Mr. James’s peculiar province is the international novel, a field which he created for himself, but which he has occupied in company with Howells, Mrs. Burnett, and many others.  The novelist received most of his schooling in Europe, and has lived much abroad, with the result that he has become half denationalized and has engrafted a cosmopolitan indifference upon his Yankee inheritance.  This, indeed, has constituted his opportunity.  A close observer and a conscientious student of the literary art, he has added to his intellectual equipment the advantage of a curious doubleness in his point of view.  He looks at America with the eyes of a foreigner and at Europe with the eyes of an American.  He has so far thrown himself out of relation with American life that he describes a Boston horse-car or a New York hotel table with a sort of amused wonder.  His starting-point was in criticism, and he has always maintained the critical attitude.  He took up story-writing in order to help himself, by practical experiment, in his chosen art of literary criticism, and his volume on French Poets and Novelists, 1878, is by no means the least valuable of his books.  His short stories in the magazines were collected into a volume in 1875, with the title, A Passionate Pilgrim, and Other Stories.  One or two of these, as the Last of the Valerii and the Madonna 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 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.