Although Henry James, like Mr. Howells, wrote at one time acute
studies of New England character, he was never, in his relations
to that section, or, for that matter, to any locality save
possibly London, anything more than a "visiting mind." His
grandfather was an Irish merchant in Albany. His father, Henry
James, was a philosopher and wit, a man of comfortable fortune,
who lived at times in Newport, Concord, and Boston, but who was
residing in New York when his son Henry was born in 1843. No
child was ever made the subject of a more complete theory of
deracination. Transplanted from city to city, from country to
country, without a family or a voting-place, without college or
church or creed or profession or responsibility of any kind save
to his own exigent ideals of truth and beauty, Henry James came
to be the very pattern of a cosmopolitan. Avoiding his native
country for nearly thirty years and then returning for a few
months to write some intricate pages about that "American Scene"
which he understood far less truly than the average immigrant, he
died in 1916 in London, having just renounced his American
citizenship and become a British subject in order to show his
sympathy with the Empire, then at war.
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