JAMES, HENRY (1843-1916), Anglo-American novelist, brother of William James, was born in New York on April 15, 1843. His father, Henry James the elder (1811-1882) was a highly original philosophical and theological author, a Sweden borgian by faith, profoundly devoted equally to the life of thought and to the education of his children. Both sons inherited a large part of their psychological insight and subtlety and their feeling for English style from their father. James's early life was spent first in New York, then, off and on during the impressionable years, from 12 to 17, in Europe, chiefly in Geneva, and finally in Newport, R.I., where he began to fit himself for his career by a profound study of French fiction of the realistic school. No novelist probably has ever undergone a more severe and devoted apprenticeship, and it was one that left its mark on James's entire literary career. He entered the Harvard Law school in 1862, his family joining him in Cambridge two years later, and while he gained little from his academic studies he came in touch for the first time in Boston and Cambridge with a purely literary circle. There he formed the friendship of Prof. Charles Eliot Norton and began a lifelong intimacy with William Dean Howells who opened for him the pages of The Atlantic Monthly, for he had already begun writing; and his stories began to attract notice while he was still in his early twenties. But although he had become in a sense a New Englander he had never lost that sense of the fascination of Europe which had become the dominant fact and impulse of his adolescence; and in 1868 he returned there, settling first in London and then in Paris and establishing tentatively a European residence that was to be unbroken, save for a few brief visits to his native country, for the remainder of his life. His first two principal contacts, with London and Paris, signified respectively his initiation into English society, which was to form so largely the theme of his writings, and into the society of the writers whose work he had studied so assidu ously, Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant and Daudet, whose actual friendship greatly increased, if such a thing were possible, his ambition, while destroying certain of his illusions in regard to their personal lives and characters. The charm of Europe at once assumed a complete and final domination over him. At first this charm extended to France and Italy as well as England, and under its compulsion he wrote the travel books, Transatlantic Sketches (1875), Portraits of Places (1883) and A Little Tour in France (1884), that interrupted the steady stream of novels and stories, most of which dealt with the relations between Amer icans in Europe and European society. His first volume had borne the prophetic title, A Passionate Pilgrim and Other Tales (1875) and this was followed by Roderick Hudson (1876), The American (1877), Watch and Ward (1878), The Europeans (1878), Daisy Miller (1878), his first pronounced success, An International Episode (1878), Washington Square (1881) and The Portrait of a Lady (1881), after which he published a new volume, and some times two or three volumes, virtually every year to the end of his life. Only two of his novels, Washington Square and The Bostonians (1886), although they were among the most distin guished, dealt exclusively with American life. Meanwhile he had gradually entered into the social life of London, at first as an extremely critical guest but more and more as what one of his critics describes as an old-established colonist, now identified with his surroundings, a sharer in the general fortunes and re sponsibilities of the place. The outward events of his life were few, chiefly indeed purely social engagements, varied by occasional trips to the continent for the sake of recreation or seclusion. His English friends included a few men of his own profession, the most notable being Robert Louis Stevenson and Edmund Gosse. The first phase of his career, and with it his first "manner," had ended with The Bostonians. The Tragic Muse (I890) represented his first attempt to deal exclusively with English characters in an English setting. Thereafter for some years he devoted him self chiefly to the writing of short stories, although he made constant but constantly defeated attempts to succeed as a play wright, producing two volumes of Theatricals (1894-95). He also published during this period several volumes of critical and topo graphical essays, Partial Portraits (1888), Picture and Text (1893) and Essays in London (1893). In 1896, feeling the need of a permanent establishment, whither he could retire to some extent from the social world whose claims had become more and more exhausting to him, he purchased Lamb house at Rye in Sussex which became his home henceforth. It was from there
that he made his periodical trips to the continent and especially, during the season, to London. There, too, he began the series of works that marked his second and more complex manner, The Spoils of Poynton (1897) and What Maisie Knew (1897), short novels that were followed by the more ambitious The Awkward Age (1899), The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Am bassadors (1903) and The Golden Bowl (1904). With the ex ception of a few briefer works, these brought to an end the list of his novels and tales. In 1899, on a visit to Rome, he accepted the suggestion that he should write the life of his old friend William Wetmore Story which was published in 1903. And in 1904 he made the long visit to America, the first in 20 years, which resulted in the memorable volume of impressions entitled The American Scene (1907). During the years immediately pre ceding his death he wrote the two volumes of autobiography, A Small Boy and Others (1913) and Notes of a Son and Brother (1914). A final volume of his critical essays was published in 1914 under the title Notes on Novelists. In June 1915, as a result of his passionate attachment to the Allied cause in the war, James became naturalized as a British subject, and in 1916 he received the Order of Merit. He died in his flat in Chelsea, London, on Feb. 28, 1916. Two unfinished novels, The Sense of the Past and The Ivory Tower, were published in 1917, and in 1919 appeared also a collection of papers dealing with the war entitled Within the Rim.
It is James's peculiarity and distinction that he carried to its utmost limits, to the limits virtually of the impossible, the ob jective psychological novel. His effort was always to reflect faithfully the social life that he studied with such scrupulous devotion, and in this he was in the main successful, although his necessarily inadequate "saturation," to use his own word, in the milieu which he adopted in early middle life restricted his field to such an extent that his work developed into subtleties that were increasingly abnormal. From this point of view the later works of his early maturity, especially Washington Square and The Portrait of a Lady, are his most successful, although they are not generally so regarded by the special disciples of the master. James chose his characters from among those leisured people of the world for whom life is naturally a work of art and who are far removed from all the more practical aspects of existence. Their main preoccupations are problems of ethical conduct which they feel and discuss with a measure of casuistry never before reflected in fiction, and for the most part with a conscientiousness that reveals the author's nonconformist Amer ican heredity. They reflect also with remarkable fidelity their race and class, James having been to a rare degree familiar with at least three nationalities. It may be said that his own point of view and the tendency of his fiction became increasingly tragic. No novelist has been more profoundly concerned with the tech nique of his art, none has ever been more sensitive as a receiver and transmitter of impressions, whether of persons or places. Indeed, he might be described as pre-eminently a novelists' novelist, one who has been studied to an extraordinary degree by other practitioners of his craft, but whose general public is, for the same reason, among others, necessarily limited, while it is limited also by the extremely restricted character of his own outlook on life. In his later work, as markedly distinguished from his earlier, the characters are frequently to such a degree in solution, the solution of psychological analysis, that they exist only in the minds of other characters, having no objective life, while the setting also exists only in the same way. But James's originality, his distinction of style and his fineness of feeling are acknowledged by all and place him very close to the first rank of modern writers.
The New York edition of the novels and tales of Henry James, embodying drastic revisions by which the author's earlier work was virtually rewritten in the later manner, appeared in 19o8—o9. Two volumes of his letters were issued in 1920 under the editorship of Percy Lubbock. Critical and biographical studies of James have been written by Rebecca West (1916), Ford Madox Hueffer (1916) and Pelham Edgar (1927). (V. W. B.)