A History of American Literature

Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900 269

In the last few decades of his life, James devoted much of his time to preparing the

New York edition of his works. He made revisions that often reflected his later

dedication to a more allusive style. A reference, in the original version of The Portrait

of a Lady, to that fact that Ralph Touchett had “simply accepted the situation” of

invalid was altered, for instance, to this: “His serenity was but the array of wild

flowers niched in his ruin.” He also wrote eighteen new prefaces for his novels. He

traveled widely, and wrote about his travels in The American Scene (1907) and Italian

Hours (1909). He published two volumes of autobiography, A Small Boy and Others

(1913) and Notes of a Son and Brother (1914); and a third volume, The Middle Years

appeared posthumously in 1917. Angered by American reluctance to become

involved in World War I, he became a British citizen in 1915. But, in a sense, as T. S. Eliot

was later to put it, it was not the condition of being English to which he – or, at least,

part of him – aspired but the condition of being European, “something which no born

European, no person of any European nationality, can become.” James anticipated

the direction in which many American writers were to move in the twentieth

century: in his concern with the complex fate of being an American in an international

culture, his concern with the possibly limited terms of American cul ture and the

fragments that could perhaps be rescued from the ruins of European tradition, in

his growing concern with the romance and mystery of the consciousness. He

assimilated the romantic tendencies that were part of the pressure of the age into

which he was born, the moral rigor that was a continuing characteristic of his part

of the nation; he also moved, especially in his later work, toward the modernist

conviction that the truth of art and the truth of life are one and the same. A sum-

mative and seminal writer, James stands at the juncture between two centuries, and

different moments in American writing. He was also, complexly, his own man. There

is no more satisfactory way of summing up that complexity than the one James

himself was probably alluding to when he called his last fragment of autobiography

“The Middle Years.” The title is also that of an earlier story, published in 1895, in

which a dying writer makes a statement of faith that his creator might well have

made for himself. “We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we

have,” the writer declares. “Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task.

The rest is the madness of art.”

Toward Naturalism

Of Hamlin Garland (1860–1940) Henry James once declared that he was “a case of

saturation so precious as to have almost the value of genius.” What James presumably

meant by this characteristically elliptical remark was that Garland devoted himself

to the detailed depiction of one particular area of America: the Midwest where he

was born and where he spent his boyhood and youth, as his family moved between

farms in Iowa, South Dakota, and his native Wisconsin. Garland is sometimes

described as a regionalist because of this concentration on the life and landscape of

the Midwest in his fiction. “Provincialism (that is to say regionalism) is no bar to a

national literature,” Garland declared in Crumbling Idols (1894), a collection of

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