e eyes of a foreigner and at Europe with the eyes of
an American. He has so far thrown himself out of relation with
American life that he describes a Boston horse-car or a New York hotel
table with a sort of amused wonder. His starting-point was in
criticism, and he has always maintained the critical attitude. He took
up story-writing in order to help himself, by practical experiment, in
his chosen art of literary criticism, and his volume on _French Poets
and Novelists_, 1878, is by no means the least valuable of his books.
His short stories in the magazines were collected into a volume in
1875, with the title, _A Passionate Pilgrim, and Other Stories_. One
or two of these, as the _Last of the Valerii_ and the _Madonna of the
Future_, suggest Hawthorne, a very unsympathetic study of whom James
afterward contributed to the "English Men of Letters" series. But in
the name-story of the collection he was already in the line of his
future development. This is the story of a middle-aged invalid
American who comes to England in search of health, and finds, too late,
in the mellow atmosphere of the mother-country, the repose and the
congenial surroundings which he has all his life been longing for in
his raw America. The pathos of his self-analysis and his confession of
failure is subtly imagined. The impressions which he and his far-away
English kinsfolk make on one another, their mutual attraction and
repulsion, are described with that delicate perception of national
differences which makes the humor and sometimes the tragedy of James's
later books, like _The American_, _Daisy Miller_, _The Europeans_, and
_An International Episode_. His first novel was _Roderick Hudson_,
1876, not the most characteristic of his fictions, but perhaps the most
powerful in its grasp of elementary passion. The analytic method and
the critical attitude have their dangers in imaginative literature. In
proportion as this writer's faculty of minute observation and his
realistic objectivity have increased upon him, the uncomfortable
coldness which is felt in his youthful work has become actually
disagreeable, and his art--growing constantly finer and surer in
matters of detail--has seemed to dwell more and more in the region of
mere manners and less in the higher realm of character and passion. In
most of his writings the heart, somehow, is left out. We have seen
that Irving, from his knowledge of England and America, and his long
reside