"the wish—the absolute sense of need—to see Italy again" had oppressed him during the following year at home. He had come back, to Rome, to Florence, to Venice, before he had at last settled in Paris; he had come back, and with what sensations! Had he not grasped there, truly grasped, "what might be meant by the life of art"? Those elements of accumulation in the human picture, those infinite superpositions of history, those fragments of the festal past! Those mellowed harmonies of tint and contour, those clustered shadows amid the ruins! And the starlit nights at Florian's, and the rides on the Campagna, and the rambles over the Tuscan countryside, with a volume of Stendhal in one's pocket!
"I have come on a pilgrimage," says the hero of one of his early stories. "To understand what I mean, you must have lived, as I have lived, in a land beyond the seas, barren of romance and grace. This Italy of yours, on whose threshold I stand, is the home of history, of beauty, of the arts—of all that makes life splendid and sweet. . . . Here I sit for the first time in the enchanted air in which love and faith and art and knowledge are warranted to become deeper passions than in my own chilly clime. I begin to behold the promise of my dreams. . . . The air has a perfume; everything that enters my soul, at every sense, is a suggestion, a promise, a performance." . . . James' own salute—was it not?—to the "sublime synthesis" of Europe.
But Italy had not held him. He had fairly reeled through the streets of Rome in a fever of enjoyment. Rome, Florence, Venice: Italy and youth, youth and, if not love, at least moonlight—he had known them all. But he had had his wits about him; he had been systematic in the midst of his ecstasies; he had been alert. He had written Roderick Hudson during those months, and not for himself had fate and a forewarning conscience predestined such a career as that luckless artist's! He had known sweet, full, calm hours, hours in which everything in him had been stilled and absorbed in the steady perception of that wondrous panorama. In those venerable cities how life had revelled and postured in its strength! How sentiment and passion had blossomed and flowered! What a wealth of mortality had ripened and decayed! His aesthetic sense had seemed for the first time to live a sturdy creative life of its own. Yet something had always been amiss there; it was, after all, a museum world—one lingered at one's peril. Had he not found in
