ivied ruins, if it was a question of the "luxuries and splendours of life," of "ambassadors, ambassadorial compliments, Old World drawing-rooms, with duskily moulded ceilings," if it was a question of such things as these, of which, like the hero of Watch and Ward, James himself "liked to be reminded," then America was unprofitable indeed. There was the New York of the dancing-masters—a world of echoes. There was Boston society, but that was a "boy and girl institution," a "Sammy and Billy, a Sallie and Millie affair," as another caustic observer had just remarked, "very pleasant and jolly for young people, but, so far as the world and its ways were concerned, little more than a big village development." And between the two there was Mrs Howe, propounding, alas, apropos of the new-born son of her Newport neighbour, the Turkish minister Blaque Bey, the riddle, Can a baby a Bey be? "Mrs Howe was very gay," writes Colonel Higginson in his diary, "and sang her saucy song of 'O So-ci-e-ty,' which is so irreverent to Beacon Street that I wondered how the A's could remain in the field." Henry James, with his inner eye fixed upon the denser, richer, warmer European spectacle that filled his imagination, upon the palaces, the castles, et cetera, that had formed such a fund of suggestion for the novelists he revered—Henry James might easily have listened to that saucy song, and with what a sinking of the heart. Clearly, as he was to put it later, the apple of America was not to be negotiated by any such teeth as his.
Later on, after he had settled in London and could look back upon these years of indecision, he was to find that certain aspects of American life had left upon his mind indelible impressions. He was then to produce, in Washington Square and The Bostonians, the most brilliant pictures of the two cities in which he had lived: the New York that he had absorbed as a child and the Boston that he had observed in the heightened light of the war. He had known his America, he had understood it, far more deeply than he had ever supposed. But as long as he was in that world he could see it, as Don Quixote saw Spain, only in terms of the novels that possessed his imagination. As a boy, he had written a letter to an actress in Boston who had sent him in return a printed copy of her play, "addressed," as he says, "in a hand which assumed a romantic cast as soon as I had bethought myself of finding for it a happy precedent in Pendennis's Miss Fotheringay." He had never ceased to
