Balzac, for example, the greatest of his masters, like the works of George Eliot and George Sand, like those even of Flaubert, Zola, Daudet, Maupassant, whom he was to meet, with whom he was to talk, and who were to reveal to him so many of the secrets of the craft. Could one advance very far as a novelist without that particular saturation? There was Hawthorne, his own American Hawthorne: what light did Hawthorne throw upon this perplexing question? A light, alas, that was anything but reassuring. Hawthorne, James was obliged to remark, "forfeited a precious advantage in ceasing to tread his native soil. Half the virtue of The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables is in their local quality: they are im-
