posed" was confirmed for him now in the artistic as well as in the general human sphere: "exposure," he was evidently convinced, signified disaster as much for the American artist as for the American young man. He could not, in the phrase of one of his contemporaries, keep himself too carefully in cotton.
Such were the prepossessions with which, at the outset of his career, Henry James appears to have regarded the American scene. Was he not, for comprehensible reasons, the prey of that "fear of life" to which Flaubert also confessed himself a victim? Undoubtedly; and to this may be traced perhaps the deep longing for security, privacy, ceremony that was to mark his later years. But to return from the ultimate to the immediate, what a light this fact seems to throw upon the great "renunciation" with which his career opened! In the Notes of a Son and Brother he describes a certain moment when, as he was sailing back to Newport one evening after a visit to a camp of wounded soldiers at Portsmouth Grove, a sudden "realization" had come to him, a "strange rapture" of realization, that one might be "no less exaltedly than wastefully engaged in the common fact of endurance." He means that the passive rôle, the rôle of the spectator of life, had suddenly been endowed in his eyes with a certain high legitimacy: he who had been prevented by an accident from taking part in the Civil War had "worked out," as Miss Rebecca West puts it, "a scheme of existence . . . in which the one who stood aside and felt rather than acted acquired thereby a mystic value, a spiritual supremacy, which—but this was perhaps a later development of the theory—would be rubbed off by participation in action." In this faith, as we know, James was to live ever after. But would he have embraced it with such a "strange rapture" if, for him, life, action, passion had not been invested with singular terrors?
It is with some such question as this in our minds that we see him emerging from the New England of the 'sixties. His family had left Newport; they had settled in Cambridge. Not till he was twenty-seven was Henry James to return to Europe for a second visit. Meanwhile, upon what sort of scene was he destined to look out? In what light does he himself appear to us? What thoughts filled his mind? We seem to see a grave and somewhat priestlike figure, sedate and watchful, guarded in his movements, slow and hesitating in speech. He has not yet acquired that look of an
