onna 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 {587} 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 residence in both countries, became the mediator
between the two great branches of the Anglo-Saxon race. This he did by
the power of his sympathy with each. Henry James has likewise
interpreted the two nations to one another in a subtler but less genial
fashion than Irving, and not through sympathy, but through contrast, by
bringing into relief the opposing ideals of life and society which have
developed under different institutions. In his novel, the _American_,
1877, he has shown the actual misery which may result from the clashing
of opposed social systems. In such clever sketches as _Daisy Miller_,
1879, the _Pension Beaurepas_, and _A Bundle of Letters_, he has
exhibited types of the American girl, the American