II
Such was the early environment of Henry James. Refinement and rare culture breathed upon his cradle and surrounded his whole boyhood like an atmosphere. He was kept sheltered from the world without, as from something coarse and degrading. He was not allowed to attend the public schools. "Considering with much pity our four stout boys," the father wrote to Emerson in 1849, "who have no playroom within doors and import shocking bad manners from the street, we gravely ponder whether it wouldn't be better to go abroad for a few years with them, allowing them to absorb French and German and get such a sensuous education as they cannot get here."[95]
The plan did not mature until 1855 when the boy was twelve. In the interim tutors were employed for his education who instructed him with desultory, changing methods, allowing him always to take apparently the paths of his preference. In these same paths he seems to have continued during the four years of his residence abroad with his parents in London, Geneva, Boulogne-sur-Mer, and Paris. All harshness he avoided, all sharpness of discipline—mathematics, examinations. He would sit, boy as he was, only in the places of beauty and refinement. "The whole perfect Parisianism I seemed to myself always to have possessed mentally—even if I had but just turned twelve."[96]
One does not understand Henry James who neglects this formative period of his life. He returned to America an esthete, a dreamer, with his heart in the lands of culture, dissatisfied with the rush and rudeness that were preparing a new world for its future. He was too frail in health to enter the armies which soon were recruiting about him for the great war; he had no inclination, because of his father's prejudice, to undertake a college course; he shrank from the usual professions open to young men of his class. He did for a year attend lectures at the Harvard Law School, but it was with no thought of preparing for a legal career. He dreamed of literature as a profession. He would woo the muse, but the muse he would woo "was of course the muse of prose fiction—never for the briefest hour in my case the presumable, not to say the presuming, the much-taking-for-granted muse of rime, with whom I had never had, even in thought, the faintest flirtation." For this profession he trained himself as deliberately and as laboriously as if it were the violin that he was to master, or the great organ. He read industriously, especially in the French; he resided now in Boston, where his father at last had settled, now in France, now in Italy. Like Story, the sculptor, whom in so many ways he resembled, he would live at the richest centers of his art. Finally, in the late seventies, he took up his residence permanently abroad to return only as a rare visitant.