fimte difficulties, a career that is beset with dangers; and as we glance at the Notes of a Son and Brother, at the passage on John La Farge, we seem to discern the thought that lay at the bottom of James' mind. . . . Many were the incentives that led to the development of that steely will of his. There was the pledge that he had virtually taken to make up in his work for having missed the war. And how keenly he must have felt the necessity of justifying his expatriation! We can see in his letters how conscious he was of the eyes of Cambridge, not to mention Boston and the "Higginsonian fangs." But to return to La Farge and those earlier days at Newport: La Farge was "of the type—the 'European,'" he remarks, "and this gave him an authority for me that it verily took the length of years to undermine." And what had been La Farge's counsel to a fellow-American who had been presumptuous enough also to dream of the life of art? "The artist's serenity"—so James interpreted it—"was an intellectual and spiritual capital that must never brook defeat—which it so easily might incur by a single act of abdication." And again: "There was no safety or, otherwise, no inward serenity or even outward—though the outward came secondly—unless there was no deflection." No deflection! The European artist, rejoicing in his strength and his abundant resources, might permit himself an occasional lapse from the strait and narrow path, the American did so at his peril: for him a single act of abdication might signify the end of all things. "It's a complex fate, being an American," James wrote in a letter of 1872, "and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe." That was the great battle of James' life, and who can deny that he lost it? But the extremity of the artist was the opportunity of the craftsman, and we cannot but trace to this humility the dogged perseverance that was to make him one of the great workers of literary history.
Meanwhile, to return to Paris, he had been faced with the problem of discovering a possible terrain. He had tried to take the measure of his difficulties: he had watched himself as Rowland watches Roderick—"as my mother at home watches the tea-kettle she has set to boil." Never had a man more thriftily learned the art of nursing his own talent: he was in danger, had he but known it, of one thing only, the cutting off at their source of the headsprings of experience. . . . But now a great practical prob-
